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Name Reese Tan Lea Keng

Module M08 Visual Culture

Academic Tutor Val Hill

Cinema has been the predominant popular art form of the first half of the twentieth century, at least in Europe and North America. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the Soviet Union, where Lenin's remark that "of all the arts for us cinema is the most important" has become a clichand where cinema attendances today are still amongst the highest in the world.

Buy cheap Soviet Cinema term paper

In the age of mass politics Soviet Cinema has developed from a fragile but effective tool to gain support among the overwhelmingly illiterate peasant masses in the Civil War that followed the October 117 Revolution, through a welter of experimentation into a mass weapon of propaganda through entertainment that shaped the public image of the Soviet Union- both at home and abroad and for both elite and mass audiences.

As a movie lover, I decide to discuss Russian movie in their way of present their movie and how does it related to our daily lives. So, this essay will emphasize on two of the protagonists of Russian movie Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov as my main discussion in my essay.

Before this, is a need to give a reader a brief history background of Russian movie.

The soviet film-makers of the 10s reflect the ideology (the values and beliefs) and politics of the society in which they were produced. The early 10s marked the end of a period of civil unrest, the causes of which lay in the great divide that separated wealthy land-owning Russians from the peasants and workers.

For centuries Russia had been governed by the single figure of the Tsar who had absolute powers. The Russian serfs were not granted freedom from slavery until 1861; this liberation, however, did not mean improved conditions, as they continued to live an existence of appalling poverty. Attempts had been made prior to the revolution of October 117 by various factions to undermine the Tsarist regime, all which were unsuccessful. A wave of revolutionary activity in 105 included a mutiny by Russian sailors at Odessa which formed the basis of Sergei Eisenstein's 15 film Battleship Potemkin.

The First World War (114-18) eventually proved to be disastrous for Tsar Nicholas , as it consumed vast amounts of money and resources that were sorely needed at home. It was also unpopular with the Russian people as the reasons for fighting were unclear. The peasants and the workers were the worst hit by the impact of the war, either being killed on the front or starving at home as supplies became depleted. The land-owning rich were protected by their wealth and were able to continue in their existing lifestyle.

These conditions provided the catalyst for the revolution of 5 February 117 which resulted in the formation of a liberal provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky and later supported by Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary factions. This caused Nicholas to abdicate on 4 March. The provisional government decided to continue the war, and for many (especially V.I. Lenin who was in hiding in Zurich) it appeared that the new government was in effect continuing the policies of the Tsarist order.

On 5 October 117 the Bolsheviks, taking advantage of a situation of confusion and competition between the various factions, seized power by storming the Winter Palace.

The new Bolshevik government agreed to Germany's demands for control of areas of land previously under Russian administration and pulled out of the war. Almost immediately, however, a fierce civil war broke out between the Bolsheviks (known as the Reds) and those still loyal to the Tsarist regime (known as Whites).

By 10 it was clear that the Bolsheviks had seized ultimate control of the country. The new Soviet government under the leadership of V.I. Lenin was faced with the task of convincing the population of Russia of the evils of the Tsarist regime and the positive points of the new Communist one.

Selected historical dates

105 Jan. First revolution (abortive)

Provides the backdrop for Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin

114, Jan General strike organized by the Bolsheviks

Outbreak of war and the crushing of the political unrest

The war was a general disaster for the Russians; low morale and food shortages in the following years led to uprisings in 117

117, Feb. Popular uprisings culminating in the overthrow of the Tsar, and the setting up of a provisional government

117, Oct. The Bolsheviks overthrow the provisional government and seize political power

118-1 Civil was between White and Red faction, as well as fighting of

hostile troops sent from abroad in an attempt to restore the power of the Tsar. The continued fighting led to the destruction of trade, agriculture, industry and film production

1-8 NEP (New Economic Policy) adopted by Lenin. A brief return to

controlled forms of capitalism to help to rebuild the shattered economy

1- Soviet feature film production resumes

14 Sergei Eisenstein's Strike completed

17 The tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. A number of

films are made to mark the occasion including

October (Eisenstein)

The End of St Petersburg (Vsevold Pudovkin)

The Fall of the Romanav Dynasty (Esfir Shub)

For a brief period in its cultural history, the USSR enjoyed a unique marriage of liberal artistic expression and generous government support. Immediately following the October Revolution, Soviet artists felt free to engage in the most original and controversial of experiments, including those, which clashed with the official party line. Those few years of ideological freedom and creative enthusiasm gave birth to some outstanding avant-garde achievements that still inspire artists worldwide to express themselves in ways uncompromised by artistic conventions or political dictates.

