Our class on Piccadilly marks the last week of our investigation of city films, which started with a consideration of the "city symphony" and closes with a drift to melodrama in a film that nonetheless recapitulates some of the concerns of the first two city films. Piccadilly's bright lights augur also the move to our next sequence, where we look at transmedial conjunctions of cinematic writing and written cinema through Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.
So to mark today as a kind of intermission, here's a compilation of cinema intermission ads, including one that evokes Burgin's description of the "psychical space of the spectating subject" as, after Baudelaire, "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness." I'm referring of course to the series of kaleidoscoped snacks.
The "special effect" of the kaleidoscope today looks antique, perhaps, but it's interesting how many of the devices used in these ads involve quasi-hypnotic spirals, a registration of cinema's collective hypnotic.
Jean Cocteau: "The collective hypnosis into which the cinema audience is plunged by light and shade is very like a spiritualist seance. Then, the film expresses something other than what it is, something that no one can predict." (Speech at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, September 9, 1946, quoted in Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 25).
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