The Alexander Medvedkin Reader

The Alexander Medvedkin Reader PDF Author: Alexander Medvedkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629630X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900–89), a contemporary of Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, is celebrated today for his unique form of “total” documentary cinema, which aimed to bridge the distance between film and life, as well as for his use of satire during a period when the Soviet authorities preferred that laughter be confined to narrowly prescribed channels. This collection of selected writings by Medvedkin is the first of its kind and reveals how his work is a crucial link in the history of documentary film. Although he was a dedicated Communist, Medvedkin’s satirical approach and social critiques ultimately led to his suppression by the Soviet regime. State institutions held back or marginalized his work, and for many years, his films were assumed to have been lost or destroyed. These texts, many assembled for this volume by Medvedkin himself, document for the first time his considerable achievements, experiments in film and theater, and attempts to develop satire as a major Soviet film genre. Through scripts, letters, autobiographical writings, and more, we see a Medvedkin supported and admired by figures like Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Maxim Gorky.

The Alexander Medvedkin Reader

The Alexander Medvedkin Reader PDF Author: Alexander Medvedkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629630X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900–89), a contemporary of Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, is celebrated today for his unique form of “total” documentary cinema, which aimed to bridge the distance between film and life, as well as for his use of satire during a period when the Soviet authorities preferred that laughter be confined to narrowly prescribed channels. This collection of selected writings by Medvedkin is the first of its kind and reveals how his work is a crucial link in the history of documentary film. Although he was a dedicated Communist, Medvedkin’s satirical approach and social critiques ultimately led to his suppression by the Soviet regime. State institutions held back or marginalized his work, and for many years, his films were assumed to have been lost or destroyed. These texts, many assembled for this volume by Medvedkin himself, document for the first time his considerable achievements, experiments in film and theater, and attempts to develop satire as a major Soviet film genre. Through scripts, letters, autobiographical writings, and more, we see a Medvedkin supported and admired by figures like Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Maxim Gorky.

The Alexander Medvedkin Reader

The Alexander Medvedkin Reader PDF Author: Alexander Medvedkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629627X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
This is an enormously important and long-awaited project in film studies: it is collection of selected writings by the filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, rendered into English. There is no equivalent volume in Russian or in any other language, so this is an original work. Alexander Medvedkin (1900-89) belongs in the canon of major Soviet filmmakers. He invented a form of total documentary cinema for workers in the early Soviet era that was aimed at bridging the distance between film and life, whereby the target audience of a film would be involved in its making, and then their viewing and discussion of it would become the basis for action to change their work situation and relations. He was also a major satirist at a time when the Soviet authorities feared the ambiguities of satire and tried to confine laughter to narrowly prescribed channels. Medvedkin s work remains a crucial link in the history of documentary cinema, especially in its more engaged or agitational forms. He was a true-believing, card-carrying Communist, but he was also a victim of the Soviet regime. Soviet institutions prevented him from fully achieving what he hoped to accomplish as an artist because he behaved as an individualist who sought to produce artistic projects in defiance of obstacles from the authorities."

In the Studio

In the Studio PDF Author: Brian R. Jacobson
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520297601
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Studios are, at once, material environments and symbolic forms, sites of artistic creation and physical labor, and nodes in networks of resource circulation. They are architectural places that generate virtual spaces—worlds built to build worlds. Yet, despite being icons of corporate identity, studios have faded into the background of critical discourse and into the margins of film and media history. In response, In the Studio demonstrates that when we foreground these worlds, we gain new insights into moving-image culture and the dynamics that quietly mark the worlds on our screens. Spanning the twentieth century and moving globally, this unique collection tells new stories about studio icons—Pinewood, Cinecittà, Churubusco, and CBS—as well as about the experimental workplaces of filmmakers and artists from Aleksandr Medvedkin to Charles and Ray Eames and Hollis Frampton.

Alexander Medvedkin

Alexander Medvedkin PDF Author: Emma Widdis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857710265
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This first introduction to Medvedkin's film-making career traces his process of developing a unique brand of cinematic satire throughout the period of the Soviet revolutionary experiment. Using original archival material and Medvedkin's writings towards his unfinished autobiography, Widdis explores his films from the 1936 The Miracle Worker, through the unreleased New Moscow of 1938 and the experimental 'film train' - or kinopoezd - up to the rediscovery of his 1934 film Happiness in the 1960s.

