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 »
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 »
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 »
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is Dziga Vertov’s most well-known film. Film schools teach it as a classic example of montage, the city film, and early documentary. It gets screened by repertory cinemas and can easily be located on DVD or online. However, Man with a Movie Camera did not always enjoy top billing… Read more »
SPOILERS for the movie Annihilation. Apocryphal or disproven science is fun to think about. For example, for much of our lives we truly believed we only use 10 percent of our brains. Similarly there’s another pop science factoid that gets a good amount of play around the internet, this one being that the process of… Read more »
Below, students of journalism, international studies and religious studies in Media School Professor of Practice Elaine Monaghan’s “Covering Ireland” reporting class write collaboratively about a showing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, a film packed with allegories, religious imagery and thoughts about death, fear, hope and materialism. As you will read, the student reporters found an… Read more »