Chapter 354: The Sound of Cannon in the Atlantic (2)

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In "The Educational and Social Value of Newsree", Dulac mentions that watching newsreak is like being there and witnessing the event, which means participating in life around the world.

Dulac believes that "news films depict events that move people's hearts more than any newspaper report";

The most common form of adaptation of movies based on real people and real events was originally adapted from news events.

In Russia during the same period, the October Revolution not only announced the establishment of a new regime, but also gave birth to a new view of realism.

A large number of Soviet filmmakers showed a strong sense of responsibility and creative spirit to serve reality around the call for new realism in Russia, and set off a wave of montage movement in the Soviet Union represented by Eisenstein and Vertov.

The team of innovators was represented by Dziga Vertov, Lev Kulishov, Sergei Eisenstein and Woosevorod Pudovkin.

Regarding filmmaking, Eisenstein proposed the famous theory of "attraction montage", which is intended to emphasize the combination of non-continuous video clips according to certain rules.

This kind of film aesthetics is committed to creating an "ultimate theme effect" through formal means, which is a film composition closely connected with social reality.

Unlike Eisenstein's constructivist tendencies, Vertov's theory of the "cinematic eye" advocated the artistic efficacy of montage in the dimension of presenting reality.

For Vertov, cinema is a means of documentary, a translation of the visible and the invisible for the naked eye.

In the context of left-wing culture, this assertion confirms the transcendence of the camera as an emerging optical instrument in understanding and representing reality.

Vertov's realist aesthetics, which is committed to a deep image cognition of the world, is embodied in his masterpiece "The Man with the Camera", which is the most typical;

Especially the footage of marriage and divorce, through the lens language of daily details.

In the context of historical narrative, vivid and real living individuals are presented.

Vertov also believed that the camera lens had to be placed at the center of events, at the center of reality and facts.

Specifically, these events and facts are filmed outside the studio, without the use of actors, sets, stories, or scripts.

In terms of theoretical research such as film authenticity, Vertov endows this "transcendental montage" with distinct political attributes:

"The cameraman uses the camera as a tool to 'attack' reality through various cinematic techniques, and then places the fragments of reality into a new structure.

It is these skills that create the conditions for videographers and other discerning people to work hard to build a better society.

Vertov set the tone for realist cinema, that is, filmmaking that went beyond the visual to explore the depths of the film that reflected the true nature of society.

Vertov's achievements in the language of cinema were prominent, but then he gradually fell into a slump for some special reasons;

After all, social realism films that are too real, and the deeper excavation of society has its ups and downs in the historical environment at that time.

However, historical irony always plays out quietly, and Vertov's realism was inherited by Godard during the "May Storm" in France in 1968, and then the "Ziga Vertov Group" came to the stage of history as an artistic group.

Montage theorists are more concerned with how the film is created than with how the film represents reality. The difference between Kulishov and Vertov is that Vertov exhorts people not to watch clichéd fictional films, while Kulishov, as a director and "technician", focuses on technical, formal and organizational issues, and enters into the idea of a "scientific" montage.

In fact, Kulishov later admitted that he was only a revolutionary of form, and together with Pudovkin, he corrected the notion that the actor was merely inanimate material at the director's mercy, and that he focused too much on montage.

In other words, Kulishov did not see the difference between material and intellectual production.

Pudovkin, while attaching great importance to montage, did not diminish his emphasis on contrasting physiognicity (verisimilitude).

In the Soviet films of the 20s of the 20th century, which had a serious tendency to be staged and metaphorical, Pudovkin emphasized the documentary nature of the film;

Pudovkin attaches great importance to the verisimilitude of cinema as one of the fundamental differences between drama and cinema.

Pudovkin not only pointed out that the picture should resemble the subject, but also emphasized the realism of the people and the nation;

Pudovkin's emphasis on verisimilitude is reflected in his pursuit of cinematic narration, which is different from staging, which makes film creation closer to the public, and he realistically captures the real lives of the people, paying special attention to the different customs and national characters of various ethnic groups.

