Film Studies Daily Log

Thursday, Aptril 1

We re-viewed the ending of Man With a Movie Camera, this time with Yuri Tsivian's voiceover commentary, which concludes with his insistence on the impossibility of adequately deciphering the complex textures of the film without multiple viewings.

We then developed our own commentary about the most important motifs of the film (eyes and the camera eye, class and class, man and machine, people as subjects and people as audience, the whirling circles of the camera and other means of production, etc.), and we re-viewed and analyzed one sequence of whirling circles.

At the end of class we turned our attention to German Expressionist film, beginning by reading Eisenstein's description of that film movement in "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today."