The Old Revolution

            I woke up around 3:30 on Sunday, November 13^th, thinking about Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Old Revolution”. I’d recently started learning how to play it, although I’ve known the words by heart for decades, but it suddenly occurred to me that Cohen is singing from the point of view of Hitler in the song, even though that only serves as a metaphor for the annihilation of the self in love. From a German perspective, World War I began as a revolution against Austria-Hungary, which Germany swore to protect. Hitler “fought in the old revolution on the side of the ghost and the king”. The ghost would be that of Franz Ferdinand and the King would be Willhelm II. I think that Cohen is comparing the beginnings of Hitler’s love affair with Germany to the beginning of a relationship when he sings, “Into this furnace I ask you now to venture”. Also “furnace” of course refers to the Holocaust and I think he is comparing love itself to those furnaces of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.

            I laid there a while, but couldn’t sleep, so I got up at 4:30 and went online for a while. I started yoga a few minutes earlier than usual, but I got sleepy and dozed a bit during one of my poses and so I finished yoga a little later than usual.

            On Sundays I usually write and upload my weekly writing assignment in the form of a paragraph about Monday’s reading. I quite often find these essays over my head and so I have to read them three times just to get a handle on them. It tends to be that I don’t get it read, re-read and re-read again until Sunday night. Then I just write the paragraph, mostly in stream of consciousness with a pen on paper, then I sometimes only edit it slightly as I’m typing it into the computer, and immediately post it. After doing that, while I was online I did the related assignment of scoring five other people’s paragraphs. Then I looked at other people’s scores of my previous paragraph and saw that I’d gotten six stars four times and five stars once. Six stars are the highest score you can give but I’ve never given anyone six stars.
            Here’s my paragraph for that night:

            Murray Smith’s essay on film traces the history of philosophical views of film as art or not art. He starts with the period after film’s inception when it was considered to be not much more than a mechanical recording procedure with no artistic merit. He looks at early experiments with film as an artform that treated the medium as photography in motion but that became more and more complex as the art developed. It was already so rich as an artform by the time synchronized sound was introduced, that such technology was resisted as limiting the artistic capacity of film. This can be seen as true in a viewing of the films of Alfred Hitchcock from his work during the silent era and comparing them to his later work. Although he created masterpieces in both forms, the use of shadows cast on walls, expressions on faces that spoke volumes and creating suspense simply by following a hand as it descends along the banister of a spiral staircase, in his classic silent film, “The Lodger”, show that much artistic style was sacrificed when talking films were introduced. Smith also looks at some of the political (often Marxist) views of film, which argued that the introduction of audio and colour, in robbing the audience of the power of engagement with a film, rendered the viewer a victim of authoritarian manipulation.