The Raft of the Medua

HD, slo-mo, lit well, bags of committment.
Not entirely sure whether this is an exercise in vanity and somewhat under-choreographed soft-core porn or a genuine attempt to bring something new to the original idea.

In essence the original painting was groundbreaking as a result of its subject matter, the fact that it documented the back story to something over which which the "authorities" would rather have drawn a clouded veil and the emergence of a growing trend towards "art" as politics rather than merely decorative.

In construction the painter of the original "The Raft of the Medusa", Théodore Géricault worked with a number of geometric patterns and design motifs brilliantly drawing the viewer's eye into, across and around his painting in a way which both told the story and allowed the imaginative processes to enter into the individual agonies of the victims of this catastrophic episode in French maritime history.

As far as I can see, Lutz Gregor, has found a suitable title, a strong and ready reference point and then abstracted the "idea" whilst providing none of the narrative nor design strengths which so brilliantly and innovatively invest the original.

Instead what we are delivered is a hi-def video version of the opening moments of the Harrods Sale performed in extreme close-up by cellulite-free luvvies in varying stages of orgiastic undress.

I think we have to be very wary of the tendency for examples of overblown dancefilm such as this, to say more and more about less and less.

Mind you, more power to you if you can get some star-struck Arts-Funt Poobahs to stump up the cash. Inviting some hot-looking mates around to your place to bend themselves out of shape in their pants is not a bad alternative to truly innovative choreo-kino creativity.

Go here to see the Wikepedia article on the original work for contrast, comparison and a little critical clarity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_of_the_Medusa

Experimental - Dance theatre

Raft of Medusa from Lutz Gregor on Vimeo.

Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera - Soviet Union 1929. Production Company: Vufku. Director: Dziga Vertov. Photography: Mihail Kaufman.

His given name was David Abelevich Kaufman, although he adopted the Ukranian Dziga Vertov (lit.trans. Spinning Top)during his early years after the Bolshevik revolution whilst working for Kino-Nedelya (Кино-Неделя, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia.

Considered to be one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era "Man With A Movie Camera" was made 10 years into a very focused film making career. It owed no small debt to a strict and thorough grounding in all of the cinematic techniques available at the time.
Dissolves, split screen, slow motion, freeze frames, whip-panning and Dutch tilts to out-Orson the Welles himself, the film further displays a fundamental grasp of the uses and forms in which cinematic *meta-text* can be exercised.

During the honeymoon early post revolutionary period, gradually freeing itself from the yoke of generations of stifling Russian Imperial bourgeoisism, the nascent thought police of the Soviet State could not prevent a measure of liberalism in artistic circles.
This allowed many of the Russian film makers to get regular access to much of the new cinema techniques being similarly pioneered under the sunny and pollution free skies of California.

Startlingly modern, this film utilizes a groundbreaking style of rapid editing and innumerable new-minted cine-effects to create a work of amazing power, energy and timelessness.

Broad in its cinematic eye, breathtaking in its apparent simplicity, masking a huge scope of urban, industrialised human life in the early 20th century, even prescient about the realities of early 21st Century urban life, MWAMC is entirely unique in its fly-on-the-wall record of life in Soviet Russia in the 1920's.

Subversive by any standards, in the increasingly febrile and propoganda driven atmosphere of officially sanctioned film making of the 1920's Soviet era, Man With A Movie Camera was an object lesson in how the camera or at least, what it sees, can be persuaded to circumvent many of the accepted "truths" of presentation.

This was at a particular time and within a peculiarly constituted political system in which "truth" in its broadest sense whilst becoming less and less evident, was nonetheless valued - particularly among those who understood its value and fragility.

For many commentators and learned cine-critics, it is fair to point out that in many ways Vertov's use of this plethora of techniques served to run counter to his creative view:
"It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple."

