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Seeing Further

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
208 Seiten
Englisch
Fitzcarraldo Editionserschienen am29.08.2024
While travelling through the Great Alföld, the vast plain in south-eastern Hungary, Esther Kinsky stops in a small town near the Romanian border. Like many other things, the cinema, 'mozi' in Hungarian, has long since closed. Entranced by the decaying mozi, she soon embarks on the colossal task of reviving it, compelled by the irresistible magic of the cinema, a site rooted in ritual that is steadily disappearing. Beautifully translated by Caroline Schmidt, Seeing Further is a powerfully eloquent declaration of love to the cinema and the collective experience of watching by Esther Kinsky, one of Germany's most important contemporary writers.

Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, five novels (Summer Resort, Banatsko, River, Grove, Rombo), numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children's books. She has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Iain Sinclair) and Polish (Joanna Bator, Miron Bia?oszewski, Magdalena Tulli) authors into German. Both River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany. Seeing Further is her fourth book published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
BuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR16,50
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR18,50
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR9,59

Produkt

KlappentextWhile travelling through the Great Alföld, the vast plain in south-eastern Hungary, Esther Kinsky stops in a small town near the Romanian border. Like many other things, the cinema, 'mozi' in Hungarian, has long since closed. Entranced by the decaying mozi, she soon embarks on the colossal task of reviving it, compelled by the irresistible magic of the cinema, a site rooted in ritual that is steadily disappearing. Beautifully translated by Caroline Schmidt, Seeing Further is a powerfully eloquent declaration of love to the cinema and the collective experience of watching by Esther Kinsky, one of Germany's most important contemporary writers.

Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, five novels (Summer Resort, Banatsko, River, Grove, Rombo), numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children's books. She has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Iain Sinclair) and Polish (Joanna Bator, Miron Bia?oszewski, Magdalena Tulli) authors into German. Both River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany. Seeing Further is her fourth book published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781804271179
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum29.08.2024
Seiten208 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse5098 Kbytes
Illustrationen40 black & white photographs
Artikel-Nr.15116024
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



II.



It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.´

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing


Where to direct the gaze?

There are two aspects of seeing: what you see and how you see it. This investigation into seeing further will involve only the question how. It pertains to the place that the viewer takes. It concerns point of view and remove from the things and images, from the action, proximity and distance, vastness. Vastness is more than physical; it is the scope of possibilities you allow. This applies to looking at a landscape, a terrain, at people, at art. In the past century no location was as important for the how of seeing, for contemplating the place that a viewer assigns themself or takes, as the cinema - as a venue, as a space. This space, whose relevance and significance did not even withstand a century, has been closing ever further in recent decades. The view out of the dark into a vastness created by film grows narrower as this venue for seeing disappears. The collective experience facilitated by this space is disappearing along with it, as is the more-or-less emphatic joy of taking part in these experiential possibilities, and this loss, whether mourned or not, deserves to be described and merits consideration. The cinema was the stage of a century. Today people differ in their relationship to this venue. Why the cinema? After all, films are available in other formats; the black box of the auditorium is considered a necessary venue for seeing by only few, and some even brush off the cinematic experience as an elitist pastime. As if the only thing that mattered any more was the what. And no longer the how.


 


Despite being relegated to the fringes of the action, the cinema still retains some mythic quality as a venue for seeing. The more the privatization of all experience eats away at our lives, the more fabulous appears a venue where seeing was a collective experience, where wit, terror, dismay and relief found a communal expression without encroaching on the anonymity afforded by the dark room. Even those who never visit the cinema any more will still remember particulars of the experience, of the place; the act of entering into the dark in order to then look out of it; the unspoken, abided by rule of seeing: All eyes in the same direction.´ In the direction mastered by the projectionist, invisible to the audience.


 


Seeing is a proficiency you acquire. A competence you slowly become aware of. Should you desire. In the beginning there is always the framed view. From the inside to the outside, from a window, whose cutout determines the world for the person looking out. Then comes a discovery: the discrepancy between the way things look from the window and the way they look when you are outside, surrounded by an unframed world, your eye itself now part of the world. A child´s view from the window into a winter morning of hoarfrost and fog remains engraved in the mind as a promise and a mystery; from the garden path or the roadside that same overgrown, rimy terrain rouses confusion, becomes branded in the mind as a memory of the world´s strangeness, which needs sizing up. A winter morning as the first film: a montage from various angles and perspectives. Visiting each window in the house on a quest to watch the outside transform into a series of cutouts which the contemplating eye alone can read and fill with narrative, whereas outside those same things, relinquished from their frames, become landmarks which the eye´s corresponding self uses to determine their place in that outside. Out there you stood in the world and looked around as far as you could see, the eye always searching for a place to rest, whereas inside, standing by the window, you gazed at a framed fragment which could be ascribed or denied an absolute significance.