Dziga Vertov (186-154)

It is far from simple

To show the truth,

Yet the truth is simple.

--Dziga Vertov

Dziga Vertoz (January , 186- February 1,154), was a Russian documentary film and newsreel director. Vertov was born Denis Abramovich Kaufman to Jewish intellectuals living in Bialystok- at the time a Russian territory a Russified his Jewish patronymic to Arkadievich in his youth. Kaufman studies music at Bialstok Conservatory until his parents fled with their family from the invading German army to Moscow in 115; they soon settled in St. Petersburg, where Kaufman began writing poetry and science fiction/satire.

In 116-117, Kaufman was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Instituted in St. Peterburg and experimenting with "sound collages" in his free time. Kaufman adopted the name "Dziga Vertov", which connotes "turning, revolving'; Vertov's political writings and his work on the Kino-Pravda newsreel series shows a revolutionary bent which is perhaps unsurprising.

Vertov's driving vision, expounded in his frequent essays, was to capture "film-truth" that is, fragments of actuality which, when organized together, have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

In the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first.

The episodes of "Kino-Pravda" usually did not include reenactments or stagings (one exception is the segment about the trial of the Social Revolutionaries the scenes of the selling of the newspapers on the streets and the people reading the papers in the trolley were both staged for the camera).

The cinematography is simple, functional, uneleborate perhaps a result of Vertov's disinterest in both "beauty" and "art".

The decade after the October Revolution unleashed one of the most exciting periods in Russian art. Although the majority of the artists remained committed to the forms of expression dominant before the revolution, the avant-garde groups in search of ways to express the needs and goals of the newly liberated working class chose forms and subjects as innovative and experimental as the times. These revolutionary enthusiasts met a serious challenge in the attitudes of the traditional artists, as both groups strove to define theoretical concepts for the artist's role in the new Soviet state, and as numerous factions of the avant-garde adopted varying and often mutually conflicting ideological positions. The resulting differences of opinions did not, however, prevent the avant-garde artists from collectively promoting artistic experimentation and freedom of expression. This was particularly evident in cinema, which was considered the most powerful means of communication and expression.

He feels that there is a need to replace bourgeois melodramas with revolutionary newsreels reflecting everyday life. Vertov surrounded himself with a group of collaborators whom he called the "kinoks" [ki-noki], a neologism that reflected their ardent dedication to film. The members of the kinoks were young cameramen, editors, technicians, and animators, including Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov's brother who, in addition to playing the "protagonist", served as the cameraman for The Man with a Movie Camera, and Vertov's wife, Elizaveta Svilova, the film's editor, who played herself in that role.

Vertov, Kaufman, and Svilova formed the Council of Three [Soviet troikh]- "the higher organ of the kinoks" [ visshii organ kinokov]- which bore responsibility for the production policy of the cooperative. The kinoks promulgated and defended their views with idealistic zeal, insisting on a sharp distinction between the traditional fictional film and the new proletarian newsreel. As a member of the Council of Three, Svilo derided the directors of entertainment films as those "who do not understand that the newsreel can also be edited, and who do not know that documentary films are important and more exciting that photoplays with actors, because the newsreel shows life that cannot be imitated by actors." She concluded her statement with a question "If one photograph a real worker and an actor playing a worker, which is better? The impersonating actor or the real man? Unquestionably the latter!" Svilova's answer clearly reflected the kinoks' desire to free film of the theatrical conventions it had acquired while becoming "artistic," an evolution which led cinema to become merely a recording devide for the performing arts.

Vertov uses only records of reality- no actors, no scenario, no scenery, nothing theatrical only LIFE. These fragments of life he puts together- mounts- montage- in various rhythmic ways, using all the possibilities of montage, of cutting.

