Article
Оппозиция к кинематографу в романе Уиндема Льюиса «Обезьяны Господни»
The paper considers the impact of cinema on the satirical novel «The Apes of God» (1930) by English modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis as contextualized by its author’s predominantly negative reception of cinema in his fiction and criticism. Cinema is represented in the novel as an anti-intellectual and anti-aesthetic mass-produced cultural product, whose model serves passively mechanical characters satirized by the author as a model for perceiving and interpreting their lives. Conceived as such, cinema stands in stark contrast with the text of the novel. Detailed metaphorical descriptions of the least significant movements of objects and characters seen from a short distance act as a deliberate literary antithesis to such popular cinema’s devices as slow motion and close-up. Thus, Lewis’s novel is a consistent articulation of its author’s opposition to cinema both on the level of content and of form. Overall, «The Apes of God» stands one of the most representative literary examples of the aversion towards cinema shared by many of the masters of English «high modernism».