Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake Part One

Man With A Movie Camera:The Global Remake from Perry Bard on Vimeo.

A participatory video shot by people around the world who are uploading footage to dziga.perrybard.net to interpret Vertov's 1929 classic film Man With A Movie Camera.

Log onto dziga.perrybard.net where there is a list of SCENES. Click on any scene to see the shot list.Click see all uploads to see the uploads for each shot. Click upload to upload your interpretation. You can also participate by selecting SHOTS BY TAG.

Software developed for this project archives sequences and streams the submissions as a film.As the same shot can be uploaded more than once infinite versions of the film are possible. A new film is built daily and streams on the website. Click START to see today's version.

Concept/Director: Perry Bard
Software Development: John Weir
Sound Design: Steven Baun
Participants: See list at dziga.perrybard.net

From: http://vimeo.com/6345709

Slightly different from the one in the previous post.

Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake Part One

 Perry bard invites interpretations of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). He is streaming them alongside scenes from the original.

Perry Bard's website:

http://dziga.perrybard.net/

Owen Land/George Landow - Remedial Reading Comprehension [1970]

I came across Owen Land in Malcolm Le Grice's Abstract Film and Beyond. Owen Land was then known as George Landow (not to be confused with  George Landow Professor of English and Art History at Brown University). In Le Grice's book  there is a still from Remedial Reading Comprehension on page 139. It was of the sequence featuring a page of a book where we can see part of the sentence "to pupil is an emot". The rest of the text is blurred.  The page is part of a montage which also includes the face of a sleeping woman.

Le Grice is concerned with the way in which the film addresses the audience directly “giving instructions, asking questions or proclaiming blandly ‘this is a film about you- not about its maker’, it forces the audience to recognize the apparent surface intentions, like the instructions to participate in a way which cannot be complied with, are ‘not’ the subject of the work. They are a provocative demonstration that the audience must treat film, however subjectively structured by the film-maker, as raw material for their own use. This is a demand that film should be approached sceptically counteracting unquestioned acceptance of the film’s authority” (Le Grice, 1977 p.139-40). 




 I like this from the Harvard Gazette: "In several of these films, Land constructs facades of reality, often directly addressing the viewer using the language of television, advertising, or educational films".

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/04/film-archive-screening-to-fete-works-of-land/

Abstract Cinema 7: Norman McLaren

"For myself, indeed, with an abstract film, the most pleasing forms are those which come closest to music. There must be visual equivalence"

Norman McLaren.

The above film Begone Dull Care (1949) was produced partly through the painting of the visuals onto 35mm clear film, frameless and frame by frame. Other imagery were etched directly into 35mm film.

The film features a soundtrack by Oscar Peterson

Abstract Cinema 6: Harry Smith

— Short animations by Harry Smith.
No. 1: A Strange Dream (l946)
No. 2: Message from the Sun (1946-48)
No. 3: Interwoven (1947-49) (Part 1)


Abstract film, especially where colour is concerned owes a lot formally to the work of Kandinsky. Malcolm Le Grice makes some interesting comparisons between works like The Battle from 1910 and Harry Smith’s Film Number 3 done before 1950. "Kandinsky's work" argues Le Grice "not only explores the notion of shape transformations, or colour changes within repeated shapes, but also shape repetitions which imply movement either across the surface or into the 'space' of the picture" ( 1977, p.77).
 Further reading:

LeGrice, M. (1977) Abstract Film and Beyond, Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press.


Russett, R.and Starr, C. (1976) Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Van Nostrand.

Abstract Cinema 4: Oskar Fishinger

Above: Abstractions 1946-57.

Oskar Fishinger is often seen as the pioneer of abstract animation. Jerry Beck suggests that “Fishinger had always had a dream of blending classical music with the kind of conceptual designs that might be formulated in one’s mind when listening to a symphony. This mixture he termed as ‘visual music’” (Beck, 2004, p.22).

