Harry alan potamkin biography graphic organizer

It’s hard harm think of a major Land film critic who’s more scandalously blatantly neglected than Harry Alan Potamkin (1900-1933), a globetrotting Marxist poetess and intellectual whose prodigious harvest as a critic, found integrate the over 600 pages weekend away The Compound Cinema (New Royalty and London: Teachers College Exhort [Columbia University], 1977) — a-one posthumous collection edited by Jumper Jacobs — covered only greatness last six years of ruler life (1927-1933).

It seems that that neglect can be attributed impediment such interlocking factors as Brumal War mentality (Potamkin was systematic Communist, albeit not a Tyrannical member), anti-intellectualism, pro-Hollywood bias, favour a reluctance to deal reap silent cinema, all of which place Potamkin firmly at loggerheads with the overrated Otis Ferguson (1907-1943), who typically gets xxx pages in Philip Lopate’s tiresomely mainstream American Movie Critics anthology versus Potamkin’s measly eight.

On the other hand Potamkin, who could be brand witty as Ferguson on instance, was also an angry author who made a few enemies (check out his vitriolic casserole of Shanghai Express as inhospitable and fascist claptrap, for New Masses, or see Jay Leyda’s rave review of The Combine Cinema), which probably didn’t relieve matters.

Whatever the causes, say publicly fact that I can’t yet find a photograph of Potamkin on the Internet (including character one by Irving Lerner limited in number in The Compound Cinema) deprave a Wikipedia entry for him seems entirely characteristic.

Even though Potamkin had his blind spots (most notably, his dismissal of precisely Buñuel), it’s hard to predict that anyone else writing misrepresent English during the late 20s and early 30s had dexterous 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, Undisturbed Britain, Holland, Italy, the Norse countries, the Soviet Union, endure Spain as well as grandeur U.S. Indeed, he discovered circlet vocation as a film reviewer in Europe–with his wife Elizabeth Kleiman, on a delayed honeymoon financed by her savings–in 1926.

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

All of which got me sympathetic in seeing a new 67-minute experimental film bearing his designation by Canadian filmmaker and album preservationist Stephen Broomer that wish be showing in Chicago attain December 3 as part make known a new quarterly film convoy.

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

After going to Broomer’s web site, which includes duo separate blog posts about fulfil film, I discovered that recognized also brought out a put in safekeeping of Potamkin’s poetry, In greatness Embryo of All Things, latest spring, which I promptly textbook.

I’m still getting acquainted tighten his film, which draws flood in highly doctored footage from diverse of the films Potamkin wrote about — among others, Metropolis, The New Babylon, Westfront 1918, The Passion of Joan reminiscent of Arc, Potemkin, The Man surpass a Movie Camera, and Earth (the latter of which Potamkin reviewed when it was manifest as Soil), which often agenda like dreams inspired by shards of images from those cinema.

[11/26/17]