Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding ...figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of Man with a Movie Camera" (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first in a three-volume study, addresses Vertov's youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology.
This article argues that the work of 1920s Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov found especially fertile ground in 1960s Japan, where critics have long discussed ties between documentary and the ...avant-garde. Theorists interpreted Vertov's filmmaking as fundamentally avant-gardist. That is, it was both an "experiment in a dream" and an "experiment in reality," according to Nakahara Yusuke, rather than the work of a documentarian "catching life unawares." This transnational media ecology results in a strong tradition of experimental documentary that traces revolutionary politics to editing tricks and self-reflexivity. Soviet and Japanese avant-garde documentary emerge independently, and decades apart, yet result in a fascinating confluence of political avant-garde aesthetics that overlaps significantly.
In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States created synthetic sounds by printing photographic or drawn patterns directly onto a filmstrip's optical ...soundtrack. This essay examines these practices alongside the radical film theories of Dziga Vertov and Jean Epstein in order to test the limits of sonic epistemology—and, ultimately, to imagine what it might mean to conceive of synthetic sound as documentary sound.
Endlos intrigiert die Frage, ob es sich bei Paths of Glory um einen Kriegs- oder Antikriegsfilm handelt. Seiner Selbsteinschätzung nach drehte Stanley Kubrick erst mit Full Metal Jacket seinen ersten ...‚echten‘ Kriegsfilm. Demgegenüber soll zum einen gezeigt werden, inwiefern schon Kubricks Film über den Ersten Weltkrieg diese Bezeichnung verdient, um zum anderen deutlich zu machen, dass er allein dadurch zugleich als Stellungnahme gegen den Krieg zu begreifen ist. Es macht die Ethik der Ästhetik von Paths of Glory aus, ein ‚wahrer‘ shoot-'em-up zu sein.
The radio eye White, Jerry
The radio eye,
c2009, 2009, 2009-11-17
eBook
The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958–1988, examines the way in which media experiments in Quebec, Newfoundland, the Faroe Islands, and the Irish-Gaelic-speaking communities of Ireland ...use film, video, and television to advocate for marginalized communities and often for "smaller languages." The Radio Eye is not, however, a set of isolated case studies. Author Jerry White illustrates the degree to which these experiments are interconnected, sometimes implicitly but more often quite explicitly. Media makers in the North Atlantic during the period 1958–1988 were very aware of each other's cultures and aspirations, and, by structuring the book in two interlocking parts, White illustrates the degree to which a common project emerged during those three decades. The book is bound together by White's belief that these experiments are following in the idealism of Soviet silent filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who wrote about his notion of "the Radio Eye." White also puts these experiments in the context of work by the Cuban filmmaker and theorist Julio García Espinosa and his notion of "imperfect cinema, " Jürgen Habermas and his notions of the "public sphere, " and Édourard Glissant's ideas about "créolité" as the defining aspect of modern culture. This is a genuinely internationalist moment, and these experiments are in conversation with a wide array of thought across a number of languages.
This article focuses on philosopher Guy Debord’s notion of anti-cinema to explore Howls in favor of Sade (1952) and We spin around and we are consumed by fire (1978), works which belong to the ...beginning and the end of his film production. Then, we connect them with the proposal that Jean Luc Godard made within the Dziga Vertov Group, that is, we analyze the production of Here and Ici et ailleurs (1976), a film made in principle as part of the group's production, but was completed years later with Anne-Marie Miéville, which condenses several of the problems raised in films made in this stage of Godard’s production. We conclude that (despite an alleged rivalry or enmity) these filmmakers have much in common due to the shared influence of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov.
Este trabalho parte da concepção de anti-cinema do filósofo Guy Debord. Focaremos em duas de suas obras: Uivos a favor de Sade (Hurlements en faveur de Sade, 1952) e Perambulamos pela noite e somos consumidos pelo fogo (In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni,1978) —primeira e última produção cinematográfica do teórico—, para vinculá-las à proposta de Jean Luc Godard dentro do grupo Dziga Vertov. Tomaremos a realização de Ici et ailleurs (1976), um filme feito, a princípio, como parte da produção do grupo, mas que foi finalizado anos depois com Anne-Marie Miéville. Escolhemos esta obra, porque ela condensa vários dos problemas levantados nas produções dessa fase godardiana. Consideramos que esses cineastas (apesar de uma suposta rivalidade ou inimizade entre eles) têm inúmeros pontos de contato, cujo germe —explícito ou não— está nas idéias e produções do cineasta soviético Dziga Vertov.
