HALF-CRAZED FRUIT DROPS & THE POLISH EDISON

In chapter 12 of A Companion to Russian Cinema (Wiley Blackwell) essayist Phil Cavendish quotes Victor Shklovskii as characterizing color film as "half-crazed fruit drops [vzbesivshiisia landrin]."* 

The first full Soviet feature in color:
The Nightingale

Schklovskii was deriding a popular push among Soviet ideologues to develop a Soviet answer to Disney's color process. But this failed to prevent Fedor Provorov (inter alia) from developing a two-color subtractive process, which was used for the 1936 film The Nightingale (i.e. Solovei-Solovushko = Соловей-Соловушко, but it's also known by the name of its protagonist Grunia Kornakova)).

Other exciting tidbits can be gleaned from Cavendish's essay, e.g. just the existence of Polish inventor extraordinaire "Jan Szczepanik, 'the Polish Edison'", who apparently developed a color film process, among a multitude of other things. According to Wikipedia, Mark Twain met and wrote an article about him entitled The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again.

*A note explains that landrin derives from popular confectionery founder Fedor Landrin, but that the quote was repeated so extensively by Soviet writers that its provenance is uncertain.

UNDERSTANDING CULTURES THROUGH KEYWORDS

Started reading Anna Wierzbicka's Understanding Cultures Through Their Keywords.

I'm considering this one 95% brain candy until further notice. Actually, I pretty much agree with the overall sweep of the argument (the particular structures and characters of languages influence the development of cultures), but I don't think it's really provable on an evidential, scholarly level (she herself (over)-frequently falls back on appeals to personal cross-linguistic experience in her intro. I'm reading this more to pick up the odd linguistic anecdote and the fun culutral factoid than for her argument.

She takes a few fun potshots at Pinker's The Language Instinct in her introduction, basically accusing him of wanton monolinguism (the word "ethnocentrism" is fired).

Also argues that Russian as a language tends to make stronger absolute value statements vs. more circumspect English. Compares use frequency of pravda/istina vs. "truth." Not being much of a Russian scholar, I don't know how broad a semantic field pravda/istina cover, but I could certainly see it overlapping with contemporary English usage of "really" (which she doesn't mention). After lambasting one-to-one translation correspondences, she's oddly happy to use them in frequency lists.

See also:

The reason to study frequency lists.