"The Descendants of Genghis Khan" was shot almost entirely on the location of the Monzo Plateau in Buryatia, and he sought to achieve folklore precision.

Pudovkin's emphasis on the nationalization of cinema is also reflected in the historical film "Minin and Pozharsky", which he later collaborated with Dorel, reflecting Russia's own national characteristics.

As far as Pudovkin is concerned, the photographic and realistic nature of film mainly refers to the embodiment of visuality, and he opposes the tendency of staging, advocating that film must reflect the theme and shape the characters through realistic pictures.

Rudolf Einheim, after Pudovkin, emphasized that the art of cinema comes from the difference between it and reality.

Einheim acknowledged that the dual structure of film theory has two dissecting axes: one is the relationship between the film image and "reality"; The second is the relationship between film images, that is, the expression of film.

Using the examples of Pudovkin, Sternberg, Dreyer, Chaplin, and Eisenstein, Einheim focused on the structural connection between inner mood and external expression, emphasizing that cinema is an artistic "representation" of emotions that highlights emotions due to structural similarities.

As a representative of montage, he aims to seek the tension between reality and artistic expression, and in fact the indelible connection between inner perception and reality has also become an aspect of the study of meaning (semiotics).

Of course, the same is true of Balazs, who argues that "through metamorphosis, the artist actually expands the visual perception mode in the viewer's mind, allowing him to re-recognize the facts".

He also emphasized that "images are human constructs and should not be used to represent reality, but to criticize or respond to reality".

And "when a film director (who has experienced real life firsthand) wants to find the truth (i.e., the meaning and laws of reality) in a chaotic representation of reality through his understanding, he must use all the means of expression available to the art of cinema."

This kind of expression of meaning for real events, even if it is criticism or response, reflects the inseparability between facts and stories.

Eisenstein, on the other hand, focused on the innovation of the film form, and he analyzed the influence of Russian formalism on the study of film, while "Boris Tomaszewski took inspiration from Shklovsky in order to summarize the process of 'defamiliarization'."

He enumerates different literary techniques and points out how each of them rescues art from the representation of reality".

Technique is the strategy of storytelling, and he "also extracts the plot (technique) from the story (truth) and the motive (technique) from the causality (truth), and he believes that the literary techniques of all arts (irony, humor, sentimentality, rhetoric, etc.) are deliberate distortions of reality." ”

This is similar to Eisenstein's position in that his theory of montage is concerned with how to "metonymize" reality into meaning.

In fact, this technique seems to separate the work from the real world, but it is not completely separated, it only focuses on deepening the meaning of some events.

This has not been excluded in the film adaptation of real people and real events, but has become a way for real people and real stories to be artistically expressed.

In the Soviet Union in the 20s of the 20th century, inspired by Lenin's instruction that "among all arts, film is the most important art", a group of film workers represented by Kulishov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov carried out active theoretical thinking and practical exploration of film language, and history called it the Soviet school of montage.

Director Eisenstein's 1925 "Battleship Potemkin" is a masterpiece of the Soviet school of montage.

Shot to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1905, the film was an instant sensation in the film industry, with some critics calling it comparable to The Iliad and Song of the Nibelungen.

In the film, Eisenstein practiced his montage theory and passion theory a lot, making the film magnificent, vivid and moving.

"Battleship Potemkin" is divided into five acts, describing the historical events of the inhabitants of the port of Odessa in support of the revolution of the crew of the battleship Potemkin.

Through the language of montage, the oppression of the people by the tsar was sharply exposed, and the proletarian revolution was praised.

Among them, passages such as "Sailor Smashing the Vegetable Plate" and "Odessa Ladder" have become classic passages in film history because of their infectious aesthetic performance and innovation of film language.

Although the strong ideological nature of the film led to the ban on the film outside the Soviet Union, it did not prevent "Battleship Potemkin" from becoming a classic in the slightest.

