1. Utopian Visions: Week 7 Outline: (1) Avant-garde film:
‘typicality’, montage
Vertov, Kuleshov, Eisenstein
(2) Avant-garde music:
Shostakovich

2. (1) Avant-garde film
‘Of all arts, cinema for us is the most important’. - Lenin, 1922

3. Agit-trains: cinema
(1920)

4. Agit-train

5. Film: Institution-destroying, institution-building
Nov. 1917: establishment of Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) with sub-department for film
1918: State Film School (Moscow) established , including experimental studios
1919: film production and distribution nationalised and placed under control of Narkompros
Problems faced:
- technical: equipment (cameras, celluloid)
- cultural: overwhelming influence of imported film, esp. Hollywood  ‘Americanitis’

6. Film production by year
Number of Soviet films produced
1918 6
1919 57
1920 29
1921 12
1922 16
1923 28
1924 69
1925 80
1926
102
1927
118
1928
124
1929 92
1930
128

7. ‘Typicality’ ‘Typicality’ (tipazhnost’) and ‘types’ (tipazhy):
vs. Hollywood star system
amateur actors embodying typical characteristics of their class
facial expression and demeanor=more important than acting
embedded in larger move from individual actors to masses/collectives

8. Examples of ‘types’
Working-class, Intelligentsia
(at 6:30)

9. Montage
breaking down of reality into bits  anti-mimetic, similar to cubo-futurism
rapid editing cuts (rather than continuity editing) and the creation of new meaning via this editing
Lev Kuleshov ( ): puts bits of montage (like bricks) together into meaningful sequences

10. Eisenstein’s Montage of Attractions
Eisenstein ( ): bits = cells, waiting to explode  bits in dialectical conflict: Eisenstein 1926: ‘Any two frames juxtaposed inevitably combine into a new concept’. Two bits put together=more than sum of their parts
‘Montage of attractions [=stimuli]’: acts on viewer’s emotions via different media, not just pictorial and still (as in cubo-futurism). Pathos = inner world of feelings, thoughts

11. Eisenstein’s montage - examples

12. Sources of Eisenstein’s Montage
influenced by theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold ( ) and biomechanics
actors and audience thought to be connected in machine-like fashion with actors as cogs; audience reactions studied. Influence of Ivan Pavlov and his reflexology. Vs. Stanislavsky and reliving of emotional experience (US method-acting)
Marx and dialectics. But also: German Weimar cinema

13. Meyerhold’s biomechanics 1

14. Meyerhold’s biomechanics 2

15. Eisenstein’s other tricks 1
Eisenstein also obsessed about movements, lines, circles: crowds are unorganized movements, elemental forces; soldiers/the autocracy as organized lines

16. Eisenstein’s other tricks 2
camera shoots heroic revolutionary crowds from below to uplift them (3:50)

17. Sergei Eisenstein ( )
silent films Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1927); historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938), Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958)

18. Zooming forward: Eisenstein in the 1930s and 40s
1937 Bezhin Meadow
disaster
Come-back with Alexander
Nevsky (1938), his first sound
film (score by Sergei
Prokofiev) foto

19. (2) Avant-garde music
Film scores, e.g. Shostakovich for New Babylon (dir. Kozintsev/Trauberg, 1929)
French army attacks Paris Commune in Shostakovich score: parody of Jacques Offenbach's cancan from Orpheus in the Underworld. Throughout the movie the cancan is associated with the Parisian bourgeoisie. Counterpoint to the French revolutionary Marseillaise, which Shostakovich quotes elsewhere in the score.

20. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
15 symphonies etc.
tortured relationship with Soviet power

21. Do the intrinsic characteristics of a medium render it more or less accommodating with, more or less resistant to Soviet power?