The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin (Studies in culture & communication)

The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin (Studies in culture & communication) by Harry Alan Potamkin. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780807715598.

Harry Alan Potamkin was an active revolutionist, and critic who specialized in the cinema. During the 1920s and 30s, Potamkin was one of the most acute critics of the arts in America. In a period when the general run of Marxist criticism was shallow and immature, he was developing in his discussion of the moving picture a critical apparatus which was to be of inestimable value to the critics who were to come after him. Unfortunately, the character of the Left press at that time prevented him from being widely published as a poet. Had this not been the case he might have devoted himself more entirely to poetry. The promise that is apparent in his few published poems might have been fulfilled. However, Potamkin died in 1932 of an illness which was the direct result of semi-starvation. His funeral was a mass demonstration. Hundreds of the common people of New York attended to honor a spokesman whom they had loved and respected. Small-minded intellectuals who had accused him of obscurity, who had called him a metaphysician, who had said he was incomprehensible to the workers, were dumbfounded at his popularity.