Tim Allen wrote:
> Bob and Robin,
>
> Jump cuts and register jumping were done first by the Dadaists who
> soon became the early surrealists. During the Dada period the main
> source of both was newspapers and the example shown by the painters.
> The influence of cinema regarding this, especially for the
> surrealists, came slightly later. (A case can be made for even earlier
> jump cutting etc, as always in these things, but the sharpness of the
> cuts was unique to Dada.)
>
> No matter what biography you read the influence of this activity on
> Pound, who was in Paris at the time, is strangely sporadic. Pound was
> a queer fish - his mind set and aims were not the same as the
> Europeans around him. Eliot's 'innovations' were not innovations as
> such, not within the broad revolutionary context, they were 'literary'
> and relied very very heavily on his assimilation of Laforgue.
As I said, there are always predecessors. But it seems to me that the
literary jump-cut was first effective in "The Waste Land." I would also
distinguish the use of the jump-cut to increase meaning from the Dada
jump-cut to destroy meaning. I also tend not to see much jump-cut in
surrealism. It seems to me surrealism (generally) combines the
incongruous rather than jumps from one thing to something seemingly
extremely disconnected.
> I get annoyed by this Anglo-American bias with regard to early modernism.
Well, I only known English, so when I discuss poetry, I always mean
anglophonic poetry only, though I rarely make that known.
--Bob
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