1) of single frames

) of sections of single frames

) of juxtaposition of frames and sections

Vertov own pioneering ideas and practices had the support of no other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who declared- "The production of new films permeated with Communist ideas reflecting Soviet reality should begin with the newsreel…. they should be of the publicist type along the lines carried out by our best Soviet newspaper. His film is like a living newspaper.

Eisenstein said

In the early twenties the newsreel documentary films were the leaders in our cinema art. Many feature films of artistic cinema that were then being born undoubtedly bore the imprint of the creations of documentary cinematography, the sharpness of perception and facts, and the sharpness of signs and quick-wittedness in assembling what was visible. The rounding-off life and actuality and still much more was done by the documentary film to the style of Soviet cinematography.

In Vertov's movie, he suggest that

1) life as it is

) catching it "unaware"

) filming the unprepared

4) unorganized

5) elemental events of everyday life

All the above characteristic tend to oppose the life created artificially in a film studio, his first documentary film Kino-Eye (14), is being called the first genuine Soviet documentary film, a new birth after Russian revolution.

As said by Vertov, his film is a social force and a medium for artistic expression and he believe that a movie should be a universal language.

Dziga Vertov believed that was one of the most unorthodox artists in the Soviet avant-garde movement, in both his style, exhibited by his documentary films, and his concept of cinema as a social force and as a medium for artistic expression.

He considered the camera to be the instrument an artist could use to penetrate the essence of external reality. He believed that cinema as a revolutionary force could affect the mass consciousness and incite people to reject bourgeois melodramas (photoplays), which Vertov, echoing Marx, labeled "an opiate for the people." At the same time, he wanted to demonstrate the cinema's exceptional power, which could be used as an educational means to build the new society.

Vertov association with the group of artists and intellectuals gathered around Mayakovsky's journal LEF is examined in terms how Mayakovsky's poetic works influenced Vertiv to write deconstructed stanzas and to lay out his film scripts poetically. In both endeavors he followed Mayakovsky's style as well as his practice of graphically displaying lines on the page in a collagelike style.

Although the participants in the Soviet avant-garde movement were unified by their aversion to bourgeois art, this unity did not preclude divergent tendencies within the same artistic trend, as well as conflicting attitudes among the individual artists and theorists. One such disagreement is exemplified by the dispute between Vertov and Aleksei Gan, the most militant of the constructivists, who strove for new revolutionary art and insisted on its being politically responsible to society. Even more controversial were the debates Vertov had with Sergei Eisenstein concerning the "true" nature of documentary cinema, the ideological function of montage, and the role of actors in staged (fictional) films.

With the eventual victory of socialist realism, officially proclaimed as the only "correct" approach to art, and their ensuing disappointment with the New Economic Policy (NEP), which encouraged the production of entertainment movies, Vertov and Mayakovsky realized the impossibility of fulfilling their revolutionary ideals. As the suppression of the avant-garde movement reached its peak in the early 10s, Vertov's cinematic experimentation was proclaimed "unsuitable" and considered undeserving of support from the Ministry of Cinematography.

Attacked by the orthodox film critics for being "formalistic" and therefore "inaccessible" to the masses, Vertov gradually sequestered himself from public life, while his films were removed to the state archive's vault.

When first time watched "Man With a Movie Camera", is like a music video which shoots during black and white video period, the background music is so marvelous, is kind of mixture of classical and electronic music.

As Vertov struggled to prove that film is a universal language of expression intelligible to all people regardless of national borders because it is capable of constructing "sentences" and "phrases" that convey ideas more powerfully than any other means of communication

As mentioned by Petric in Constructivism in Film

From the beginning of his career, Vertov's goal was to break the literary theatrical conventions of cinema in order to attain an autonomous film language based on specific visual devices unique to the nature of the medium. Considering the camera a technological vehicle capable of recording "life-unawares" and recognizing montage as the means by which one could create the genuine "film-thing," .

Through the camera, the viewers can know better the condition of that time of Russian society, with that movie, we can read that during that time, Soviet society is a very progressive society, everybody is hardworking, everybody is contributing.

Vertov identifying himself as a worker among other workers, he intended to help the audience- workers, peasants, and ordinary citizens, to see "through and beyond" the appearance of mundane reality. He also believe that cinema could be used as an educational means to build the new society.

