Word: vertov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Solanas collects the surfaces of reality in order to reorganize them as objects into a total social context, creating an essay form in the tradition of the far-Left Soviet cineaste Dziga Vertov (who said: "To make a montage ... means to write something cinegraphic with recorded shots."). Appearances serve as linguistic elements, his "writing" vocabulary, which means less concern with the purity of the images (i. e. dialectical compositions) than with their dialectical relation. Individual images of the bourgeoisie, for example, are never caricatured (ef. Eisenstein) in sequences of their normal activities that are perfectly harmless in hemelves: relaxing...
...LONG TIME ago Godard said, that to move the camera, in other words, to analyze the material presented by a set shot, was a political act. For Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group the criteria for formal choices are political. It's silly to accuse them of not having coherent or correct politics; their movies are not about politics, any more than any art work is about any phenomena. Rather their films are a series of formal choices made according to a given criteria, and relate to possible criteria for formal choices, not strikes or demonstrations. Their political films...
This course will deal with the specific elements of film and the ways in which they convey meaning to the audience. Sequence-by-sequence, shot-by-shot analysis will be applied to a wide variety of film classics. Among the films to be shown are early Dziga Vertov films, Griffiths' "Birth of a Nation," Chaplin's "Modern Times," the Odessa steps sequence from "Potemkin," Ford's "Stagecoach," Welles' "Citizen Kane," Kubrick's. "Dr. Strangelove," and Fellini's "81/2...
...Godard would point his finger at the "Academy Awards" and re-em-phasize Vertov's disgust. A former French individualist, Godard is now a member of a film collective "where we are all directors, actors, actresses, cameraman or camera-women." The collective is named for Vertov. It decides spontaneously what to shoot and devotes itself to experimentation and self-criticism. It acts on Godard's off quoted assumption that "In order to become an intellectual revolutionary, it is necessary to give up being an intellectual." The collective members have not become scholars of ancient revolutions but rather what Stokeley Carmichael...
...Savoir, the Dziga Vertov group show that, in both content and form, they have become the revolution: they draw from Wittgenstein, the Whorfian hypothesis, and Rousseau to begin unlearning the current culture at its roots. The collective attempt to show you the way both the language of words and the language of cinema have shaped us and what must be cha(lle)nged. The authority of See You at Mao stems from an accurate application of Marxian rhetoric to contemporary image, from an unpretentious sound-image montage, and from the use of the camera as Vertov's "Kine-Eye" which...