VCC397 Final Flashcards by Victoria T

Who is the author of the painting Black Square (1915)

Kazimir Malevich

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In lecture one, I mentioned three “philosophers of suspicion” of the 19th century who, in their writing each in their own way, questioned “conscious thought.” Who are those three philosophers / thinkers

Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud

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Who is the author of this painting

Alexander Rodchenko

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when was the soviet union formed?

1922

(1917 = Bolshevik Revolution, not USSR formation)

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Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera focused mostly on

a vibrant city life

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What are the three concepts that characterize in the language of Constructivism as defined by Alexi Gan in his text “Constructivism” (1922)

Tectonics, texture, construction

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Who is the author of the following passage - reflection on Vertov’s cinema: 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.”

Jacques Rancière

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in 1920, Vladimir Tatlin designed an architectural project for the _____ which was supposed to become a center for various institutions and organiztion to promote communism: a funcitonal construction thought of as a microcosm of the revolution, a vision of the future society operation. what is the title of this project

Monument to the Third International

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Who is the author of this statement made in 1922: “We declare uncompromising war on art!”

Alexei Gan

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what did Dziga Vertov do before turning into filmmaking?

worked for the Film Committee of the People’s Commissariat of Public Education as an editor for the first newsreel programs produced by the Soviet Government

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Who is the author of this passage: “Vertov’s disdain for the mimetic, his concern with technique and process, with their extensions and revelation, stamp him as a member of the constructivist generation. The shared ideological concern with the role of his art as the agent of human perfectioility, of a social transformation which issues in a transformation of consciousness in the most complete and intimate sense, the certainty of accession to the “world of naked truth,” are grounded in acceptance, the afirmation, of the radically synthetic quality of filmmaking in the stylistics of Montage”?

Annette Michelson

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which one of the Soviet filmmakers listed below WAS NOT mentioned in lecture V as one of the key figures in developing the practice and theory of montage?

Alexandr Dovzchenko

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who is the author of this following statement: “Our eyes, spinning like propellers, take off into the future on the wings of hypothesis”?

Dziga Vrertov

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when was the Russian School of Cinematography (later: All-Union state Institute of Cinematography - the first film school in the world) created?

1919

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Sergei Eisenstein’s theory og montage was influenced by ____?

Japanese writing, theatre, and poetry

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Which definition best describes the principle of hieroglyph/ideogram, according to Sergei Eisenstein?

the laconic imprinting of an abstract concept

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Sergei Eisenstein explains his take on montage through a comparison with…

the series of explosions of the internal combustion engine

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In lecture VI (The Language of Constructivism: Montage II - Sergei Eisenstein), we watched a montage of attractions. What film was that?

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

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in lecture VI, we watched the “slaughterhouse sequence” from Sergei Eisenstein’s film ___ as an example of the montage of attraction. Fill in the gap by choosing the correct title of the film

Strike (1925)

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Viktor Shklovsky was

a literary theorist and writer

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who is the author of this passage: “photography - the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world - should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people’s capacity to see from all sides. It has the capacity to do all this.”?

Alexander Rodchenko

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which explanation best characterizes the concept of “estrangement” (V. Shklovsky)?

making fmiliar seem strange

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Who is the author of the following statement: “Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war.”?

Viktor Shklovsky

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when was the film Bed and Sofa made

1927

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Which German philosopher visited Moscow in December 1925 - January 1926 and shared reflections on this trip in the book "Moscow Diary"?

Walter Benjamin

How does Boris Avratov describe the socialist object (The Thing)?

As a co-worker (key idea: objects become collaborators in socialist life)

Who is the author of this passage? "The light from the East is n ot only the liberation of workers, the light from the East is the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades, and not these black and mournful slaves, as they are here."

Alexander Rodchenko

Identify this image

soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, 1925

In which city do the events in Bed and Sofa take place

Moscow

Alexander Rodchenko's poster "Books in All Branches of Knowledge" includes a photograph of a real woman. What is her name?

Lilia Brick

Who is the author of this passage: "What Soviet defines as literacy went far beyond the conventional western definition and included having a working knowledge of the various areas of production most pertinent to the Soviet Union, including but not limited to the textile, metallurgy and mining industries."?

Kathryn Martin

What happens to Liuda, Bed and Sofa's female protagonist, at the end of the film after she has learned that she 1s pregnant:

She leaves the city in a search for a new life for her and her soon to be born baby

Who is the author of the following statement: ''Communism is Soviet Power plus the electrification of the entire country"?

Vladimir Lenin

Who is the author of this passage: "Go to work, comrades working women! Liberate yourselves! Build nurseries, maternity houses, help the Soviets set up public canteens, help the Communist Party build a new happy life. Your place is amongst those who are fighting for the emancipation of working people, for equality, for freedom, for the happiness of your children! Your place, working women and peasant women, under the red revolutionary banner of worldly victorious communism!"?

Alexandra Kollontai

Who was referred as both "Soviet Taylor" and "Ovid of miners and metalworkers"?

Alexei Gastev

Who is the author of this statement: "The body is the machine, the worker is a machinist"?

