vcc quiz 1

Question 1

Man With a Movie Camera

Answer 1

Dziga Vertov, 1929

Question 2

Man with a Movie Camera is “an experiment in cinematic communication.”

Answer 2

Dziga Vertov

Question 3

“… That philosophic phantasm of the reflexive
consciousness: the eye seeing, apprehending itself as it constitutes the world’s visibility: the eye transformed by the revolutionary project into an agent of critical production”

Answer 3

Annette Michelson

Question 4

[The film] joins the human life cycle with the cycles of work and leisure of a city from down to dusk
within the spectrum of industrial production. That production includes filmmaking (itself presented as a
range of productive labor processes).
Mining, steel production, communications, postal service, construction, hydroelectric power installation,
and the textile industry in a seamless, organic continuum, whose integrity
is continually asserted by the strategies of visual analogy and rhyme, rhythmic patterning,
parallel editing, superimposition, accelerated and decelerated motion, camera movement – in short,
the use of every optical device and filming strategy then available to film technology.
Within the continuum thus established, the fragmentation and contradictions “naturally” generated
by the industrial system of production in its urban scene are annulled, as it were,
by the rhymes and rhythms that link and propel them all.
The rhythm and rhymes are in fact the formal installation of a general community,
of the common stake in the project that retains both division of labor as indispensable to
industrialization and rationalization as indispensable to to the construction of socialism,
a project that has radically reorganized the property relations subtending industrial production. […]
and in which filmmaking as a labor is comprehended in the general organization of productive labor
processes.

Answer 4

Man With A Movie Camera
- Annete Michelson (reading)

Question 5

within the continuum thus established, the fragmentation and contradictions
“naturally” generated by the industrial system of production in its urban scene are
annulled, as it were,
by the rhymes and rhythms that link and propel them all.

Answer 5

Man With A Movie Camera
- Annete Michelson (reading)

Question 6

The rhythm and rhymes are in fact the formal installation of a general community,
of the common stake in the project that retains both division of labor as indispensable to
industrialization and rationalization as indispensable to to the construction of socialism,
a project that has radically reorganized the property relations subtending industrial production.
[…]
and in which filmmaking as a labor is comprehended in the general organization of productive
labor processes.

Answer 6

Man With A Movie Camera
- Annete Michelson (reading)

Question 7

“…The flow of the homogenous present created by the accelerated montage in fact mingles
heterogeneous temporalities… [I]t is in the disharmony, the barbarism even, of intertwined
temporalities that we are to find the thread capable of unifying the new community. [Vertov] had
applied it even more radically two years earlier, in A sixth Part of the World. Causing a great scandal
among the Soviet authorities, he had represented the reality of communist life in the Asiatic
republics of the Soviet Union by assembling images of caravans of camels in the steppes and
reindeer in the tundra, Kalmyk fishermen hauling in their nets, Siberian hunters drawing their bows,
nomads eating raw meat dipped in blood that was still warm, and Muslims bowing down to pray.
What is communist is not the nature of these activities, but the bond that unites them,
starting from their very disparity.
Thus, a complex temporal interplay is set in train by this film. It is avant-garde in as much as,
with the constitution of a common time, it anticipates the communist s

Answer 7

Man With a Movie Camera
- Jacques Ranciere

Question 8

19th century as “the age of extremes”

• defying the limits of ordinary perception (transformation of time and space perception) and the birth of mass culture
• Thinking anew about the world and a human being within it (“a new man / woman” as a key concept of
  the time)
• Radical transformation of society → New forms of consciousness
• Working out a new visual language for this new world and a new person → Avant-Garde of the 1920s as a reaction to that: radical break with the previous tradition

Abstract (non-representational, non-objective art) vs realist, representational art Artist as a physicists and psychologists; experimenting to new extremes; creating and responding to these extremes

Question 9

Historicizing the Avant-Garde
CONSTRUCTIVISM
as part of this response to the changing world

Answer 9

But: should be seen in conversation with the 1920s avant-garde and Marxism in a specific context of post-1917 Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution

• a very specific social and political agenda: to build a new communist society
• arts (design and cinema specifically): that which should transform both social structures and,
  most importantly, human consciousness
  (hence, its philosophical, educational, and propagandistic function)
• artists as engineers; art and its utilitarian function

Question 10

Marxism

Answer 10

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
* political, economical, and social theory
* Critique of capitalism and its class division
* The ruling class of bourgeoisie (owner of the mean of production)
VS
* Exploited class proletariat (sells its labour)
* Aiming at classless communist society; communal ownership

Question 11

1917s Bolshivik Revolution

Answer 11

Abolishing class division → abolishing private property
* Abolishing separation between the city and the countryside
* Community as a totality (society) of equals
* & to transform the country into a developed highly
industrialized society

Question 12

1917 October (Bolshevik) Revolution
1917-1923 – Civil War
1922 Creation of the Soviet State
1991 The Belovezh Accords, Soviet Union ceased to exist

Question 13

1919 – nationalization of the film industry by the Bolshevik government

1919 – creation of the Russian School of Cinematography (later: All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK)

1923 - Cinema as “the most important of all arts” (Lenin in conversation with Lunacharsky (ideology and economy)

Cinefication of the country (Agit trains, new—reels, etc.)

