Though emerging from disparate circumstances, styles, and techniques, Raúl Ruiz’s 1977 experimental short-film Colloque de Chiens and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 groundbreaking experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera find common ground in their strategic use of motion and stasis. Ruiz’s Colloque de Chiens is a film that is the product of its circumstances. Made on an extremely low budget during a strike in the production of Ruiz’s 1978 film The Suspended Vocation, the film is an experiment in delivering a convoluted story through an extremely limited means—still images. Vertov’s Man with a Movie camera, in contrast, is an experiment in pushing film technology to its limits. Lacking a plot, the filmic techniques of the film are both a …show more content…
However, as delivered through still images, this atmosphere is amplified. The film’s disjointed, jarring presentation is reflective of the disjointed reality of its universe. In watching Colloque de Chiens, a spectator would typically not seek to identify with the characters in the film, given their immorality. Ruiz facilitates this deliberate lack of identification through the film’s stasis. The images are off-putting in their defiance of film’s primary convention—motion. By constricting motion, Ruiz denies the audience the connection via motion that is intrinsic to film, further distancing the spectator from the characters. According to Metz, “the objects and the characters we see in a film are apparently only effigies, but their motion is not the effigy of motion—it seems real” (8). Without the grounding reality of motion, the characters’ ability to appear as ‘real’ is limited.
This unreality is intentional, however. Rather than inhibiting the viewer’s ability to invest themselves into the events of the story, it enhances it. The cyclical, bizarre characters and events are foreign to the world of the viewer; however, in the off-kilter reality of still images, they appear almost normal. The viewer is on the outside, peering into a universe in which the unimaginable is plausible. The distance between the diegetic world of Colloque de Chiens and the world of the viewer serves another purpose. As
Film exists in layers of physical existence and reality. You have the layer the audience views of the film’s world - setting, characters, and plot - and then you have the layer the film production workers view of the film’s world - actors, the set, and the story. Like photography, film is able to establish a physical existence. However, unlike photography, film uses two very unique and different techniques in order to establish its physical existence. According to Siegfried Kracauer, film establishes its physical existence through representation of reality as it evolves through time and with the help of techniques and devices exclusive to cinema cameras (Kracauer 187). All the world is a stage for film, however Kracauer lists specific techniques of film he refers to as cinematic due to how these techniques are read on the cinematic medium. Although Kracauer wrote his theory on Establishment of Physical Existence in 1960, the 2015 movie Tangerine contains a fair amount of content that can be serviced as examples in order to support Kracauer’s theory. Using the 2010’s movie Tangerine directed by Sean S. Baker, modern cinema examples from various scenes of the film can be provided for examples on Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of Establishment of Physical Existence through cinema’s recording functions of nascent motion, cinema’s revealing function of transients, and cinema’s revealing function of blind spots of the
Soviet Montage is a movement driven by “Marxist [politics]” and an “economic philosophy” developed in Soviet Russia at the time of revolution. Lenin himself considered film, as an art form as the “most influential of all arts” as it not only entertained but could be used to “[mould] and reinforce values.”( Mast, G. & Kawin, B. F.) Sergei Eisenstein, himself a Marxist, is no exception to this and not only are his films are full of political propaganda, but he is also considered “the greatest master of montage.” .”( Mast, G. & Kawin, B. F.) His film October, called Ten Days That Shook The World in the Western world at the time and butchered due to its content, has always been considered problematic for audiences and critics alike and the standard critique of the film soon became “The Film as a whole is difficult and incoherent.” (Sperbur) Although if analysed properly, you can see that it has powerful political and social messages to convey and comprises of film form that Eisenstein himself called “intellectual film.”
The depiction of subjects is always absolutely accurate to reinforce the portrayal of real life and is void of any unnecessary artistic embellishment (Vaux, R. 2014). A technique that is used is filming done on locations rather than sets to properly portray the feel of real-life. Events are not euphemized or hyperbolized to become a distortion or opinion of the truth. Unpleasant images, words and events are portrayed in full with no hidden facts, as well as plain images, words or events.
Theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin claims that narrative films are mainly a “product of construction” and cautious compilations of “selections of images that have been shot” (Renée).
‘There are…two kinds of film makers: one invents an imaginary reality; the other confronts an existing reality and attempts to understand it, criticise it…and finally, translate it into film’
By exploring the theory of the “abject”, horror and the role of gender instability within film with regards to The Silence of the Lambs, this essay will attempt to explain the characteristics of the aestheticisation of abjection.
