What is wrong with the beard : Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible as an eccentric tragedy

Cet article traite de certaines particularités des décors, des maquillages et des éclairages d'Ivan le terrible (1945) d'Eisenstein, selon trois points de vue : celui des censeurs du Kremlin, celui que l'on peut déduire des notes de travail d'Eisenstein et celui du cinéaste américain Orson Welles (qui fut aussi, à ses heures, critique de cinéma). L'auteur tente ici de définir comment le public des années quarante pouvait percevoir la distinction généralement acceptée entre le « filmique » et le « pictural », et comment les théories paradoxales d'Eisenstein sur le cinéma et sur les arts lui ont permis de renverser pareille distinction.The article looks at some idiosyncrasies of Eisenstein's set design, make-up and lighting for Ivan the Terrible (1945) from three points of view : the first, through the eyes of its Kremlin censors; the second, through the lens of Eisenstein's working notes; the third, through the eyes of the American film director (and part-time film critic) Orson Welles. The author attempts to define what general audiences of the 1940s understood as "cinematic" and "pictorialist" and how Eisenstein's paradoxical film theory and theory of art allowed him to reverse this generally accepted division

Cinemetrics, a Digital Laboratory for Film Studies.

This proposal requests an NEH Level II Start-Up grant support for the innovation of Cinemetrics (http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php), an open-access, interactive website designed to supplement the traditional toolkit of film studies with a number of digital tools that enable researchers to collect, store, and process scholarly data about film editing. Any student of film interested in the way films are edited can use Cinemetrics tools to time a movie, submit the obtained time data, calculate and visualize data statistics, and comment on or make use of the data generated and collected by others. As it stands, Cinemetrics offers its users a client tool to measure a film, a database to store the measurements, graphs that help users to visualize the statistics, and a lab space that can be used to compare films. The NEH grant will enable the project team to innovate, augment, and enhance these tools. This will put Cinemetrics at the forefront of humanities cyberinfrastructure

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

A Numerate Film History? Cinemetrics Looks at Griffith, Griffith Looks at Cinemetrics

The field of study we visit in this article is the history of editing. Specifically, we look at D.W. Griffith’s essay “Pace in the Movies” (1926) which says that specific scenes in films must be edited with specific shot lengths in mind. In a model movie cuts between shots must come with a wavelike frequency, Griffith insists, and offers his recipe as to the perfect wave curve within the duration of the film. Griffith’s post-analysis based on his experience as a director and editor has caused a controversy among modern-day film historians. Some use it as an argument in favor of numeric approaches to film style; others doubt whether it was Griffith who authored this idea, and if it was, whether Griffith meant what he meant

Man with a Movie Camera under the Lens of Cinemetrics

Article about Dziga Vertovs most famous film from 1929 with a focus on it's surviving prints and structure. Investigation was carried out within the research project Digital Formalism (2007-2010) in Vienna