I reckon this image is pretty wonderful – it suits my Vorticistic sensibilities. It is the last chapter image for The World in 2030, and it depicts the way we will see the future in that year. It was written “by The Right Honourable The Earl of Birkenhead, P.C., G.C.S.I,. D.C.L., LL.D., D.Litt. High Steward of Oxford University, Lord Rector of Aberdeen University.”

The illustrations are by E. McKnight Kauffer. He was an important poster designer and commercial artist throught the first half of the last century, who started with the London Underground. He was a fantastic collector of influences, who was using an airbrush from the 1920’s, inspired by Russian and German photomontage, and – yes! – Vorticism.

Birkenhead was a Conservative politician who was fated to die of accumulated good living in 1930, the year of publication. He had an engaging time in Parliament, who both ensured the execution of Roger Casement and the failure to criminalise lesbianism.

It comes from a site called The Visual Telling of Stories, resurrected from a course run by Chris Mullen at the University of Brighton.

He has a lovely collection of quotations, including these two by Buster Keaton:

“After we stopped making wild two reelers and got into feature length pictures, our scenario boys had to be story-conscious. We couldn’t tell any far fetched stories. He couldn’t do farce comedy for instance. It would have been poison to us. An audience wanted to believe every story we told them. Well, that eliminated farce comedy and burlesque. The only time we could do something out of the ordinary had to be in a dream sequence, or in a vision. So story construction became very important to us. ” [and]

“Somebody would come up with an idea. `Here’s a good start’ we’d say. We’d skip the middle. We never paid attention to the middle. We immediately went to the finish. We worked on the finish and if we get a finish that we’re all satisfied with, then we go back and work on the middle. For some reason, the middle always took care of itself.”

Both from an interview in Film Quarterly Fall 1958, quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .

This site is full of amazing stuff – and here is the index.

I found it indirectly through an entry on Air Minded.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 11:41 pm and is filed under visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.