Vertov wanted his audience to be able to "feel the world" because he wanted his audience to see what was really going on in Russia (Michelson, 184). He focused on reality, which is why he constantly criticized foreign films such as American, British, French, and Japanese because he believed the characters lived a fantasy life.

According to Vertov in an article by Barnouw, "Foreign lands abet you in your confusion, sending into the new Russia… in splendid technological dressing" (Barnouw, 184). Characters in Western films did not suffer like real people or at least like the people of Eastern Europe. His Russian films were serious, not ideological like the Western films.

Most of Vertov's films reflected what the government wanted the movies to say about Russian life (propaganda), which was serious.

Vertov's most radical achievement and his masterpiece, The Man with the Movie Camera, is a nonfiction (unstaged) film, is "an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events, executed without the aid of intertitles, without a script, without theather, without sets and actors.

This is quite an interesting point because in our daily life, we can notice that in a "artificial daily life" in a movie, a protagonists always talks a lot, and the dialogue is always splendid and well-organised, and Vertov tend to oppose this phenomena, in my experience, sometime we will be facing a problem with don't know what to say, what to say a right thing, how to say it?

It gives the audience the new way of seeing reality, and a new interpretation of that reality.

One of Vertov's manisfesto "We A Version of a Manifesto", published in August 1, the Cine-Eyes rejected the cinema of fiction and "the theatre"

We are purging the Cine-Eye of its hanger-on, of music literature and theatre, we are seeing out own rhythm, one that has not been stolen from elsewhere, and we are finding it in the movement of objects.

We invites you

--- away ---

from the sweet embraces of the romance from the poison of the

psychological movel, from the clutches of the theatre of adultery,

with year backsides to music.

--- away ---

into the open, into four dimensional space (three+ time), in search of

our own material, metre and rhythm

The "psychological" prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch and hampers his desire for kinship with the machine.

In the "Man With a Movie Camera", the camera were against the cinema employing actors, scripts, sets and studios- all the artifice of film drama- and argued the camera should get out onto the street and film ordinary people at work and leisure.

He intended to show the world of ordinary Soviet people from all over the Soviet Union, to other ordinary Soviet people from all corners of the vast country.

The Man with a Movie Camera is much more revolutionary film, as in the film's prologue "This experimental work is directed forwards the creation of a truly international absolute language of cinema on the basis of is total separation from the language of the theatre and literature.

The film's overall montage structure, which Vertov called " the film's indissoluble whole," develops around a central theme- that of the Cameraman performing his daily routine in an urban environment- and is built by juxtaposing events occurring in diverse locations and at different times.

In my opinion, the movie portray a ordinary day in the society, but why it was started in the theatre, the director wants us to analyze the the intention of the prologue, is the director want us to remind the audience that we are watching a society through an eye of camera?

In my opinion, the camera in the movie reflect the eye of ourselves, we see everything through our eyes, seeing is believing. At the opening, why the chair of the theatre will open by itself, nobody tend to open it, and sometime the movie will stop?

A hundred years after cinema's birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating story, of linking one experience to the next. In the cinema, it can create a seamless virtual space, borders between different worlds do not have to be erased; different spaces do not have to be matched in perspective, scale, and lighting; individual layers can retain their separate identities rather than being merged into a single space; different worlds can clash semantically rather than form a single universe.

In Man with a Movie Camera, the camera can be anywhere, and with its superhuman vision it can obtain a close-up of any object.

When the second part of the movie, the awakening of the city, the cameraman dare to shoot the train with all the danger; on the other side, the women seems to be awakened by the danger of the cameraman, of course, finally the cameraman is safe and get what he want to shoot.

In the The Man with a Movie Camera, whols movie is presented as one of

many working activities, with a part of a socialist environment.

Eisenstein accused Vertov of producing "trikery" and "unmotivated [formal] mischief," even though Vertov clearly stated that The Man with a Movie Camera was conceived and executed with one major intention to rid the viewers of their conventional manner of watching movies.

Only recently have some critics gone beyond regarding Vertov's film as a mere display of cinematic fireworks and instead have recognized its unique structural and cinematic importance. Commenting on the structural difficulty of the film, Noel Burch writes

This film is not made to be viewed once. It is impossible for anyone to assimilate this work in a single viewing. Far more than any film by Eisenstein, The Man with a Movie Camera demands that the spectators take an active role as depicpheres of its images. To refuse that role is to leave the theatre or escape into revery…. One may safely say that there is not a single shot in this entire film whose place in the editing scheme is not overdetermined by a whole set of interwined chains of signification, and that it is impossible to fully decipher the film's discourse until one has a completely topographical grasp of the film as a whole, in other words, after several viewing.

