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

[Terrance]

Again, just a page taken out of GR is all ... the wheel turns a clacking
clack clack clack the celluloid tail slapping the light in the
theater/theatre ... Nixon and Ray-Gun frozen shadows thawing, but
pre-war the spirit of the time changed, and as american experimenters
grew more familiar with their medium they turned further away from the
germans and the naturalism of the french to the heightened realism of
the russians ... but Tom doesn't even bother to stencil them in ... the
impact of russian films and their artistic credo, summed up in the word
"montage," was so shattering that they wiped out the aesthetic standards
of their predecessors and ushered in new criteria. the principle of
montage as presented in the films and writings  of eisenstein, pudovkin,
vertov, became by 1931 the aesthetic guide for most experimental films. 
the soviet technique, Charles Vidor, The Spy, The Last Moment, a montage
of the recollections of the events of the past (flashbacks) and the
thoughts of the immediate present projected as if they were taking place
in reality instead of in the minds of the doomed (flashfowards) or dead.
the doomed man is about to be executed, a flash forward (in his mind he
escapes, a wish fulfilled)  to his escape and then back to his being
hung and death. 

in style The Spy is highly realistic. there are no camera tricks, no
effects. the actors, nonprofessionals, use no make-up, the sets are not
painted nor studio backgrounds, but actual locations. the impact depends
entirely on straightforward cutting and mounting. 

Vertov's or the russian manifesto, "the news film is the foundation of
film art." 

the camera must surprise life, pictures should not be composed
chronologically or dramatically, but thematically. they should be based
on such themes as labor and rest, and other manifestations of daily
working life. 





Mark Wright AIA wrote:
> 
> 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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