Word: vertov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that Harvard has asked him to return, Petric will take the first semester of next year off(as he originally planned), to complete three books: Cinematic Analysis, a textbook for analyzing film structure; Theory of sound film, about how sound relates to images; and a monograph on Dziga Vertov, a Soviet revolutionary, avant-garde filmmaker of the silent era. He will also publish a recent interview he conducted with Orson Welles, whom Petric considers the greatest American filmmaker (though one who has been neglected...
Godard dates his political conversion quite specifically: the rebellion in the streets of Paris, May 1968, and his films before that date now qualify as bourgeois garbage. In the aftermath of May, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin formed the Dziga-Vertov group, a revolutionary film collective (that for a long time had just those two members). Their early work consisted of a series of quasi-documentary polemics (Pravda, See You at Mao, Struggles in Italy) that managed to alienate most of the critics who had made Godard's reputation in the middle sixties...
GODARD'S PREMISE is simple. He is a militant filmmaker in service of the revolution, and the meaning of his films derives entirely from their participation in the class struggle. But here the Dziga-Vertov group sees a problem where conventional filmmakers see none, and that problem is in the very nature of political art. The method of conventional political films--Costa-Gavras' Z and The Confession, Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers -- is to assume that the way to political commitment is through faithful depiction of political reality. So they select an important event and recreate it on screen...
...Dziga-Vertov group insists on two levels of political struggle. The first is obvious. It is the struggle against the enemy outside the film, the bourgeoisie and the revisionists. But there is a second aspect to the struggle, and that is within the film itself, in the political order of the sounds and images themselves. A truly revolutionary cinema must create a revolutionary film form, and that is Dziga-Vertov's present goal...
...where the conventional film engrosses, the Dziga-Vertov film alienates. In place of entertainment, it offers irritation, in place of subtlety, didacticism. Against the passivity of film as diversion, it seeks to provoke an active and critical response. That is the justification for the irrealism of Godard's plot and characterization, for the constant interruptions of the film's movement, for the ceaseless polemic, for the refusal to let the film come to any satisfactory climax...