Agenda
• Film History:
– Alternatives to Hollywood Storytelling
– Soviet Cinema in the 1920s
– Intro to Man with a Movie Camera
• 4:40: Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
– Dir. By Dziga Vertov
Approaches to Film History
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Aesthetic
Technological
Economic
Social/Historical
Also:
• Film Movements
• Nationalism
Alternatives to
(Hollywood) Narratives
• 1. Documentary: “Documentary film is more
concerned with the recording of reality, the
education of viewers, or the presentation of
political or social analyses” (LaM 71)
• 2. Experimental Film: “pushes the boundaries of
what most people think movies are—or should
be” (LaM 76)
• 3. Modernist Film and Modernist Aesthetics
European Cinema in the 1920s
• German Expressionism, French Impressionism, Soviet
Montage
• Formal experimentation and innovation
• Emergence of the Avant-Garde: Films begin to achieve
status of “art”
Modernism and Modernity
• Modernity
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• Modernism
Rise of the nation
• “A major shift in cultural attitudes
that arose largely as a response to
Urbanization
modern life—the late phases of the
New technologies
industrial revolution, especially the
Rapid growth of scientific
new modes of transportation and
knowledge
communication that were swiftly
Rise of mass media
transforming people’s lives” (Bordwell and Thompson, Film History,
Changes in family structure
68-70).
Challenges to religious
authority
Growth of consumer capitalism, • How people’s philosophies and
worldviews shifted, and especially the
emergence of a leisure class,
ways their representations of the
etc.
world (in their art) changed.
Characteristics of Modernist Art
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Increasing abstraction
Emphasis of form over content
Emphasis on the new, rejection of tradition
Fragmentation (of narrative and image)
Nonlinear temporality, disruption of cause and
effect
• Investigation of subjectivity and the
subconscious
Experimental Film
• Maya Deren: “A radio is not a louder voice, an airplane
is not a faster car, and the motion picture should not
be thought of as a faster painting or a more real play . .
.
• . . . All of these forms are qualitatively different from
those which preceded them. If cinema is to take its
place beside the others as a full-fledged art form, it
must cease merely to record realities that owe
nothing of their actual existence to the film
instrument.”
Early Documentary
• First Documentary:
– Nanook of the North
(1922), dir. by Robert
Flaherty
• “City Symphonies”
– Manhatta (1921), Berlin
(1927)
• Influences on Early
Documentary
– Anthropology
– Public Education
– Science of Propaganda
Soviet Cinema in the 1920s
• 1917: Bolshevik Revolution
• 1920s: Golden Age of Soviet Cinema
– Lenin: “For us, the most important of all the arts is the cinema”
(1922)
– Constructivism: Art as labor; a modernism of social utility
– Eisenstein: Battleship Potemkin (1925)
– Vertov: Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
• 1930s: Stalin’s “great purge”; ascendancy of socialist
realism
• “Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people
dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible
phenomena; they invented the telescope…now they
have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more
deeply into he visible world, to explore and record
visual phenomena so that what is happening now,
which will have to be taken account of in the future,
is not forgotten.” – Dziga Vertov
• “The film drama is the Opium of the people…down
with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as
it is!” – Dziga Vertov
•
from: http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/vertov/
Critical Responses to
Man with a Movie Camera
• Sergei Eisenstein: “unmotivated camera mischief.”
• John Grierson: “Man with a Movie Camera is not a
film, but a snapshot album“
• Roger Ebert: “What Vertov did was elevate . . . avantgarde freedom to a level encompassing his entire film.
That is why the film seems fresh today; 80 years later, it
is fresh.”
•
•
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/movies/dziga-vertov-films-at-museum-of-modern-art.html
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-man-with-a-movie-camera-1929
Questions about
Man with a Movie Camera
• What does the film tell you about life in the Soviet Union in
the 1920s?
• Does this film have a narrative?
• Think about Individuals and crowds. How does Vertov direct
our emotions toward people in this film?
• Why does Vertov show us his filmmaking process at various
points in the film?
• How does the editing affect your interpretation of the film?