Wednesday, March 31
Before finishing Man With a Movie Camera we discussed briefly what students saw on Tuesday. What is the film about? (Possible answers: making and watching a movie, vision, the post-revolutionary Russian seeing themselves as a people, the workers seeing themselves as a revolutionary class, the filmmakers seeing themselves as revolutionary workers, etc.)
We also rewatched the beginning and one other section of the film with voiceover narration by film scholar Yuri Tsivian.


Tuesday, March 30
Mr. P was out; students watched the first 49 minutes of Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera.

Monday, March 29

Students turned in single-scene analysis essays and returned films.

To put the artistic style of Battleship Potemkin and Man With a Movie Camera (which students will view starting tomorrow) into their broader cultural context we looked at slides of Cubist (Duchamp and Picasso) and Futurist works, and, for the Russian context, examples of Constructivism (including Rodchenko and Tatlin). We concluded with some of the anti-Fascist photomontages of the German Communist John Heartfield.

Friday, March 26

Mr. P distributed two new handouts, "The Great Experiment," about cultural trends in post-revolutionary Russia, and a similar handout also containing information about about Dziga Vertov.

We completed our analysis of the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin and introduced Vertov and his differences with Eisenstein.

Thursday, March 25

Mr. P announced that he will accept the outside viewing essay, due tomorrow, for full credit on Monday and will give 5 points extra credit (on a 75-point assignment) to essays submitted on time (Friday).

We watched a short segment of an instructional film from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences featuring a clip from Fast and Furious, and compared that with the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. Then, using a handout concerning montage in that sequence, we began to analyze it in some detail.

HW due Friday:
Single-scene essay analysis. Papers submitted Friday will receive 5 pts. extra credit. Papers submitted Monday will receive full credit.

Wednesday, March 24

Students received a notesheet of vocabulary relating to early Soviet cinema and began filling in the sheet while we continued our discussion of montage in Battleship Potemkin, illustrating the discussion with clips from the film.

Tomorrow: The Odessa Steps.

HW due Friday:
Single-scene analysis essay.

Tuesday, March 23

Using the "Soviet Montage" excerpt by Gerald Mast, we reviewed the concept of film montage as used by Eisenstein and other early Soviet filmmakers, differentiating varieties of narrative, intellectual, and emotional montage.

Monday, March 22

We read together from Eisenstein's essay "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," and saw how Eisenstein and the other Soviet filmmakers of the twenties both learned from and, in their view, surpassed the films of D.W. Griffith in the use of "montage," or film editing.

We then watched the first 25 minutes of The Cutting Edge, a documentary about film editing; this included sections about Griffith and the Russians. Students took notes on the film and turned them in at the end of class.