The four parts of The Man with a Movie Camera (Prologue, Part One, Part Two, and Epilogue) build a circular structure that evokes the theme of Vertov's work- a Cameraman's daily activity in a Soviet City. Continually reminding the viewers of the perceptual illusion of the projected image, Vertov demonstrates how "the film stock is transformed from the movie camera, through the laboratory and editing process, to the screen.

Because the film communicates through purely visual means, and there is five types of images in The Man with a Movie Camera industrial construction, traffic, machinery, recreation, and citizen workers' countenances.

Machines are shown mostly in close-up, with the other five images, this creates a "grand metaphor" about a Soviet Society free of any capitalist exploitation of workers. The worker seems to be satisfied with their job.

For the most part, the citizens, involved in their work, remain unaware of the camera and pay no attention to the shooting.

The female workers in the mill reveal rather indirectly their awareness- even pleasure- of being photographed although they seen absorbed in their activity, their facial expressions and physical gestures acknowledge the presence of the camera.

On the other side, the male workers seem to be more involved in their work, rarely paying attention to the Cameraman.

Vertov says in his essay "The Man with a Movie Camera" that he was fighting "for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature."

Sergei Eisenstein (188- 148)

Born on Jan , 188 in Riga, Latvia, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (188-148) was to become one of the most world-renowned filmmakers of the first half of the twentieth century.

Eisenstein was of Jewish descent through his paternal grandparents. His father worked in shipbuilding, until 110, when the family moved to St. Petersburg, where his training as an architect and engineer had a great influence on his future filmmaking.

The architect in Eisenstein was inspired by Renaissance conceptions of space. He studied Leonardo da Vincis work and was influenced by Freuds interpretation of da Vinci. Trying to bridge the gap in what he felt was the distorted space induced by technology, Eisenstein pushed the outer envelope of filmmaking.

He attempted to understand how the sensations of the machine age could be incorporated in the grand style of the Renaissance and how the meaning of Marxist humanism might be traced back to the spirit of the Quattrocento.

The Battleship Potemkin (15)

The Battleship Potemkin was long considered the masterwork of the silent cinema. In 158 an international critics' poll voted it the greatest film of all time.

The first time I saw The Battleship Potemkin, this movie will gives audience a great impact, especially the Odessa Steps sequence, silent movie tend to give audience better level of imaginary at a certain level.

Potemkin was, by all judgements, a more unified and intelligible work than Strike. Eisenstein put his emotion firmly at the center. Revolutionary fervor spreads from the sailors to the people of Odessa to a navy fleet.

He portrayed the ship's officers as ferociously oppressive, the tsarist troops as mechanically brutal, and the sailors and the people of Odessa as ordinary people caught up in an event of epochal importance.

The finished film was premiered in December at an anniversary ceremony at the Bolshoi Theatre. It was released in January 16, to generally favorable response. Some press reviews declared it the finest soviet film yet made. One writer found it a success in the monumental mode "He knows that the revolution is not a personality but the masses, and he seeks a language to express emotions of the masses" (Volkov 16 4)

Besides, Eistentein's films can usefully be understood as part of a broad tendency toward "heroic realism" in 10s Soviet art.. this trend has its immediate sources in the Civil War period, which generated lyrical, episodic portrayals of collective action, in agit-dramas and novels the hero became the mass, and appeal to the spectator was when the avant-garde had declined, most painters, writers, and theatre workers accepted the obligation of celebrating the Revolution or portraying Soviet society through some version of "realism" (although the exact meaning of this concept was hotly debated)

Bibliography

1) Christie, Ian and Taylor, Richard, Eisenstein Rediscovered (London, Routledge London and New York, 1)

) Marshall, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 18)

) Petric, Vlada, Constructivism in Film (USA, Cambridge University Press, 1)

4) Taylor, Richard, Eisenstein Wiritings 1- 14 (London, BFI Publishing London, Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis, 188)

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