In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s definitive 2002 text on the Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, he persuasively argues that Dovzhenko’s cinema represents a form of “heroic portraiture” more than it does a vehicle for storytelling or narrative expression. Comparing Dovzhenko’s work with a more contemporary film by Jean-Marie Straub, Rosenbaum writes that “[Straub’s film] qualifies as heroic portraiture… Read more »
Tag: Sergei Eisenstein
Montage as Conflict: Sergei Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days that Shook the World
Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage are well known but often oversimplified. In this video, I offer my interpretation of Eisenstein’s film theory, drawing from his 1928 film October: Ten Days that Shook the World to illustrate his ideas about montage. Within Eisenstein’s writings, he repeatedly returns to the importance of conflicting lines of form and movement… Read more »
Anguished Portraiture: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible
Due to the intensity of its anguished and baroque surfaces, its radical reconstruction of spatial dimensions, and its cartoonish, sometimes grotesque approach to performance and film dramaturgy, Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1944-46) – the Soviet master’s final work, one of the prime glories of the cinema – may be plausibly considered one… Read more »