Dziga Vertov

I read the insert about Dziga Vertov and found it very interesting.  Vertov was adamantly (and oddly) against fictional films.  The text even refers to his “crusade against the fiction film”.  He was bored with the usual fictional films and wanted to film ‘life caught unawares’.  I think this is very interesting to think about when watching The Man with the Movie Camera because many parts of the film only depict life as it really happens.  The segments in the morning sequence that show various stages of a young woman’s morning (waking, cleaning, dressing, etc.) are clearly not ‘life caught unawares’.  They look very much like it, but they staged.  This makes me wonder what Vertov’s standards for reality are.  I know that reality or truth in film is very difficult to define, but my opinion is that anything staged is not reality.  It seems that Dziga Vertov must think that anything that depicts reality is ‘truth’ even if it is not truly ‘life caught unawares’. 

            The text later says that Vertov was inspired by the Italian Futurist Manifestos and futurist poetry.  This is a clear influence on his work in The Man with the Movie Camera.  Vertov expressed his futuristic influences in eclectic sound compositions.  These compositions seemed to be various sounds combined in creative ways to create meaning.  The Man with the Movie Camera seems like it might be similar in style to these audio compositions even though it is a silent film.  I imagine the sound projects to be very fast-paced and moving like the feel of real life.  The Man with the Movie Camera has the same effect, changing shots frequently in combination with music that echoes real life noises to create a feeling of everyday city life. 

            

Word Study: Synaesthesia

I came across this word in my reading of Art Cinema and the Early Avant-Garde, in the charpter about Cinema and the Avant-Garde, by A.L. Rees. The sentence it's used in is:"Abstract animation also dominated the German avant-garde 1919-25, stripping the image to pure graphic form, but ironically also nurturing a modernist variant of synaesthesia, purging the screen of overt human action while developing rythmic interaction of basic symbols (square, circle, triangle) in which music replaces narrativeas a master code" (Nowell-Smith 96).

Here's a definition courtesy of answers.com:

Dictionary: syn·es·the·sia syn·aes·the·sia (sĭn'ĭs-thē'zhə)
also n.

1) A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.
2) A sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus applied to another, as in referred pain.
3) The description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally describe another.

http://www.answers.com/topic/synaesthesia

Harmony and Disruption

The avant garde film movement was meant to confuse, yet inspire its audiences. Some films were merely paintings set in motion, a spectacle for the eye. Some were meant to put the audience in a ‘constant hallucination’ experiencing ‘temporary depersonalization’. This meant the audience was unaware that they were, for a moment, another entity entirely.

The avant garde filmmakers wanted to go against the grain and make something no one else wanted to. They wanted to be different and evoke a change in thought. Although each movement had similar goals, they fought against each other. The Surrealists were against the Dadaists, and so on. Some of the films seem like an inside joke to the filmmakers and his comrades, leaving the audience out on the punch line. For instance, Un Chien Andalou (1928) was a confusing film, but it was supposed to inspire those who watched it and show them what was wrong with the world.

Though these films are confusing, they showed us that film doesn’t have to be exactly like the lives we live. They can be something entirely different. They can allow us to escape the everyday world and be somewhere we only dreamed of. They inspire future filmmakers to think outside the box and to do something they believe in. Because they were confusing, they made the audience think, they made them question. They provoked harmony and disruption.

Word Study

Harmony

–noun, plural -nies.
1. agreement; accord; harmonious relations.
2. a consistent, orderly, or pleasing arrangement of parts; congruity.
3. Music.
a. any simultaneous combination of tones.
b. the simultaneous combination of tones, esp. when blended into chords pleasing to the ear; chordal structure, as distinguished from melody and rhythm.
c. the science of the structure, relations, and practical combination of chords.
4. an arrangement of the contents of the Gospels, either of all four or of the first three, designed to show their parallelism, mutual relations, and differences.
Origin:
1350–1400; ME armonye < MF < L harmonia < Gk harmonía joint, framework, agreement, harmony, akin to hárma chariot, harmós joint, ararískein to join together

Synonyms:
1. concord, unity, peace, amity, friendship. 2. consonance, conformity, correspondence, consistency. See symmetry. 3. Harmony, melody in music suggest a combination of sounds from voices or musical instruments. Harmony is the blending of simultaneous sounds of different pitch or quality, making chords: harmony in part singing; harmony between violins and horns. Melody is the rhythmical combination of successive sounds of various pitch, making up the tune or air: a tuneful melody to accompany cheerful words.

