VERTOV

While Flaherty was scruffling around for dough to subsidize his romanticized view of Eskimo life, a World War was in progress

(or one could say, because a world war was in progress Flaherty was scuffling around for funding).

American cinema in these years was dominated by

·  the narrative dramas of DW Griffith...

·  the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone studies..

·  the historical and biblical epics of Cecil B. Demille.

Non-fiction film, as I mentioned last time, was on the downward slide...

Perhaps the most prominent glimpses of cinematic reality were those provided by newsreels which had geared up for war with a vengeance: the US and British propaganda mills worked overtime to boost public morale and vilify the evil German huns...

On the other side of the Atlantic, earthshaking events were happening, both in the world and on the screen.

In 1917,

·  the bond between the Russian people and tsar Nicholas II finally ruptured after years of increasingly radical discontent with rampant governmental corruption and inefficiency and the tsar's reactionary social and political policies.

·  The catastrophic entry of ill-equipped and ill-prepared Russian forces into World War I and the ensuing shortages of food at home were further catalysts for revolution.

In March 1917 most of the Petrograd garrison joined a revolt against the Tsar. Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, ending more than 300 years of rule by the Romanov Dynasty.

In October of 1917, Nicolai Lenin and other revolutionaries returned to Russia after years of exile abroad and began orchestrating the final in a series of revolutionary takeovers of government.

On the night of Oct. 24, the Bolsheviks staged a coup engineered by Leon Trotsky against the provisional liberal government of Alexander Kerensky.

Aided by the workers’ Red Guard and the sailors of the battleship Kronstadt, the insurgents captured the government buildings and the Winter Palace in Petrograd.

A second Soviet congress was convened and immediately called for cessation of hostilities, gave private and church lands to village soviets, and abolished private property.

It was in the years following the October revolution, that Soviet film industry and the tradition of Soviet film experimentation was born.

Before the revolution, this small, disorganized industry consisted mainly of unremarkable escapist entertainment. The large majority of films played to Russian audiences were imported from Europe or the US.

The Great social and political experiment of the 1917 Revolution was matched by revolutions and experimentations in the arts including cinema.

During this time Russian artists in all fields strongly came strongly under the influence of European avant garde movements and trends.

·  The prevailing romanticism of the late 19th Century was thrown over for in favor of radical experimentation and

·  a love affair with the possiblities of new technologies and new societal relationships.

Cubism and particularly futurism were look to for models and directions.

Futurism was an international movement started in Italy in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Instead of worshipping nature and the natural world, the Futurists adored

·  the speed, energy, fragmentation, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life in general.

·  Fast cars, airplanes, grinding gears and smoke stacks became their icons.

·  Futurist poets abandoned formal syntax and traditional poetic subjects for long lists and word catalogs, splattered across the page in startlingly graphic ways--

Instead of worshipping the cultural traditions of Western Civilization, the futurists called for

·  violent revolution, a clean sweep...

·  the destruction of libraries, museums, academies and other temples of Culture.

Manifesto of Futurism

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

In Russia, futurist principles and tactics were incorporated into burgeoning avant-garde art movements--particularly the movement known as Constructivism.

Founded c.1913 by Vladimir Tatlin, constructivist art is marked by

·  a commitment to total abstraction and a wholehearted acceptance of modernity.

·  A rejection of emotionalism in art--a turn toward science

·  A concentration on Objective forms pared down to their which were thought to have universal meaning -- (often geometic forms favored)

·  A rejection of the subjective or the individual in art.

·  New media were often used.

Like the futurists, the Constructivists sought an art of order, which would

·  reject the past (the old order which had culminated in World War I)

·  and lead to a world of more understanding, unity, and peace. Celebration of modernity, the machine…like cubism, experiments with fragmentation, montage.

SHOW SHOCK OF THE NEW

In August 1919 Soviet Film industry was nationalized.

Under the directorship of Lenin's wife, the Cinema Committee

·  founded a state film school to train directors, actions and technicians,

·  as well as to produce agitki - newsreels edited for the purpose of social and political agitation and propaganda - or AGITPROP.

These films were carried across Russia along with books and journals on specially equipped trains and boats. Agitki was intended to provide the masses with general and political education and to serve as

"one of the many instruments used on the battlefronts of class struggle for socialist construction."

The Early Soviet film industry encountered a myriad of substantial obstacles--lack of equipment or production facilities, even lack of film stock forces filmmakers to reuse old stock or piece together scraps.

Next Tues professor ann nesbet will be joining us to talk about one of the most influential directors to arise during these heady post-revolutionary years, Dziga Vertov.

Dziga Vertov was born Denis Abramovich Kaufman to a Jewish middle-class family. In his late teens, he began studies Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute but soon came under the spell of the heady avant garde art scene in Petrograd.

During this time he changed his name to Dziga Vertov ('the humming--or spinning-top')

In 1918 Mikhail Koltstov, who headed the Moscow Film Committee's newsreel section, hired Vertov as his assistant. Among Vertov's colleagues was Lev Kuleshov, who was conducting his now legendary experiments in montage, as well as Edouard Tissé, Eisenstein's future cameraman.

Vertov began to edit documentary footage and soon was appointed editor of Kinonedelya, the first Soviet weekly newsreel.

In 1919 Vertov with other young filmmakers, created a group called Kinoks ('kino-oki', meaning cinema-eyes). The group, like many other avant garde groups, was big into manifestos.

The Kinoks

·  rejected 'staged' cinema with its stars, plots, props and studio shooting.

·  insisted that the cinema of the future be the cinema of fact: newsreels recording the real world, as 'life caught unawares.'

·  "The film drama is the Opium of the people…down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!"

He even called the 23 newreels he directed between 1922 and 1925 Kino-Pravda, 'pravda' being not only the Russian word for the truth but also the title of the official party newspaper.

·  Vertov proclaimed the primacy of the camera itself (the 'Kino-Eye') over the human eye. He clearly saw it as some kind of innocent machine that could record without bias or superfluous aesthetic considerations (as would, say, its human operator) the world as it really was. The camera lens was a machine that could be perfected to seize the world in its entirety and organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective set of pictures.

SHOW KINO PRAVDA????

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