(#2) Gordon Square: The Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, and the Stracheys)
Unforecast rain on purple shoes. Sharp turn right into Gordon Square to be presented with a brown circular plaque: ‘Here and in neighbouring houses during the first half of the 20th Century there lived several members of The Bloomsbury Group…’.
Walking on to number 43, the patter morphs into the staccato of the old film Professor - hearing aid in ear - elaborating ‘In fact, Eisenstein’s film was first exhibited in London not far from here…’. He motioned out into the half-remembered November chill, letting Battleship Potemkin play in the background. ‘By the London Film Club, based near Regent Street, which was attended by Virginia Woolf, and other Bloomsbury writers.’
Later, a library-sourced volume reveals Woolf’s prescient handling of cinematic potential, in the 1926 essay ‘The Cinema’:
‘Yet if so much of our thinking and feeling is connected with seeing, some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await cinema. That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which we see before us seems highly probable. Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently - of such movements and abstractions the films may in time to come be composed.’
Part of cinema’s appeal, and part of its influence on Woolf’s own writing, was its mastery over time. Film creates continuity through a progression of images. It creates fluidity and transcendence, and the possibility for play, elision and experimentation. Quite the opposite of the fixity of paint on plate.
Back to the late January drizzle, climbing university stairs to a seminar on Japanese cinema.
