From stef8888@u.washington.edu Mon Aug 5 11:35:32 2002 Received: from mailscan4.cac.washington.edu (mailscan4.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.15]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g75IZSeY014336 for ; Mon, 5 Aug 2002 11:35:28 -0700 Received: FROM mxu1.u.washington.edu BY mailscan4.cac.washington.edu ; Mon Aug 05 11:35:27 2002 -0700 Received: from mxout3.cac.washington.edu (mxout3.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.19]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.06) with ESMTP id g75IZRR9024329 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for ; Mon, 5 Aug 2002 11:35:27 -0700 Received: from mailscan-out1.cac.washington.edu (mailscan-out1.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.17]) by mxout3.cac.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.06) with SMTP id g75IZRYu027513 for ; Mon, 5 Aug 2002 11:35:27 -0700 Received: FROM dante22.u.washington.edu BY mailscan-out1.cac.washington.edu ; Mon Aug 05 11:35:27 2002 -0700 Received: from localhost (stef8888@localhost) by dante22.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g75IZQPM077706 for ; Mon, 5 Aug 2002 11:35:26 -0700 Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 11:35:26 -0700 (PDT) From: History undergraduate advisors To: histmaj@u.washington.edu Subject: Autumn 2002 - Early Russian and Soviet Film (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII ******************************** History Undergraduate Advising University of Washington Box 353560 Seattle, WA 98195-3560 318 Smith 206 543-5691 histadv@u.washington.edu http://depts.washington.edu/clio ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 10:47:15 -0700 (PDT) From: S. Westen To: History undergraduate advisors Subject: Autumn 2002 - Early Russian and Soviet Film (fwd) We'd very much appreciate it if you could let your students know about this course: RUSS 420/SLN 7515 C LIT 497A/9237 EARLY RUSSIAN AND SOVIET FILM Wed & Fri 2:30-4:20 Instructor: Diment VLPA 5 credits The course will focus on Four Masters of the Early Russian and Soviet Film: Evgeny Bauer, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov. 1. EVGENY BAUER (1867-1917). Russian director and set designer who was influenced by the Art Nouveau and Symbolist movements. By far the most complex, celebrated, and prolific director of his time, he made close to 80 movies in just four years. He died very unexpectedly of stagnant pneumonia between the two Russian revolutions. Finally discovered by the West not so long ago, Bauer is now seen as one of the most precocious and innovative directors of his era who had anticipated many breakthroughs in filmmaking (such as use of mirrors and a dolly with a camera) which would be later attributed to German or American directors. He also worked with very strong actors and seems to have guided them very skillfully to create psychologically complex performances. Bauer's impact on his films was equally powerful in his roles as a set designer and a director. He fills the frame with rich, baroque decoration and ornately designed furniture in the interior scenes, while his outside scenes often feature luscious garden settings. The scenes are composed not only in terms of borders around the frames, but with deep focus and pertinent depth cues. Many of Bauer's films exhibited a preoccupation held by popular audiences of the day, with melancholy and the inevitable ending. These narrative conclusions, which invariably ended with the death or tragic injury of a central character, sharply contrast with the happy ending of much of American and European cinema of the period. 2. SERGEI EISENSTEIN (1898-1948) One of the fathers of montage, Sergei Eisenstein was also one of the principal architects of the modern cinematic form. Despite a relatively small ouvre of only seven completed films, most if not all of which suffered under the weight of censorship intrusion, few individuals were more instrumental in enabling motion pictures to evolve beyond their origins in 19th-century Victorian theater into a new arena of abstract thought and expression. After the February 1917 Revolution, he sold his first political cartoons, signed Sir Gay, to several magazines in Petrograd. He also served in the volunteer militia and in the engineering corps of the Russian army. Although there is little record that Eisenstein was immediately affected by the events of October 1917, in the spring of 1918 he did volunteer for the Red Army. His father joined the Whites and subsequently emigrated. While in the military, Eisenstein again managed to combine his service as a technician with study of theater, philosophy, psychology and linguistics. He staged and performed in several productions, for which he also designed sets and costumes. Eisenstein's second film, the enormously successful and influential POTEMKIN (1925), demonstrated that his art could be most powerful when it achieved a balance between experimental and traditional narrative forms. POTEMKIN, the story of one of the tragic episodes of the 1905 Russian revolution, was a work of prose, highly emotional but clear in its logical, public speech. The close-ups of suffering human faces and the soldiers' boots in the now legendary "Odessa steps" sequence carried such impact that some screenings of the film outside the USSR provoked clashes with police when audiences were convinced they were watching a newsreel. In Hollywood, David O. Selznick saw the film and wrote with great enthusiasm to his boss at MGM that a print should be obtained because it would be "very advantageous to have the organization view it in the same way that a group of artists might study a Rubens or a Raphael". It was, he thought, "unquestionably one of the greatest motion pictures ever made" (this in 1926!) and the firm "might well consider securing the man responsible for it." 3. VSEVOLOD PUDOVKIN (1893-1953) A physics and chemistry student in his adopted home town of Moscow, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin joined the Russian artillery upon the outbreak of World War I. Wounded in 1915, Pudovkin spent three years in a German POW camp before escaping and returning to Moscow. This experience has affected the vehement pacifism in his brilliant _End of St. Petersburg_ (1927). After working briefly as a writer and chemist, Pudovkin entered the Russian film industry, inspired by a screening of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916). While attending the State Cinema School, Pudovkin worked as an assistant on a number of propaganda films. One of Pudovkin's favorite experiments involved intercutting a "passive" close-up of a man or woman displaying no discernible emotion with evocative shots of a dog, a plate of food, a child, a coffin etc. This was designed to illustrate his pet theory that the true drama in film lies not in performance but in juxtaposition of images. This was further articulated in his famous 2-reel comedy _Chess Fever_ (1925), wherein the highly non-mobile chess master Capablanca was made to appear to be an active participant in a fanciful scenario. Pudovkin's "docudramas" -- Mother (1926), End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Storm Over Asia (Heir to Genghis Khan, 1928) -- are regarded by many as the zenith of the Soviet silent cinema. 4. DZIGA VERTOV (1896 - 1954) Dziga Vertov was born as Denis Abramovich (later changed to Arkadievich) Kaufman in the Pale of Settlement to a Jewish book-dealer's family. As a child he studied piano and violin, and at the age of ten began to write poetry; Vertov's films would reflect all these early interests. Vertov began to edit documentary footage and soon was appointed editor of Kinonedelya, the first Soviet weekly newsreel. In editing those documentaries, Vertov was discovering the possibilities of montage. He began joining pieces of film without regard for chronology or location to achieve an expressiveness which would politically engage the viewers. Soon, the central authorities were fed up with Vertov's formal experimenting, and they refused to support his most ambitious project, THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929). To make the film, Vertov had to accept the invitation of the film studio VUFKU in the Ukraine. Vertov was largely silenced in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s making many in the West believe he must have perished during the Stalin purges. But unlike many of his avant-garde friends, he was not, strictly speaking, persecuted. He lived for almost 20 years in obscurity, editing conventional newsreels, the same kind of films he had once proven so capable of transforming into art. Six years after his death, French documentary filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin adopted Vertov's theory and practice into their innovative methods of filmmaking. In the last 40 years Vertov's heritage of poetic documentary has influenced many documentary filmmakers all over the world. Susanna J. ("Shosh") Westen Administrative Assistant University of Washington Dept. of Slavic Lang. & Lit. Box 353580 Seattle, WA 98195-3580 (206) 543-6848/(206) 543-6009 (FAX) .