Vsevolod Meyerhold

In lecture on "The Poetry of Labour, Biomechanics and the Soviet Body," we watched a fragment from an American film that provides a critique of the instrumentalization of labour through an assembly line. Which film was that?

Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)

Marcel Mauss, the author of "Techniques of the Body" (1934), was:

A French anthropologist and sociologist

Who is the author of "How to Work. A Practical Guide to Labour Organization." (1920)?

Alexei Gastev

main authors to know

a) Dziga Vertov  b) Alexandra Kollontai  c) Viktor Shklovsky  d) Sergei Eisenstein  e) Varvara Stepanova  f) Boris Arvatov  g) Karl Marx  h) Jacques Rancière  i) Alexander Rodchenko  j) Annette Michelson

“…the flow of the homogenous present created by the accelerated montage mingles heterogeneous temporalities… it is in the disharmony of intertwined temporalities that we find the thread capable of unifying the new community… What is communist is not the nature of these activities, but the bond that unites them.”

Jacques Rancière

“And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life… to make us feel things, to make stone stony… the device of art is the estrangement of things… the process of perception is an end in itself and must be prolonged.”

Viktor Shklovsky

“If we are to compare montage with anything, then we should compare a phalanx of montage fragments – ‘shots’ – with the series of explosions of the internal combustion engine… these fragments multiply into a montage dynamic through impulses.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“The supersession of private property is… the complete emancipation of all human senses… The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human, social object, created by man and designed for him.”

Karl Marx

“Now we are using photography as a viable method of communicating realities… the mechanical complexity of industrial culture forces the artist… to move from the imperfect method of drawing to the utilization of a photograph.”

Varvara Stepanova

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

Annette Michelson

“Our eyes, spinning like propellers, take off into the future on the wings of hypothesis.”

Dziga Vertov

“The capitalist city street is one in which things are bought and sold… the Thing becomes an abstract category… a means of accumulation.”

Boris Arvatov

“An attraction is any aggressive moment… that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence… these shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological conclusion.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“For many centuries women were oppressed… The October Revolution liberated women… but life has not yet liberated women from domestic labor… the worker woman remains a slave in her own land.”

Alexandra Kollontai

“Photography—the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world—should undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people’s capacity to see from all sides.”

Jacques Rancière

“…a seamless, organic continuum… within which the contradictions of industrial production are annulled by rhythms and rhymes that link them into a general community.”

Viktor Shklovsky

“The combination of two representable objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“I reduced painting to its logical conclusion… red, blue, and yellow… I affirmed: it’s all over… every plane is a plane.”

Karl Marx

“Man with a Movie Camera is an experiment in cinematic communication… It speaks to the viewer without the aid of sets and actors and without the aid of intertitles.”

Varvara Stepanova

“Go to work, comrades working women! Liberate yourselves! Build nurseries, maternity houses… your place is under the red revolutionary banner.”

Annette Michelson

“The construction of proletarian culture requires the elimination of the rupture between Things and people… everyday life is a conservative force that must be transformed.”

Dziga Vertov

“It’s quite possible that we often look at things. But don’t see them… we must reveal the extraordinary perspectives of objects… we must revolutionize our visual reasoning.”

Boris Arvatov

“Thus cinema… makes sense only as one form of pressure… the montage of attractions… liberates film from plot-based narrative.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“If the filmmaker is, like a magician, a manufacturer of illusion… he can destroy illusion through the reversal of time… the ‘negative of time’ for the Communist decoding of reality.”

Alexandra Kollontai

“…filmmaking as labor is comprehended in the general organization of productive labor processes… part of a collective industrial system.”

Alexander Rodchenko

“The light from the East is not only the liberation of workers… it is the new relation to things, to people… our things must become comrades, not slaves.”

Annette Michelson

“Communism is Soviet Power plus the electrification of the entire country.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing and not merely recognizing… perception must be prolonged… what has been made does not matter.”

Alexander Rodchenko

“…fragmentation and contradictions generated by industrial production are unified through montage rhythms that create a shared social project.”

Dziga Vertov

“The combination of two hieroglyphs is regarded not as their sum total but as their product… a new concept emerges from their collision.”

Alexandra Kollontai

“Photography must accustom people to seeing from new viewpoints… familiar objects must be shown from unexpected angles.”

Boris Arvatov

“…the material forms of culture… represent an extraordinary conservative force known as everyday life (byt)… this must be transformed into a progressive force.”

Alexander Rodchenko

“The filmmaker… can disrupt the process of identification… generating a crisis of belief in the viewer.”

Sergei Eisenstein

“Art is the means to live through the making of things… the process of perception itself becomes the purpose of art.”

Annette Michelson

KEYWORD 1: Everyday Life (byt)

(1) Explanation (1–3 sentences) Everyday life, or byt, refers to the material structure of daily existence, including objects, spaces, and routines that shape how people behave and interact. It is not neutral, but a structured system that influences social life. (2) Person Boris Arvatov (3) Example (2–3 sentences) An example of byt can be seen in Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club, where the layout and furniture are designed to organize collective activity. The space is functional and structured, guiding how people move, sit, and interact. This demonstrates how everyday life can be shaped through material design rather than left to individual choice.

VCC397 Final Flashcards

(72 cards)