Mihailova reaches the conclusion that motion capture as a defamiliarization device is a way to look inwards and explore what it is that makes us human; at the same time, it also provides society with a way to analyze self-representation. Her conclusion is the end of a successful argument and application of Formalism. She picks out the themes of the films and examines how defamiliarization communicates these
Gunning goes on to define the cinema of attraction as “a cinema that bases itself on the quality that Leger celebrated: its ability to show something. Contrasted to the voyeuristic aspect of narrative cinema analyzed by Christian Metz, this is an exhibitionist cinema,” (Gunning, 230). It’s a cinema before narrative where the focus lied in testing the boundaries of what was possible with the medium, much like avant-garde today. It’s a cinema where narrative was always second, if even there, to the spectacle of what was possible with the medium. Lumiere’s Demolition of a Wall displays some of the possibilities of the medium quite clearly in its later half when the reel is re-winded to create the effect of the wall rebuilding itself. As Gunning reminds us, we should never forget that “in the earliest years of exhibition the cinema itself was an attraction,” (231). Cinema was defined by the machine instead of the films in this period, and thus the simple fact of being able to see moving pictures was itself astounding. Looking at Maxim Gorky’s first accounts of viewing a motion picture in his article The Kingdom of Shadows, he writes the “extraordinary impression it (cinema) creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances,” (Gorky 7). The people of the
Man with a Movie Camera directed by Dziga Vertov is an unprecedented film that establishes unconventional narrative structure by abandoning standard rules of storytelling in film. Vertov utilizes cinematic elements such as editing, framing, and camera movement to weave together the story and establish an experience with the audience. All these factors culminate into establishing the idea of the connection between the city and its citizens.
Plantigna deliberates on various differences between the fiction and non-fiction filmmaker, particularly the role of imagination to the two differing styles of film. He discusses that the fiction filmmaker “freely creates imaginative events”, where the non-fiction filmmaker “portrays or makes explicit claims about actual historical events” (104). He then puts forth the idea that imagination is also important for the non-fiction filmmaker as he as the creator “decides how to represent historical events” (104). This is demonstrated in shot 237 where Resnais’ camera pans over the ceiling of a gas chamber that has been carved in and scored by human fingernails and the voice-over narrates, “the only sign—but you have to know—is this ceiling, dug into by fingernails”. Here, Resnais using his imaginative ability, has seamlessly
This film analysis will delineate the diverse directorial decisions of The French New Wave cinema movement, and how they have been utilised and developed to challenge and subvert the typical Hollywood filmmaking conventions and techniques of the 1950s and 60s Hollywood cinema, in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Hollywood produced films of the time used a very limited variation in film techniques such as camera, acting, mise-en-scene, editing and sound. This can be mainly attributed to the low innovative thought of creative and expressive camera movements, angles, etc… due to technological hindrances. In particular, this film analysis will de-construct the filmmaking elements of the revelatory French New Wave movement in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows ending scene (01:34:42 – 01:39:32) portraying the main character Antoine Doinel’s escape from juvie and trek to the bespoken beach.
Driven by the same communistic idea, Dziga Vertov presents another, all different way of his propaganda style. His vision applies to the beauty of the regular daily life and he starts experimenting with to demonstrate the objective eye of the movie camera of recording and showing the un-staged events that are not noticed by the bared human eye. His movement Cine-Eye distinguishes his position from the idea of the
Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, (1943) is a 14 minute black and white 16mm film that captures simple realities like walking around one’s house, cutting bread, etc, and turning that narrative into a warped and surrealistic reality that is eerie and chilling, but ultimately there is still familiarity in it’s truth and sensibility. In addition to it being cinematically masterful, Deren’s approach in the choices she made were remarkable and iconic in terms of editing because of the time period’s limited technological advances. Not only were the choices relating to the piece’s aesthetics ambitious and experimental, actually being able to act on those artistic impulses or inquires was a conscious awareness to the arduousness that would
Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov are among the most identifiable names in early Soviet film. Their contributions to film, in the areas of montage and documentary film respectively, have helped to structure film, as we know it today. However, apart from their theoretical contributions to the field, both directors played an imperative role in Soviet film during the 1920s and 1930s. This paper examines historical revisionism within their film, how their theories of montage influenced the revisionism, and how they were persistent in the use montage throughout their careers as filmmakers to assert themselves as artists.
The Kuleshov Workshop explored the effects of juxtaposition in film, and how sequential shots convey a