Component 2 - Section C - Film Movements: SILENT CINEMA

SILENT CINEMA

Realist Or Expressive

• Debates whether film should be realist medium or an expressive medium.
• Should a filmmaker be concerned with representing the world e.g; Documentary
• In film history, the divide is traced all the way back to the period around 1895-1902

MODERNISM

- A rejection of the classical art form of the past.

- Modernism refers to the broad movement in Western arts and literature that gathered pace from around 1850, and is characterised by a deliberate rejection of the styles of the past; emphasising instead innovation and experimentation in forms, materials and techniques in order to create artworks that better reflected modern society. 

FUTURISM
- Launched by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
- It denounces the past.
- Because in Italy, the weight of past culture was felt as particularly oppressive.
- All about movements and energy and dynamism.

CUBISM
- Moving around pictures e.g; Picasso

CONSTRUCTIVISM
- Constructing art that reflect the modern industrial world.
- Vladimir Tatlin was crucially influenced by Pablo Picasso.
- in 1921, Russian artists who followed Tatlin's ideas were calling themselves constructivists and in 1923 a manifesto was published.
- Can be a combination of technology, science and art.
- Art had to free itself from the bourgeois past; new ideas and experimentation were taking place in all the arts.
- Taking individual elements and putting them together in a different way.

PHOTOMONTAGE
- Itnegration of photographs in graphic design work.

SILENT CINEMA - Man With Movie Camera

- Films of the 1920s are often considered among the greatest masterpieces created in the whole history of the medium.
- Filmmakers had developed ways to tell film stories visually with great skill and ingenuity.
- Dialogue-driven narrative was perceived as dragging cinema backwards as a form of theatre, rather than as the brilliantly new, innovative and artistic form of visual expression it was proving itself to be.



DZIGA VERTOV - SPINNING TOP (Real Name: David Kaufman)
- Was a constructivist. For him, montage was part of the selection process.
- The combination of shots would affect the audience, making them aware.
- He founded the experimental group KINO EYE together with his wife Elisaveta Svilova (co-editior) and his brother Mikhail Kaufman (cameraman).
- They felt the task of Soviet film was to document reality 'to reveal truth' and were opposed to the fiction film that depended on artifice.
- Described as a 'film hooligan'
- Man with a movie camera described as: 'A visual symphony', 'experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events'
- Self-reflective-meta

Context

Social
- In 1929 the soviet revolution into and beyond its first decade.
- Ideas about the role of the new Soviet Citizen.
- Openness to experiment initiated under Lenin now beginning to close down under Josef Stalin.

Historical
- 1928, Stalin introduced the first five year plan whose chief aim was to rapidly expand industrial production to bring a vast country into line with Western Europe.

Political
- Vertov associated with the Revolutionary LEF group (left front) whose members included Rodchenko, Mayakovsky and Eisenstein.

Technological
- Vertov had worked on the agit-trains, mobile propaganda centres sent to the Eastern front and the far corners of the Soviet Union.
- The task was to disseminate propaganda through film, plays, leaflets and posters.

Institutional
- Early 1922 Lenin established a fixed ratio between entertainment and documentary film 'The Lenin Proportion'. 75% fiction films and 25% documentary.