VLVL2 (13) 3: Round wire rims with ND-I filters for lenses

Mark Wright AIA mwaia at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 12 18:58:42 CST 2004


Howdy
Here is a sweet paragraph or two about Dziga Vertov and his theory
about the relationship between film and political reality. The 24fps 
crew would have acknowledged him as a father. See his five-point
"checklist of essentials"!

excerpted from
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/vertov.html

"Dziga Vertov, of course, considered his films to be documentaries,
records of actuality, but all his work reflected his very personal,
highly poetic vision of Soviet 'reality,' a vision he maintained
throughout his life, long after the dustbin of soviet history had
claimed him, too. Very early on, Vertov was attracting unfavourable
comment and attention from party hacks, with his strange camera angles,
fast cutting, montage editing, and experimentations like split screen,
multi layered supers and even animated inserts. By the mid 1920s,
Vertov was acquiring the reputation of an eccentric, a dogmatist who
rejected everything in cinema except for the Kinoks' own work.
Fortunately Vertov, like Eisenstein, received the close attention and
support of the European avant-garde. His feature-length Kino-Eye – Life
Caught Unawares(1924) was awarded a silver medal and honorary diploma
at the World Exhibit in Paris, and that success led to two more films
commissioned by Moscow: Stride Soviet!(1926) and A Sixth of the World
(1926).

But the central authorities were also becoming fed up with Vertov's
experiments, and they refused to support his greatest and still most
rewardingly complex film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Given the
difficulties in getting the film made at all, Vertov must have looked
back nostalgically at his Kinok checklist of essentials for a Kino-Eye
filmmaker:

1.  rapid means of transport
2.  highly sensitive film stock
3.  light handheld film cameras
4.  equally light lighting equipment
5.  a crew of super-swift cinema reporters (etc)

—Vertov op cit
This all looks like a shopping list for a post 1960s Direct Cinema crew
and indeed filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers and Fred Wiseman all
acknowledged the conceptual debt to Vertov's ideas and practices so
many years before."

Mark

--- Leonid Oganesyantz <leonog at ice-group.ru> wrote:
> >Is this another of P's cybernetic conceits? Perhaps a Christopher
> >Isherwood/Sally Bowles reference? (see "I am a Camera") I also
> remember
> >an early Russian silent film of the revolutionary agit-prop sort,
> >called "I am a Camera" (in Russian of course) but can't find it on
> the
> >www so maybe I'm mistaken.
> 
> Maybe Dziga Vertov's "The Man With Movie Camera"?
> 
> Leonid
> 
> 

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