Tuesday, October 12

Students took a thirty-question quiz over The Birth of a Nation and Reconstruction.

Mr. P briefly traced the great influence which the counter-revolutionary Griffith had on the young post-revolutionary Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s.  (The next two films we will watch are Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera.)  Of all the techniques pioneered or extended by Griffith, it was film editing, and especially parallel editing or cross-cutting which the Soviets seized on most eagerly, devoping it further into a theory and practice of montage, in which the juxtaposition of images is central filmic principle.

We resumed our viewing of The Cutting Edge documentary with the section entitled "The Russians Are Coming!"