However, on the basis that despite the use of advanced technologies to prove the moon is not entirely made of cheese, nothing can ever run counter to the actual truth, terrible beauty or sheer poetry of outer space, he comfortably argued against his own proto-Keatsianism with:
"Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope...now they have perfected the cine-camera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten."

In my view, far from being antagonistic, this perceived ambivalence to cinematic artifice allowed Vertov both to explore a far more interesting set of realities beneath surface veneer and still make films which appear to stay "on message".

He succeeds in making to order an "...'aint life fun, fun, FUN here in Moscow amid progroms, secret police surveillance, acute shortages and civil repression..." film, all the while simple yet sophisticated cinematic choices quietly and powerfully imprinting graphic insights into the human condition by what appear to be stock framing decisions, deliberate cinematic cliche and occasional glimpses of stocking-top. A neat trick.

After the fact, Vertov seems to be attempting to find within a formal and quite traditionalist cinematic eye, a whole new set of communicative possibilities to encode a notion of time and linear narrative, but which are nuanced and distinct from the techniques and artefacts still strongly associated with literature and theatrical artifice.

We are fortunate that the movie camera brought in the wake of its invention and early development, one of the few true early examples of Cinema as the first (some might argue, only) self-contained and genuinely novel 20th Century artform.
Complete with all of the distinctions and creative possibilities which result from new ways of "seeing" the world, cinematographers of the time were the doing the equivalent of what this generation of Information Superhighway pioneers and digital film makers are trying to do now - plus ça change....

Whilst not original - Vertov's mentors and direct influences included Eisenstein and DW Griffiths among many - it could be argued that his work was consequent with the rapid commercialisation of "the movies".

Fuelled then, as is still is in the USA, by a voracious capitalist investment and return machine, the advent of talkies further drove cinematography as a catholic art-form for its own sake, towards the commercialisation of an emergent Hollywood aesthetic and its global ilk,
This with all of the imperatives and preoccupations of making fairystory-driven mass-entertainment to get bums on seats.

Dziga Vertov and his pioneering approach, whetehr by accident or design, set out on another road, helping forge a distinctive and sturdy European art-house style of film making, alive and well to this day.

His greatest work coming as it does nearly halfway through his 20 odd year career.
Eventually falling foul of the artistic and personal compromises required of Stalinist social realism, Vertov and his Man With A Movie Camera slides neatly and independantly between the making and presentation of meaning in simplified linear forms to appeal to the widest demographic of consumers in the west and albeit more propoganda-driven versions of the same semi-literate and conceited efforts behind what by 1934, was rapidly becoming an the Iron Curtain in all but name.

There's a piquant irony in those most unlikely of bed-fellows, The Mighty Dollar and The Great Five Year Plan/Leap/March Forward ending up sclerotically staggering around in the same ever-decreasing cinematic circles. At least until the Berlin Wall dropped on them both.

Dziga Vertov's personal blend of montage, multi-layered time frames, character, action, metaphorical juxtaposition and auteurish faux-naivete have been credited with feeding into a divergent and experimental flowering of a third-way of approaching film making.

One which has done much to inform on and inspire the work of directors as diverse as Jean-Luc Goddard and Bresson. His techniques clearly impacting on more audience focused masters of cinema from Kurosawa and Tarkovsky to Kieslowski, Jarmusch and even the Coen Brothers to name a few whose "originality" can so often be attributable to previous technical innovators such as Vertov.

To see the film in its entirety with a brilliant score by The Alloy Orchestra, go here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6910724735856178670&hl=en

Here is a 9.00 minute clip from Youtube, with a more obvious and manipulative soundscape and score.



*meta-text*
Self-reflection on the actual process of making personal creative meaning as a formula.
This mindset can slip into conceited self-regard for the unwary, particularly if they suspect they might have a message for the world.

The notion of a movie audience, watching a man with a movie camera, being watched by another film unit, while the editor (in this case Vertov's wife) is seen splicing the footage of the audience watching a man being watched....all begins to engender the view that at least in terms of POV nothing much is new under the sun.