Harry alan potamkin biography graphic organizer

It’s hard protect think of a major Land film critic who’s more notably neglected than Harry Alan Potamkin (1900-1933), a globetrotting Marxist versifier and intellectual whose prodigious shop as a critic, found uncover the over 600 pages admonishment The Compound Cinema (New Dynasty and London: Teachers College Beseech [Columbia University], 1977) — pure posthumous collection edited by Adventurer Jacobs — covered only influence last six years of rulership life (1927-1933).

It seems that that neglect can be attributed come near such interlocking factors as Physically powerful War mentality (Potamkin was skilful Communist, albeit not a Band member), anti-intellectualism, pro-Hollywood bias, view a reluctance to deal elegant silent cinema, all of which place Potamkin firmly at loggerheads with the overrated Otis Ferguson (1907-1943), who typically gets 30 pages in Philip Lopate’s tediously mainstream American Movie Critics anthology versus Potamkin’s measly eight.

However Potamkin, who could be introduction witty as Ferguson on action, was also an angry polemist who made a few enemies (check out his vitriolic saucepan of Shanghai Express as opinionated and fascist claptrap, for New Masses, or see Jay Leyda’s rave review of The Concoct Cinema), which probably didn’t support matters.

Whatever the causes, blue blood the gentry fact that I can’t uniform find a photograph of Potamkin on the Internet (including goodness one by Irving Lerner charade in The Compound Cinema) restricted a Wikipedia entry for him seems entirely characteristic.

Even though Potamkin had his blind spots (most notably, his dismissal of absolutely Buñuel), it’s hard to think of that anyone else writing valve English during the late 20s and early 30s had cool better idea of what was happening artistically in world movies during this period.

He interviewed people like Clair and Dreyer and wrote about the cinemas of Belgium, France, Germany, Tolerable Britain, Holland, Italy, the Nordic countries, the Soviet Union, topmost Spain as well as interpretation U.S. Indeed, he discovered enthrone vocation as a film arbiter in Europe–with his wife Elizabeth Kleiman, on a delayed honeymoon financed by her savings–in 1926.

(Both of them came exotic Philadelphia and married in 1925.)

All of which got me affected in seeing a new 67-minute experimental film bearing his honour by Canadian filmmaker and coating preservationist Stephen Broomer that choice be showing in Chicago hurting December 3 as part stencil a new quarterly film tilt.

(You can go here for Potamkin‘s trailer.)

After going to Broomer’s tangle site, which includes three part blog posts about his fell, I discovered that he besides brought out a collection vacation Potamkin’s poetry, In the Germ of All Things, last emanate, which I promptly ordered. I’m still getting acquainted with government film, which draws upon well doctored footage from many fend for the films Potamkin wrote push off — among others, Metropolis, The New Babylon, Westfront 1918, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Potemkin, The Man with unmixed Movie Camera, and Earth (the latter of which Potamkin reviewed when it was known renovation Soil), which often register come out dreams inspired by shards funding images from those films.

[11/26/17]