Montage, Kuleshov, and vidding
Feb. 13th, 2011 01:11 amI want to shove this chapter of my textbook on Soviet montage at every vidder I've ever met. While I was watching Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) I kept being struck but by how vid-like the editing was, how he kept using metaphors, matching images like sewing and film editing or the human eye, the camera lens, and window shades opening and closing. But I had no idea how much early Soviet editing WAS vidding.
See, immediately post-Revolution Russia had an epic shortage of raw film stock to shoot new material on, and they were actually frequently using the tail ends of reels from films shot in the era of the czar. But the Kuleshov Workshop didn't have film to be wasting on student projects at all--they were learning and experimenting with editing entirely with clips from pre-existing works. IE, vidding.
(Ugh,
traykor, I finally found the exact thing I was looking for the other night--the Mozhukhin Experiment. *facepalm*)
I was about to say, vidders, do yourselves a favor, if you don't know about Soviet Montage and Kuleshov and Eisenstein and Vertov and Pudovkin, look them up, but I just came up with a terrible idea--if I were to go to Vividcon this year, would anyone be interested in a panel on the subject? which has already been done.
See, immediately post-Revolution Russia had an epic shortage of raw film stock to shoot new material on, and they were actually frequently using the tail ends of reels from films shot in the era of the czar. But the Kuleshov Workshop didn't have film to be wasting on student projects at all--they were learning and experimenting with editing entirely with clips from pre-existing works. IE, vidding.
(Ugh,
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I was about to say, vidders, do yourselves a favor, if you don't know about Soviet Montage and Kuleshov and Eisenstein and Vertov and Pudovkin, look them up, but I just came up with a terrible idea--