The Vortex That Unites Us

The Vortex That Unites Us PDF Author: Jacob Emery
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501769405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The Vortex That Unites Us is a study of totality in Russian literature, from the foundation of the modern Russian state to the present day. Considering a diversity of texts that have in common chiefly their prominence in the Russian literary canon, Jacob Emery examines the persistent ambition in Russian literature to gather the whole world into an artwork. Emery reveals how the diversity of totalizing figures in the Russian canon—often in alliance with ideologies like the totalitarian state or enlightenment reason—strive for the frontiers of space and time in order to guarantee the coherence of the globe and the continuity of history. He expores subjects like romantic metaphors of supernatural possession; Tolstoy's conception of art as a vector of emotional contagion; the panoramic ambitions of the avant-garde to grasp the globe in a new poetic medium; efforts of Soviet utopians to harmonize the whole of social life along aesthetic lines; Mandelstam's evocation of writing as a transcendental authority that guarantees a grandiose historical rhythm even when manifested as authoritarian repression; and the mass market of cultural commodities in which the exiled Vladimir Nabokov found success with his novel Lolita. The Vortex That Unites Us reveals a common thread in the disparate works it explores, bringing into a single horizon a variety of typically siloed texts and aesthetic approaches. In all these cases, the medium of totality is the body, inspired by artistic vision and compelled by aesthetic response.

History and Film

History and Film PDF Author: Eleftheria Thanouli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501340794
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines addresses the representation of history in cinema, a much-argued debate on the need to understand cinematic history in its own terms and develop a certain vocabulary for discussing historical films, their relation to public history, and their impact on public historical consciousness. Eleftheria Thanouli does this by changing the agenda altogether - combining a macro-level perspective with a micro-level one in order to argue that cinematic history is the dominant form of historiography in the 20th century, as it succeeded in remediating and repurposing the key formal, rhetorical, and ideological practices of 19th-century professional historiography. With case studies ranging from The Thin Red Line and Life is Beautiful, to The Fog of War and The Last Bolshevik, Thanouli bridges the gap between history and film studies and lays the foundations for a new visual historiography.

The Eisenstein Universe

The Eisenstein Universe PDF Author: Ian Christie
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350142115
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Over the decades since he was first hailed by critics and filmmakers around the world, Sergei Eisenstein has assumed many identities. Originally cast as a prophet of revolution and the maestro of montage, and later seen as both a victim of and apologist for Stalin's tyranny, the scale and impact of Eisenstein's legacy has continued to grow. If early research on Eisenstein focused on his directorial work – from the legendary Battleship Potemkin and October to the still-controversial Ivan the Terrible – with time scholars have discovered many other aspects of his multifarious output. In recent years, multimedia exhibitions, access to his vast archive of drawings, and publication of his previously censored theoretical writings have cast Eisenstein in a new light. Deeply engaged with some of the leading thinkers and artists of his own time, Eisenstein remains a focus for many of their successors, contested as well as revered. Over half a century since his death in 1948, an ambitious treatise that he hoped would be his major legacy, Method, has finally been published. Eisenstein's lifelong search for an underlying unity that would link archaic art with film's modernity, individuals with their historic communities, and humans as a species with the universe, may have more appeal than ever today. And among his many thwarted film projects, those set in Mexico and what were once the Soviet Central Asian republics reveal complex and still-intriguing realms of speculation. In this ground-breaking collection, sixteen international scholars explore Eisenstein's prescient engagement with aesthetics, anthropology and psychology, his roots in diverse philosophical traditions, and his gender politics. What emerges has surprising relevance to contemporary media archaeology, intermediality, cognitive science, eco-criticism and queer studies, as well as confirming Eisenstein's prestige within present-day film and audiovisual media.

Cosmic Shift

Cosmic Shift PDF Author: Ilya Kabakov
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786993260
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 537

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Book Description
A TLS Book of the Year 2017 In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country's most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region's contemporary art, culture and and theory. With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Oxana Timofeeva, Pavel Pepperstein, Arseny Zhilyaev and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vibrant and complex culture: one built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal, and battling its own histories and ideologies.

Film Histories

Film Histories PDF Author: Paul Grainge
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748628940
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
An introduction to film history, this anthology covers the history of film from 1895. It is arranged chronologically, and each chapter contains an introduction on the key developments within the period. Various types of film history are undertaken to enable students to become familiar with different types of film historical research.

The Postmodern Arts

The Postmodern Arts PDF Author: Nigel Wheale
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415077767
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The Postmodern Arts provides essential material and invaluable guidance for students of modern literature and culture.