Film archives from all over the world vied with each other to collect it, and even the mouthpiece of a radical faction in Germany expressed their admiration for the film after watching it, urging the German film industry to make a similar film.

After the second stop, with the lifting of the ban on the film, "Battleship Potemkin" swept the major charts and was billed as one of the "greatest films in history".

In the film "Battleship Potemkin", he managed to portray two extras - the crew of the battleship Potemkin and the townspeople of Odessa.

During the filming, he even tried his best to avoid professional actors, and used a large number of amateur actors for performances, and more than 10,000 citizens of Odessa who participated in the film became real protagonists.

In depicting the masses of people, Eisenstein skillfully moved between groups and portraits.

The archetypal characteristics of mothers, babies, old women and Vakurinchuk all left a deep impression on the audience, and unlike Hollywood's dramatic portrayal****** Senstein's characters do not have a strong empathetic effect, but go beyond the image itself to represent the people behind it.

This dialectical relationship between individuals and groups appears many times in the film, and showing the power of the people has become the director's main theme.

On the other hand, the tsarist army, which ruthlessly suppressed the people, the ship doctor who falsely claimed that it was harmless to eat carrion, and the ship's priest who appeared halfway through constituted the opposite force of oppression of the people.

The ship's doctor appeared as an intellectual to ensure food safety, but he was complicit in the captain's efforts to ignore the basic requirements of the crew.

He was also thrown off the ship after the crew revolted, and the crumbling glasses on the cable were like the Romanov dynasty in a storm.

The priest's appearance in the film is somewhat abrupt, but it is not a big deal for Eisenstein - expressing opinions comes first.

In fact, from Peter the Great onwards the Orthodox Church there was no patriarch in the polar bears, and the church was in the hands of the bureaucracy and became an instrument of the ruling class.

Rasputin's control of the royal family of Nicholas II was even more hated by the people of the polar bears, who suffered from the First World War.

The man, who was about to shoot the crew, came out and shouted, "Oh God! Wake up these rebels! The priest is the spokesman of the Orthodox Church.

His feigned death after being knocked down was a further manifestation of religious opportunism in the revolution – in fact, after February 1917, the Orthodox Church quickly formed a committee to revive the Church and avoid Tsarist intervention.

It was only after the October Revolution that Lenin officially separated the church from the state.

On the whole, in all his works, Eisenstein did his best to express his denunciation of the Tsarist government, his praise of the proletariat, and his affirmation of the revolution.

This emotion touches every viewer with the passionate appeal of its films.

For Eisenstein, "passion" is the transition of a person from normalcy to another dimension, and to a state of new quality.

In his view, passion is not the characteristic of the film itself, but the characteristic of the film that makes the audience feel passionate.

The way in which passion arises can be expressed both through the exaggerated performances of the actors and through the structure of the film.

The powerful appeal of "Battleship Potemkin" is due to the director's unique grasp of passion, specifically breaking the calm rhythm in the organic structure of the film.

For organicity, Eisenstein cites Engels' definition:

“...... The organism is, of course...... High degree of unification ......"

Through the structural integration of different elements, the film has a high degree of organicism.

First of all, he chose the most classic tragic structure, the tragedy in five acts, and strictly followed the requirements of the tragedy in five acts to select and arrange the facts:

Act III begins to enter the port of Odessa, which is different from Act II; Act 5 sails out to sea, distinguishing it from the stranded ships in Act I.

The dramatization of the structure by playing individual titles in front of each act is not unrelated to Eisenstein's previous work as a director in the theater.

Secondly, from the second act onwards, each act undergoes a transformation in the central section:

In the second act, the canvas-covered execution turns into a Vakurynchuk speech uprising;

In the third act, the mourning of Vakulinchuk turns into the righteous indignation of the masses;

In the fourth act, the crowd supports the battleship, which turns into a massacre at the Odessa Steps;

In the fifth act, he waits uneasily for the fleet to turn into a cannon and get out victoriously.