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/harmony)

Beware of the Dog

Released in 1929, Un Chien Andalou is an avant-garde collaboration between surrealist Spanish director Luis Bunuel and artist Salvador Dali. Described by A.L. Rees in Cinema and the Avant-Garde as the “stray dog of Surrealism”(Nowell- Smith 100) in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s The Oxford History of World Cinema, Rees is quick to point out that the silent film preceded Bunuel’s joining of the Surrealist movement.

The idea for the film itself came about when Bunuel told Dali of a dream he had had where (like in the movie) a cloud passes over the moon, slicing it in half “like a razor blade slicing through an eye" (Roger Ebert). Dali revealed that he had a dream where ants were eating blood from his hand. Both of these images were to be just two of the countless unsettling, and provocative images in early cinema.

Out of the whole movie, the slicing of the eye really unnerved me. Reading about it is one thing, seeing how realistic it looks is another. Rees states that the meaning behind the slicing of the woman’s (Simone Mareuil) eye “acts as an emblem for the attack on normative vision and the comfort of the spectator whose surrogate screen-eye is here assaulted” (Nowell-Smith 100). Bunuel did disturb his viewers, but the fact the story is not even told in a chronological fashion, means that the audience has to deal with putting the story together themselves, as well as, watching a silent cinema sexual assault, a transvestite on a bike, and a poke at Christianity with two priests being dragged after two grand pianos with rotting donkeys (IMDb).

After researching the film, I found out some interesting facts, so I’d like to share them with you:

•The budget for the film was provided by Bunuel’s mother (Ebert)

•Bunuel himself is the man who slices Simone Mareuil’s eye (IMDb)

•A real eye is actually being sliced…that of a dead calf (Ebert)

•Salvador Dali is uncredited as one of the priests being dragged after the piano (Ebert)

•There is a French phrase that to have ants in one’s hand literally means that someone is itching to kill (IMDb)

•Bunuel and Dali fell out before shooting Bunuel’s second film L’Age d’or in 1930. Dali accused Bunuel of being an atheist and a Communist, shortly after Bunuel secured a job in New York where he was to release propaganda films for release in Latin America (Nowell-Smith 432).

References:
Rees, A.L. "Cinema and the Avant-Garde." The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell- Smith. New York: Oxford UP, USA, 1999. 95-105. Print.

Chanan, Michael. "Luis Bunuel." The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell- Smith. New York: Oxford UP, USA, 1999. 432-433. Print.

Un Chien Andalou IMDb Entry: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020530/plotsummary

Un Chien Andalou Roger Ebert Review: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000416/REVIEWS08/401010369/1023

Word Study: Cacophony

Defined as "harsh or discordant sound: dissonance; harshness in the sounds of words or phrases" in the Miriam Webster dictionary. I read this word in the section about Dziga Vertov (Nowell-Smith 92-3): ". . . the futurist cult of noises was given a revolutionary tinge by Proletkult as part of the 'art production,' and urban cacophonies remained significant for Vertov throughout the 20s."

Vertov's Silent Symphony: The Music of Montage

Influenced by the “trans-sense poetry (zaum) practiced by Russian and Italian poets,” as well as his four years of music studies at Petrograd’s Institute of Neuropsychology, Dziga Vertov experimented with mixing various sounds created by human voices, whether they formed speech or imitated environmental noises (Nowell-Smith 92). This interest in environmental symphonies, of course, pervades his films, as we have seen in The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), and Vertov’s poetic, visual rhythm further accentuates the power conveyed in the Utopian images of this film (Nowell-Smith 93). Although The Man is silent, it was originally accompanied by live orchestras in theaters, and since its release, there have been several soundtracks created to accompany Vertov’s visuals (http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Man_with_a_Movie_Camera).

