Eisenstein

            On Monday November 14^th, Nancy was in the classroom when I arrived, but she was busy texting so I didn’t strike up a conversation. Instead I did Wednesday’s reading on the “Power of Movies”, from my expensive textbook. It was another boring essay, but when it was finished I was able to work on ideas for my Canadian Poetry essay.

            Our lecture was on the topic of Film.

            The question was, “Is it art?” But Devlin said we know better now than to think of it like that. It’s better to as whether it is fine art or pop art.

            Roger Scruton says that film is always illusory and it is not art. Besides Scruton though, most of the arguments about film mentioned in Murray Smith’s essay are from he early 20^th Century, and so they refer to black and white, silent films. Theodor Adorno thought that neither film nor photography was art. Film will always be sentimental because it is representational. Everything is there and so you are not given the chance to contribute to it with your imagination.

            Scruton claims that film is a true illusory dimension and that it can’t get past the surface because it has no room to proscribe.

            Adorno said that film is never contemplative because it is stuck in the practical.

            High art is art and aesthetic qualities for their own sake, so why can’t film serve that ideal? It is argued that film is too representational and so there is no room for aesthetics.

            Professor Russell projected again a screen shot from the video about the quadrant system that was used to show that the movie, “Drive” is exceptional.

            Arnheim says that what film is representing can be manipulated to convey deeper meaning and aesthetic qualities and to make reality prettier.

            Remove the colour from film, for example and it forces you to reassess reality. Film can redirect the attention. When this is done, film can possibly be high art.

            One cannot just point a camera to get high art. But some films, if we apply the cluster theory, may show themselves to be high art.

            We talked about the pioneering of the use of montage in filmmaking by Sergei Eisenstein. We were shown part of a video called, “The History of Cutting: the Soviet Theory of Montage”, which talked about Eisenstein and also Kuleshov. Lev Kuleshov demonstrated what came to be known as the Kuleshov Effect, when he made a short film featuring a man’s expressionless face being alternated with various other shots such as a plate of soup and a girl in a coffin. The film was shown to an audience, which perceived that the man’s expression changed with everything that they thought he was looking at.

            Film can transcend space and time through montage. Montage comes from “monter”, meaning to assemble.

            D. W. Griffith developed continuity editing through practice to create a type of film-enhanced theatre. 

            The video showed a segment of Eisenstein’s successful 1925 film, “Battleship Potemkin”. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the German Nazi party thought that despite its Marxist dialectic it was the greatest propaganda film ever made, presenting history as conflict.

            Thesis meeting antithesis creates synthesis.

            The five methods of montage, from the simplest to the most complex, are:

            Metric – Cutting to the beat.

            Rhythmic – Concerns the rhythm of the action in the shot.

            Tonal – Concerned with the tone of the shot.

            Overtonal – Concerns montage of large sequences.

            Intellectual or Ideological – Concerns ideas.

            There is a shot of someone tapping on a cross, followed by one of a man tapping on a sword. We see the image of a statue of a lion and the rising proletariat.

            Eisenstein’s “October: Ten Days That Shook The World” was ten hours long. Audiences found it too abstract, too manipulative and too totalitarian so they hated it.

            Manipulation by cutting – Manipulating the order of the shots to create a psychological effect.

            Video permeates our lives. If we recognize the possibilities of montage, we can appreciate film as high art. Montage reveals how film can rise to the level of deep truths beyond surface ideas. It can create new, deep and intellectual meanings.

            We then looked at film as Imprint. For Bazin, film is an imprint, so it can be high art but of a completely new dimension. Film brings new terms. What film and photography do is put you in causal contact with a scene. There is a causal connection from you to the actor. You are touching the actor through a long causal chain. Realistic painting does not get to the deeper truth. For Bazin, the difference is that with film you are seeing the real thing because film is literally real.

            We looked at a video that showed a segment of the documentary, “Don’t Look Back” by D. A. Pennebaker. We are taken behind the scenes of Bob Dylan’s tour of England in 1965. We follow a group of people up a stairs. Donovan is in the Bob Dylan’s hotel room. Dylan is demanding to know who threw a glass out of the window that broke on the street. “I’m not taking responsibility for cats I don’t know!” Someone says, “Fuck off! You’re a big nose!” Dylan says, “You say you’re small and I believe you!” “I didn’t throw any fucking glass on the street!”

            Imprint is direct cinema, with no cutting and long takes with a hand held camera. It gives a sense of being there and for a moment we were transported to an eye level experience of Bob Dylan in his hotel room in 1965.

            But this takes imagination away. There is no narration and no text.

            Devlin took an iclicker poll to determine which theory we prefer. When most of the class picked “montage” over “imprint” he exclaimed, “All right! We’ve got some Eisenstein fans here!”

            When he asked for why we voted the way we did, I said that if montage had been used in the documentary, “Don’t Look Back” it wouldn’t have mattered whether the film had been about Bob Dylan or not. But in Pennebaker’s film all he’s doing is pointing his camera and shooting and so it’s entirely dependent on the subject matter. If the camera had been pointing at Joe Schmo, no one would be interested in the movie. He seemed to like my comment.

            On my way home along Queen, the wide sidewalk on the north side near the Horseshoe Tavern, a chalk artist had made a tribute to Leonard Cohen.

            At Spadina I stopped for the light. Two middle-aged guys with long hair crossed to the north and asked the panhandler at the corner if he was feeling better. He told them gratefully that he’d just had breakfast.

            I went online for an hour and then I took a siesta. When I woke up I had fifteen minutes before I had to get ready to leave for work.

            I worked for Nick Aoki’s class again. One of his students was wearing a set of headphones that had kitty ears on them. Before class started, a young woman said to a guy that was sitting at the other room that McDonalds had a deal on coffee downstairs and she wanted him to go with her. He said, “I don’t even drink coffee.” She insisted that she couldn’t go by herself, but he didn’t budge and she left the room. I don’t know if she managed to dredge up the courage to go to the food court by herself or not.

            Nick had this class do the same work as he had for the class I worked on the previous Wednesday, except that we took a break in the middle rather than leaving early. I got some reading done towards trying to figure out what I’ll be writing my Canadian Poetry term essay on.

            During the break, the woman that had been reluctant to go for coffee by herself asked Nick for advice on whether to change her major to Illustration or Graphic Design. He asked her what she wants to do. She said what she wants to do is to not be broke on the street. He answered that she should go into business administration then. She argued that she couldn’t do math. He countered that she wouldn’t need to because they just work with spreadsheets. He explained that illustrators produce images, while what graphic designers do is organize information. Most graphic designers work for firms, while illustrators are freelance, so when you become a graphic designer, while you are waiting to build a reputation, you will need a part time job, perhaps as a graphic designer.