Pages 525-532

This page-by-page annotation is organized by sections, as delineated by the seven squares (sprockets) which separate each section. The page numbers for this page-by-page annotation are for the original Viking edition (760 pages). Editions by other publishers vary in pagination — the newer Penguin editions are 776 pages; the Bantam edition is 886 pages.

Contributors: Please use a 760-page edition (either the original Viking edition with the orange cover or the Penguin USA edition with the blue cover and rocket diagram — there are plenty on Ebay for around $10) or search the Google edition for the correct page number. Readers: To calculate the Bantam edition use this formula: Bantam page # x 1.165. Before p.50 it's about a page earlier; as you get later in the book, add a page.

Finally, profound thanks to Prof. Don Larsson for providing the foundation for this page-by-page annotation.

Page 527

527.34-37 You’d better enjoy it while you can ... then ... then ...
Note von Goll’s shift from a symbolic, expressionist aesthetic of film to a realist one. His position here echoes the shift in post-war film theory away from valuing the manipulation of the medium through editing and other devices (as in the writings of Rudolf Arnheim and Sergei Eisenstein) and toward a conception of the cinema as a record of reality (as espoused by Andre Bazin and in Siegfried Kracauer’s own Theory of Film, and as practiced in postwar Italian "neorealist" cinema). Pynchon undercuts such arguments, though, by exemplifying von Goll’s musings with a banal travel documentary.