Images from the Film Spiral

Cam Tolton is a professor of French and Cinema Studies at the University
of Toronto.

This curious book consists of stills from Spiral, a short wordless film by Sorel Etrog, originally presented on the CBC in 1975. The stills are printed in a generously uncrowded format accompanied by brief quotations from pertinent authors. The whole idea for the book was apparently Marshall McLuhan’s, who chose the quotations and provided a three-page postface for the volume.

The film is a visual commentary on the human condition from birth to death. Etrog explains his concept in his single verbal contribution to the book: “The Spiral is a single continuous line that creates within itself the parallel that exists conventionally between two lines. Therefore, you can have on this single line moments in time and space that signify the past, the present, and the future — and these moments occur in this unique situation as parallel. Time and space are collapsed. Chronology is obsolete.”

Etrog’s images reflect the concern for shape and design which one might expect from a sculptor. McLuhan compares Etrog’s filmic concept and execution to Eisenstein’s, but most film scholars will see a more logical parallel in the French avant-garde films of René Clair or Fernand Léger from the 1920s.

McLuhan’s quotations come from sources as varied as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Dante, Beckett, Auden, Emerson, Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and Frost. But by far the most prevalent voice is that of James Joyce. The quotations complement the images effectively and sometimes ironically, as when a few portentous words from Joyce about a key accompany an image of a key — opening a sardine can.

To be best appreciated, the pages of this book should be turned while listening to the music of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1, which was the background score for the film.