Lev Trotsky: “Vodka, the Church and the Cinema” (1923)

Question 14

Revolutionary Avant-Garde
the1920s

Question 15

late 1920s/earlier 1930s-mid.1950s
Stalinist Era

Question 16

Soviet Thaw: Cultural and Political Liberation
Mid.1950s-mid.1960s

Question 17

Late 1960s through
mid. 1980s
“Stagnation” period

Question 18

Perestroika
Late 1980s-early 1990s

Question 19

Soviet Leaders
1922-1924 Vladimir Lenin
1924-1953 Joseph Stalin
1953 Georgy Malenkov
1953-1964 Nikita Khrushchev
1964-1982 Leonid Brezhnev
1982-1984 Yuri Andropov
1984-1985 Konstantin Chernenko
1985-1991 Mikhail Gorbachev

Question 20

“…The flow of the homogenous present created by the accelerated montage in fact mingles
heterogeneous temporalities… [I]t is in the disharmony, the barbarism even, of intertwined
temporalities that we are to find the thread capable of unifying the new community. [Vertov] had
applied it even more radically two years earlier, in A sixth Part of the World. Causing a great scandal
among the Soviet authorities, he had represented the reality of communist life in the Asiatic
republics of the Soviet Union by assembling images of caravans of camels in the steppes and
reindeer in the tundra, Kalmyk fishermen hauling in their nets, Siberian hunters drawing their bows,
nomads eating raw meat dipped in blood that was still warm, and Muslims bowing down to pray.
What is communist is not the nature of these activities, but the bond that unites them,
starting from their very disparity.
Thus, a complex temporal interplay is set in train by this film. It is avant-garde in as much as,
with the constitution of a common time, it anticipates the communist sensible world that, for
Soviet leaders, could only result from a protracted process of construction.”

Answer 20

Man With A Movie Camera
- Jacques Ranciere,

Question 21

Red: Bolsheviks (revolutionary force);
White: Mensheviks (counter-revolutionary force)
Wedge (dynamic form, movement, force)
vs
Circle (passive, receptive form)
Text is part of the image (the title of the painting;
it is part of the visual statement)

Question 22

“… That philosophic phantasm of the reflexive consciousness:
the eye seeing, apprehending itself as it constitutes the world’s
visibility: the eye transformed by the revolutionary project
into an agent of critical production”

Answer 22

Man With a Movie Camera
- Annette Michelson,

Question 23

“My monument is a symbol of the epoch. Unifying in its artistic and utilitarian forms, I created a kind of synthesis of
art with life.”

Answer 23

Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the Third International, 1920

Question 24

Tectonics

Answer 24

“a synthesis of a new content and new form…. [a Marxist-educated man
who] outlived art and advanced on industrial material… [a]guiding star, the brain of
experimental and practical activity… it unites ideological and the formal ”

Question 25

Factura

Answer 25

the conscious handling and manipulation of material in its entirety, from its state as raw material to its properties as a finished product

Question 26

Construction

Answer 26

he organization of, and giving intellectual form to, this tectonic materials for a given purpose

Question 27

1st stage: From representation to Construction (1917-1921):

Answer 27

- Breakdown with the Western Paradigm (Cubism, Futurism): rejection of Cubism’s obsession with flatness and two-dimensional picture plain - A laboratory experimental stage: focus on construction, materials, and a discovery of a new formal vocabulary (line, colour, shape, material)

Question 28

2nd stage: from construction to production (1921-~1932)

Answer 28

- Art into Life! Art into Technology! Art into Production! = the liquidation of art (as an autonomous sphere) - Artist – engineer; Bolshevik artist - proletarian worker - Art – industry – daily life - Art as production, as labor, as social engineering/

Question 29

“The streets are our brushes; the squares are our palettes”

Answer 29

Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Order to the Army of Art”(1918)

Question 30

Osip Brik : art is a category of work, of an industrial work: “Do not distort, but create… art is like any other means of production… not ideas, but a real object in the aim of all true creativity.”

Answer 30

“Drainage to the Art,” 1918

Question 31

“It is not a matter of decoration, but of the creation of new artistic objects. Art for the proletariat is not a scared temple for lazy contemplation, but work, a factory,, producing completely artistic objects.”

Answer 31

“It is not a matter of decoration, but of the creation of new artistic objects. Art for the proletariat is not a scared temple for lazy contemplation, but work, a factory,, producing completely artistic objects.”