Out of economic necessity, Soviet filmmakers, unlike the emigres who sought to preserve the slower-paced, traditional Russian style, developed quick montage, usually created by means of re-editing already existing footage into new films, and began to employ other film techniques – for example, split screen, dissolves (Nowell-Smith 167). Undoubtedly, Dziga Vertov’s musical training contributed to the visible, “musical” effect of his silent city symphony, thereby opening up his audiences’ minds to the very essence of the unified “masses” as the hero/heroine of his experimental film (Nowell-Smith 170).

Even after the birth of sound, the silent Soviet cinema reached its peak in 1929 (Nowell-Smith 174). One can only wonder if this had something to do with the fast-paced, rhythmically edited cinema already established in the style adopted by the nationalized film industry and popularized by Sergei Eisenstein, Vertov, and the like. In any case, the Soviet industry’s clever substitute for recorded sound transposed beautifully on the screen in the form of utopian montages of Vertov’s city. It not only withstood the test of time, but also probably hurried the progress of technological developments within the film industry. When those changes, namely sound, came on the scene, Dziga Vertov and the Soviet montage were ready.

A Comrade In the Arts

Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929) has a very unified vision of people in Russia. It starts off showing calm, generic shots of places in a city, both private and public. In places where there are people, they are doing the universal action of sleeping. In places where there is no sign of life, there is an eerie feeling that once people begin to wake, everyone will pass through the empty streets and alleys. These ideas serve as a way to show that the people of Russia are all very similar in their daily lives.
Vertov's most poignant demonstration of this point comes right as the people are waking up. The man with the movie camera places his camera on the railroad tracks as a train approaches rather quickly. This shot is inter cut with a women waking up, tossing and turning, as though she is being forced from her slumber by an awful dream. From the inter cutting it seems as though the woman is dreaming of the man about to get hit by the train, and that is why she is so upset. Despite the fact that the two are never introduced as acquaintances, the audience feels that they are somehow connected and cared for each other.
In the reading Nowell-Smith explains that Vertov was reacting to criticism of his recent movement towards more poetic film at the time Man With a Movie Camera was made. He "ruled out the use of all intertitles from his filmic Manifesto" (Nowell-Smith 93), and solely used images to present an idea of unification in the film. This motif of inevitable conformity came from Vertov's political affiliations with "left-wing and constructivist artists", people who supported the idea of a communist Russia (Nowell-Smith 92). This same belief system is the reason people of the Soviet Union referred to each other as comrade. The word had a more intimate connotation, which provided the same feeling of closeness that Vertov's work did, allowing his art to fit in with the modifying public opinion.

The word Quixotic was used in the reading, and since I did not know what it was, I looked it up.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition, the word is an Adjective meaning:

1. Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality. 2. Capricious; impulsive: "At worst his scruples must have been quixotic, not malicious" (Louis Auchincloss).

This seems to be a very good word to describe Vertov's work. In his films he strived to present the world in a more Utopian and idealized way. Many With a Movie Camera is the best example of this because it presents people as nameless equals, and suggests that everyone is exactly the same in their everyday routines, which therefore implies that everyone would benefit from a communist government in which all citizens were regarded as equal. This idea is unrealistic, just like the belief that communism can successfully be applied to any civilization.
Man With a Movie Camera also seems very impulsive when being viewed. Vertov strings together images that are united only in the sense that they occur within the same city. There is no story line to the film, but instead its goal is more to describe life in Russia as a whole without being driven by a plot.

American Heritage Dictionary. 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2009. Print.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ed. The Oxford History of World Cinema: A Definitive History ofCinema Worlwide. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.