Fishinger’s ability in blending music with animation inspired the animators on Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1941). He did work on the “Toccata and Fugue” (Bach) section, but “because his original designs were dismissed as too abstract and modified against his wishes, Fishinger acquired a deserved reputation as an animator with more integrity than Disney” (Kostelanetz, 2001 p.213). Fantasia can be seen as “Disney’s attempt to legitimise the animated film by working in a more abstract, highly aesthetic supposedly ‘cultured’ way" (Wells, 1998 p. 29)


Further reading:

Beck, J., (2004) Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, The History of Cartoon, Anime and CGI London: Flame Tree Publishing.
Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes 2nd Edition, New York and London: Routledge.
Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde, London and New York: Verso.
Russett, R.and Starr, C. (1976) Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Van Nostrand.
Wells, P., (1998) Understanding Animation London and New York: Routledge

Abstract Cinema 3: Hans Richter

Hans Richter is still an important chronicler of the Dada movement. His first-hand account of Dada, Dada: Art and Anti Art still stands today as an important document despite it’s the silly and appalling treatment of Hannah Höch. It’s a book that still appears on many a reading list in art schools today.

Hans Richter’s Rythmus 21 is an important early abstract film. It sometimes, quite wrongly apparently, referred to as the first abstract film.

According to Esther Leslie, Richter’s “abstract films were conceived as a light-play of positive and negative” (Leslie, 2002p.37). Leslie compares Richter to Malevich in his aim to “reduce form to its simplest element”, which Richter claimed “to be the rectangle or square” (p.37). However, she points out that unlike Malevich and others, there was no “assumed metaphysical importance” to these elements (p.37).

Sources:

Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde, London and New York: Verso.

Abstract Cinema 2: Viking Eggeling (1880-1925)

Eggeling was an early contributor to the Dada movement. In collaboration with Hans Richter he worked on abstract picture scrolls. The works are notable shift in (Zurich) Dada’s aesthetics away from Expressionism towards Constructivism. Although it can be argued that historically “the impetus for the production of the first abstract film seems to come from music and paintings rather than cinematography” stimulated by the “Blaue Reiter almanac’s call for a theory of painting” (Lynton, 2003, p. 119).

Eggeling was concerned with “‘rhythm in painting’ through all the possible permutations of certain linear and spatial relationships” (Kostelanetz, R., 2001, p. 189): “a general concern for line and surface” (Michaud, 1996, p.23). Above is the classic Diagonal Symphony from 1924, in which Eggeling produced more than a thousand drawings on his own.

Bibliography:

Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes 2nd Edition, New York and London: Routledge.

Lynton, N., (2003) The Story of Modern Art, London and New York: Phaidon.

Michaud, Philippe-Alain, (1961) “The Haunting of the Subject on Dada Cinema”, in (2005) Dada Cinema, Paris: Re: Voir Video.

Abstract Cinema 1: Walter Ruttman

Walter Ruttman is perhaps best known for his film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City from 1927, a film that demonstrated the influence of Soviet film montage as exemplified by Vertov. Before he produced this classic film Ruttman was making short abstract films in the early 1920s. Ruttmen like Eggeling and Richter started out as a painter. For these painters-come-film makers “it seems that at first, they hoped that animation could be, above all, paintings salvation rather than films” (Leslie, 2002 p.46).

Lightplay Opus I has been referred to as “not only the first abstract film to be shown in public, but also a film hand-tinted in striking and subtle colours, with a live synchronised musical score composed especially for it (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

In 1976 Opus I is said to be missing however above is a film which is claimed to be Opus I. It is claimed that “Ruttman did not wish it (Opus I) to be seen, after he had made improvements to his later films” (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

As well as producing his Opus films Ruttman produced abstract films for commercial purposes in Munich and Berlin: “in 1923 he created the “Dream of Hawks Sequence” for Fritz Lang’s Siegfried” (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 41). Later he joined Lotte Reininger in her feature length silhouette animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed Ruttman produced fantasy effects using the wax slixcing machine he had commissioned from Oskar Fischinger. Prince Achmed was completed in 1926 after which Ruttmen gave up animation (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

Bibliography:

Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde, London and New York: Verso.
Russett, R.and Starr, C. (1976) Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Van Nostrand.

Current Viewing

Apart from CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, Numbers, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist and TheEleventh Hour, I have been watching a lot of examples of avant garde film.

I was recently given a set of DVDs, one of which was a Dadaist film selection which included a number of Hans Richter abstract and semi representational film: Rythmus 21(1921-24), Filmstudie (1926) and Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927). The later two seem very surreal in nature. His one time collaborator Viking Eggeling also features on the DVD. His work Symphonia Diagonale (1921-24) is a purely abstract composition.

I also have a DVD of the work of Len Lye from 1935 to 1960/80. This is a really nice addition to my collection of animated films.

I need to prepare myself to watch Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). This is the film which served as a guide for Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media (2001).