Russian Montage


Vertov was a constructivist. For him, montage was part of the selection process. The combination of shots would affect the the audience, making them aware. He founded the experimental group Kino eye together with his wide Elisaveta Svilova (co-editor) and his brother Mikhail Kaufman (cameraman). They felt the task of the soviet film was to document reality 'to reveal truth' and were opposed to the fiction film that depended on artifice 'the ordinary fiction film acts like a cigar or cigarette on a smoker. Intoxicated by the cine-nicotine...'

Man with the movie camera

Dziga Vertov is described by S.M Eisentien as a 'film hooligan' producing 'unmotivated camera mischief'. He made a Man with a movie camera as a 'visual symphony', a self-reflexive film about making of the film. As a self proclaimed 'experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events' it is an exhilarating dynamic, collective experience about the life and rhythm of a city, in which the spectator plays an active role as both subject and audience.

Context

Social
  • In 1929 the soviet revolution into the beyond its first decade.
  • ideas about the role of the new Soviet Citizen.
  • Openness to experiment initiated under Lenin now beginning to close down under Josef stalin.
Historical
  • 1928 Stalin introduced the first 5 year Plan whose chief aim was rapidly expand industrial production to bring a vast country into with western Europe.
Political 
  • Vertov associated with the Revolutionary LEF group (left front) whose members included rodchenko, Mayakovsky and Eisenstein. In 1928 the first all-union party congress on film questions criticised 'formalist devices' as used by Eisenstein and others. These were considered to make films inaccessible a mass audience 

Technological
  • Vertov had worked on the agit-trains, mobile propaganda centres sent to the eastern front and the far corners of the soviet union. Their mask was to disseminate propaganda through films, plays leaflets and posters. To this they both projected films (giving many audiences their first experience of cinema) and recorded images and events which they edited together to form newsreels and documentaries as the train was speeding across the ussr. They worked on the move.
Institutional
  • Early 1922 Lenin established a fixed ratio between entertainment and documentary film 'The Lenin Proportion'. This was 75% fiction films to 25% documentary films. By 1925 cinema was a vital public institution.
Vertov used many cinematic techniques and effects that emphasised the contrived (constructed/artificial) nature of films.

These included:
  • Double exposure 
  • superimposition
  • animation
  • speeded up action
  • freeze frame
  • reverse motion 
  • overlapping motion
  • split screen techniques
  • slow motion
  • stopmotion  
A propos de Nice is a 1930 silent short documentary film directed by Jean Vigo and photographed by Boris Kaufman - the brother of Man with a movie cameras director Dziga Vetov

Vigo described the film in an address to the Groupement des Spectateurs d'Avant-Garde: "In this film, by showing, by showing certain basic aspects of a city. The sickening"


End scene
  • Low angles camera pans across towers/tubes in low angle (everything is going to be replaced by the industry)
  • Woman at the end is of the upperclass, stating she will die and be replaced by industry
  • Upside down head shows the aftermath - all symbols existing before the revolution are forgotten.
  • Ending states that we should get rid of the poor and the rich and unite them all through industry.

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