The ear against the eye : Vertov’s symphony

Vertov defined the basic qualities of his Cine-Eye by means of a simple negation: it sees what remains inaccessible to the human eye. This means that in his films we see media-based and media-produced images that have nothing to do with the imitation of human perception. According to Vertov, such filmic, telescopic, or microscopic perception develops, educates, and expands the viewer’s analytical abilities. Thus, we have on the one hand a media-induced perception and on the other a new assemblage or montage of the fragments of this mediated perception. This new montage is based on a specific interaction and follows poetic rather than prosaic rules. It is freed from such constraints as time, space, causality, or speed. In other words it is based on properly media-specific qualities and, following the terminology of the Russian Futurists who influenced Vertov in his youth, it constitutes zaum or transrationality

1917-1927: Russian Film between the Old and the New: Genres, Narratives and Bodies

There are different forms of continuity and shifts in the Russian film after the October Revolution. On the one hand, films by Alexander Panteleev, Vladimir Gardin, and Czeslaw Sabinski adapted the new post-revolutionary reality to the established genres and narratives of the Russian prerevolutionary cinema, and the stylistic tradition of the Russian film school was continued not only between 1917 and 1924 but also afterward. The new generation of filmmakers, the Soviet Avant-Garde (Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin), was looking for different canon of representation. The article shows the interplay between the tradition and the shifts which could be discovered in common gestural behavior and the mode of its representation produced on the screen between 1924 and 1927.Il y a différentes formes de continuité et de changement dans les films russes après la révolution d’Octobre. D’un côté, les films d’Aleksandr Panteleev, Vladimir Gardin et Czeslaw Sabinski adaptaient la nouvelle réalité postrévolutionnaire aux genres et aux récits établis du cinéma prérévolutionnaire russe et la tradition stylistique de l’ancienne école de cinéma russe se poursuivit non seulement entre 1917 et 1924, mais aussi après. Une nouvelle génération de réalisateurs, l’avant-garde soviétique (Lev Kulešov, Dziga Vertov, Sergej Ejzenštejn, Vsevolod Pudovkin) cherchait des canons de représentation différents. L’article montre l’interaction entre la tradition et les changements qui pouvaient être découverts dans le comportement gestuel ordinaire et ses modes de représentation, produits à l’écran entre 1924 et 1927

Late 1920s film theory and criticism as a test-case for Benjamin’s generalizations on the experiential effects of editing

This article investigates Walter Benjamin’s influential generalization that the effects of cinema are akin to the hyper-stimulating experience of modernity. More specifically, I focus on his oft-cited 1935/36 claim that all editing elicits shock-like disruption. First, I propose a more detailed articulation of the experience of modernity understood as hyper-stimulation and call for distinguishing between at least two of its subsets: the experience of speed and dynamism, on the one hand, and the experience of shock/disruption, on the other. Then I turn to classical film theory of the late 1920s to demonstrate the existence of contemporary views on editing alternative to Benjamin’s. For instance, whereas classical Soviet and Weimar theorists relate the experience of speed and dynamism to both Soviet and classical Hollywood style editing, they reserve the experience of shock/disruption for Soviet montage. In order to resolve the conceptual disagreement between these theorists, on the one hand, and Benjamin, on the other, I turn to late 1920s Weimar film criticism. I demonstrate that, contrary to Benjamin’s generalizations about the disruptive and shock-like nature of all editing, and in line with other theorists’ accounts, different editing practices were regularly distinguished by comparison to at least two distinct hyper-stimulation subsets: speed and dynamism, and shock-like disruption. In other words, contemporaries regularly distinguished between Soviet montage and classical Hollywood editing patterns on the basis of experiential effects alone. On the basis of contemporary reviews of city symphonies, I conclude with a proposal for distinguishing a third subset – confusion. This is an original manuscript / preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Early Popular Visual Culture on 02 Aug 2016 available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2016.1199322