En este trabajo partiremos de la concepción de anti-cine del filósofo Guy Debord; nos centraremos en dos de sus obras, una del inicio y otra del final de su producción fílmica: Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) y In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), para vincularlas con la propuesta de Jean Luc Godard dentro del Grupo Dziga Vertov. Tomaremos la realización de Ici et ailleurs (1976), una película hecha en principio como parte de la producción del grupo, pero finalizada años después con Anne-Marie Miéville. Elegimos esta película porque condensa varias de las problemáticas planteadas en las producciones de esta etapa godardeana. Consideramos que estos realizadores (a pesar de una supuesta rivalidad o enemistad) poseen numerosos puntos de contacto, cuyo germen —explicitado o no— está en las ideas y producciones del cineasta soviético Dziga Vertov.
This article focuses on Soviet agit-trains, initiated in the year 1918, as an important instrument for the dissemination of political propaganda and for the enlightenment of the rural population. ...These trains were not only used to produce and distribute newspapers and leaflets but were additionally equipped with mobile, independent film production units and cinemas. The directors Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) and Aleksandr Medvedkin (1900-1989) can serve as examples of two different models for how moving images were used as agit-prop. Vertov was already working along these lines during the time of the Civil War in Russia (1917 to 1923), when the railway network was used among other things to maintain support for the Red Army fighting at the front lines. This article aims to shed light on a lesser known chapter in Vertov’s life, emphasising the influence these early experiences had on his creative work later on. Medvedkin’s Film Train project on the other hand focused explicitly on laying bare and denouncing the farmer’s shortcomings using the medium film. This position has its roots in the changed political situation in the 1930s, when the Party relentlessly pushed collectivisation and the first five-year-plan. Although their approaches differed somewhat, both directors developed new strategies for the mediation of political messages through the medium of film, which steered audiences and facilitated their immediate involvement. Comparisons can therefore be made between Vertov and Medvedkin’s working methods and the modern information age, particularly in light of their shared interest in technical progress and their independent efforts to achieve maximum mobility when shooting and screening films.
The work of anarchist collectives in the film industry during the Spanish Civil War and the video documentaries of Grupo Alavío in post-2001 Argentina, as represented in two documentaries that attest ...to historical moments of worker self-management, shows historical and aesthetic intersections. Both were devoted to disseminating information counter to the official line of the mass media, and in neither was there a desire to take over the state; instead, the movements they represented denied the very legitimacy of the state. In the tradition of the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, both crafted meanings out of sequences of images of all kinds, and both paid homage to the masses awakening to social emancipation. Similarly to the Soviet film vanguard of the 1920s, both can be understood as organic parts of the transformations that they portrayed. La obra de colectivos anarquistas en la industria del cine durante la Guerra Civil Española y los video-documentales del Grupo Alavío en la Argentina del pos 2001, representadas en dos documentales que atestiguan los momentos históricos de autogestión laboral, demuestran una intersección histórica y estética. Ambas se dedicaban a la difusión de información contraria a la línea oficial de los medios de comunicación, y ninguna deseaba apoderarse del estado; en lugar de ello los movimientos que representaban negaban la propia legitimidad del estado. En la tradición del cineasta soviético Dziga Vertov, ambos elaboraban significados de secuencias de imágenes de todo tipo, y ambos prestaron homenaje al despertar de las masas y la emancipación social. Igual a la vanguardia del cine soviético de los años mil novecientos veinte, ambos pueden entenderse como piezas orgánicas de la transformación que retrataban.
The seminal work of pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera (Chevolek s kino-apparatom, 1929) has given rise to a number of discussions about the documentary film ...genre and new digital media. By way of comparison with American artist Perry Bard’s online movie project entitled Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake (2007), this article investigates the historical perspective of this visionary depiction of reality and its impact on the heralded participatory culture of contemporary digital media, which can be traced back to Russian Constructivism. Through critical analysis of the relation between Vertov’s manifest declarations about the film medium and his resulting cinematic vision, Bard’s project and the work of her chief theoretical inspiration Lev Manovich are examined in the perspective of “remake culture,” participatory authorship and the development a documentary film language. In addition to this, possible trajectories from Vertov and his contemporary Constructivists to recent theories of “new materialism” and the notion of Man/Machine-co-operation is discussed in length.
Within the early Soviet Union, artists and theorists experimented with a variety of representational forms and modes that were designed to manipulate audience reception and effect a new Soviet ...subjectivity. Investigating Dziga Vertov's often overlooked and misread first feature-length film, Kino-Glaz (1924), this article discovers within this historical context a unique cinematic intervention that sought to institute an alternative hegemony to American narrative film, and dominant conventions of narrativity itself, by exploiting the subjects and composite forms of early cinema to evolve a new proletarian sphere.
