After the revolution of 1917, Soviet cineastes became engaged in state-supported media praxis. Their signal accomplishments included bold theories and practices of montage within the context of cultural revolution.
Committed to introducing dialectical materialism to new Soviet citizens, these filmmakers engaged in a formalist project establishing the unique powers of cinema as both modernist technology and practice. The cultural producer became one of many laborers using machines towards revolutionary change. Dziga Vertov writes, “through the poetry of machines…a new man.” Vertov’s theory of montage is about prosthetic perception: a machine-aided vision, a Cine-Eye. Committed to documentary, Vertov uses cinema to reveal “a communist decoding of reality.” Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage is of conflict and synthesis: a Cine-Fist. While rooted in the material of film, and narrative in form, Eistenstein’s work is fundamentally about a transformation in knowledge, constructing an artful cinema that forces contemplation. He proclaims that “art… is a tractor plowing over the audience’s psyche.”
We might want to hold these first theorist/practitioners to our standards: accessibility and ethics. They both produce avant-garde forms by and through an elitist and highly theorized practice that does not consider how it enables its viewers to produce their own culture. On the other hand, their work is an elegant and significant model for praxis: carefully theorized, beautifully and powerfully realized, and central to the history of the media that will follow.
From Julie and Mamadou
Vertov is explaining why the American system of filmmaking is not grounded on reality because it’s simply tell and doesn’t show or feel. #fakedrama
Luisa and Jonathan
In the art of movement we have no reason to devote our particular attention to contemporary man #2193BC
https://youtu.be/-0aauqX5xgU
Mckenzie Itak
Esmeralda Gonzalez
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3nANtArfwM
Sorry guys
right link :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0aauqX5xgU
The Newly soviet Russia film showed a lot of montage shots. Each shot was done well and told a particular story about the newly soviet Russia.
While the showing of blood and pain is commonplace nowadays, I don’t think it is in the 1917, which is what makes this film so unique. The film captures the blood coming from the child’s head, the scream as he calls for his mom, and the trauma of the mother as she watches her child succumb to the inevitable. All of that makes it anti-war or perhaps anti-revolution so that the state wouldn’t have to do what is already done in the film.