 


Later: binoculars. A new frame, a new, magical metamorphosis via manipulated distances. A fetched piece of yonder, transformed by the frame into a foreign land, into a fiction entirely liberated from its surroundings: the other side of the river, accessed in life outdoors only by crossing a bridge found farther upstream, became available as a result of the binoculars and the view was made obtainable, offering itself up to be filled with ideas entirely unrelated to the vague, blurry contours recognizable to the naked eye, embedded in the familiar gradation of fields, trolley embankment, waterside trees and a notion of the river. Seeing became an adventure, each look through the binoculars was a journey of discovery.


 


From binoculars to the camera viewfinder. As a child I received a small Russian camera with an inscription in Cyrillic letters. The camera was black and silver, girdled by a brown leather case that snapped onto it, with a protruding part, which could be folded down, covering the lens. The world was reflected on the surface of the lens, distorted to the point of unrecognition, and thanks to a mysterious technical correlation when I looked through the square viewfinder I saw what the eye of the lens saw. Suddenly the world could be divided into pieces, into fragments that became separate entities if you stared long enough through the viewfinder, and even more so later, once the fragments were spread out on the table as photographs and all memory of what had once surrounded these images receded into the shadows. What had been all around could then be reported, related, invented in words; it was excluded from the image. That was a revelation to me. The act of seeing, much more how to look than what to see, had become a decision.


 


One spring they destroyed the wild terrain across the street, which had always been the first thing I saw out my window every morning. Abandoned land, as they called it, orphaned land; the missing owners´ heirs never turned up, the wilderness became land to build on, and in the morning my gaze now fell upon a construction site, piles of soil and trucks, later the skeleton of a multi-storey house, an apartment building. An act of violence was committed against the view; there was no further, there was no yonder any more, no mystery, and in winter no forms enchanted by hoarfrost. Families moved in, children who went to my school, and one day I stood on one of those balconies visible from my window, and looked down at my own house, at my own window. From the perspective of this newly built balcony, the spot from which I examined my world now appeared distressingly strange and distant; the window looked so small I couldn´t believe it capable of the relevance it held for my seeing, for my preoccupation with the cutout of the world that it delineated. For the first time a question began to stir in me, unarticulated yet, about the relationship between seeing and being seen, about the mysterious connection between looking and being looked at. But I also saw past my house, out to the terrain leading to the river, which I was otherwise familiar with only from a different window found on the backside of my house, framed as if cut out from a larger whole. I saw the strips of field, the railroad embankment, the pikes of the poplar trees that lined both sides of the river, the factory behind the damp alluvial meadows with the migrant-worker shanties´; I saw further, all the way to the range of hills, bluish-green and out of focus beyond the river, and down to the river bend country shimmering in whitish light, where the landscape flattened and dissolved into everything possible. This panorama of vague things, of vastness, of eventualities and all the stories the river bend might have opened up into, remained for me a promise that oddly belonged to the cinema - as if this were the place where the worlds that I peered into from the darkness of the auditorium grew.


. . .


The cinema was not an everyday experience in my childhood. I grew up in a suburb, without a television, in fact, yet not close enough to a cinema for regular weekend visits. From time to time a theatre on wheels came along, set up a projector in a gymnasium, and there was a programme. Charlie Chaplin or, less frequently, Buster Keaton, with his absurdity pushing into chaos, as well as nature documentaries and animated films. Because of my nearsightedness I had to sit in one of the front rows, and for weeks I lost sleep over Bambi, those rolling eyes and the animals´ distorted proportions. The cinema was better with real movies´, for instance Nils Holgerssons underbara resa, even if the end was always difficult to bear. Not because of the story itself, but simply because the film had to end, because you couldn´t go on watching, because the view out the window of the screen into another world had to close. Later my father occasionally took my siblings and me along to a cinema near a train station, where a main feature and an opening short and the weekly newsreel ran in an endless loop. You could join the sparse audience at any point, search for a seat in the dim glow of the...

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Autor

Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, five novels (Summer Resort, Banatsko, River, Grove, Rombo), numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children's books. She has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Iain Sinclair) and Polish (Joanna Bator, Miron Bialoszewski, Magdalena Tulli) authors into German. Both River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany. Seeing Further is her fourth book published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
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