Film Studies Daily Log

Monday, November 1

First, we watched the last few minutes on The Man with the Movie Camera again, this time with Yuri Tsivian's commentary, which among other things holds the scene with the children watching the Chinese magician to be both an example of the film as actuality -- life caught unawares -- and of the film as itself a magic show.

Next we watched twenty minutes og Abel Gance's 1927 Napoleeon.  As a romantic fiction film and as an exposition of the Great Man school of history, Napoleon embodies what Vertov and the Kinoks opposed, but as, a masterpiece of innovative montage it is in places The Man with a Movie Camera's equal.

Tuesday:
Montage quiz over Potemkin, The Man with a Movie Camera, Napoleon, and associated handouts.