Component 2 - Section C - Silent Cinema - Man With A Movie Camera & A Propos de Nice

 

Man With A Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)

- City symphony
- Omniscient viewpoint of three Soviet cities (Kyiv, Odesa, Khavkiv, Moscow)
- No actors or scripted scenarios
- Focus on theatre, poverty, babies
- Maxim Gorky
- Music symphony tied with sequence, offers continuity
- Part of film is showing the process of making it

Celebration of diversity of life:
- Couple in registry office, wedding
- Transition into funeral procession
- Constant movement, modes of transport, rhythm of life

Form = cinematic equipment = how film is made
Content = sacrificed = what we see = ideas and themes 


A Propos de Nice (Vigo, 1930)

- Great Depression
- Social discontent
- Rise of Marxism/Socialism
- Beginning of European Fascism
- Art Deco
- Cinema as 'art' or Cinema as a social force

- Modernism and constructivism
- City symphony
- Banality of life
- Jump cuts, juxtaposition and montage editing
- Handheld and hidden camera, social realism
Silent Cinema

- By the mid-1920s Silent cinema was mature, established and creative as a visual medium
- It was never entirely silent - although there is no recorded sound, most films were accompanied by soundtracks which matched the visuals and enabled spectator interaction

- Some filmmakers even feared that the coming of sound would drag the narrative-driven features of cinema down
- Lack of recorded dialogue can be seen as a strength as it draws the spectator into a much more active engagement with the film
- Inter-titles function as little more than a summary of what is being spoken

- Sergei Eisenstein's ambition was that film would be a visual canvas on to which the spectator could project their own imagined detail, in other words become co-storytellers

- Silent cinema can appear as a form of 'slow' cinema where a simple story is expanded or dragged out
- Silent film depends on what might be called visual amplification: gestures and details are used to make a narrative point, and then the point is reinforced and possible reinforced again - the shot is often held for longer

- The spectator is given room - different kinds of cinema with different techniques

Modernism
- Artistic and cultural movements of 1920s linked by modernism
- Strong commitment to the machine, especially the machinery of cinema
- Sense of anticipation of a new world under construction, experienced materially and physically
- In cinema, experimentation combined with modernism attempted to see what the medium could achieve

Constructivism
- Eisenstein used his first feature, Strike, to demonstrate the power of montage
- Constructivism links developments in cinema to wider artistic innovations of the time
- Celebrates the human machine, with new theories of acting and physical movement based on the mechanics of the human body and human communication
- Old/young 

Plan:
MWAMC: 
Sports
Transport

Exp. editing of Real. situations, personification of machines, human machine
Universal Kino-eye, in all machines

APDN:
Real 


Comments

  1. Lisa SocratesDecember 9, 2021 at 1:10 AM

    A clear and effective starting post on Silent cinema and Soviet filmmaking, with key trends and concepts highlighted.

    ReplyDelete

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