Filmele avangardei

The image is from Things to Come; the movie was made in Great Britain in 1936. Alexander Korda was the producer, the director was William Cameron Menzies, and Herbert George Wells wrote the screenplay, based loosely on one of his novels.

I saw some scenes at the Exhibition of Modern Art that was some time ago at the Corcoran in Washington DC. Later I found the movie on the web.

I am passionated for the movies of the Avant-Garde of the twenties and thirties and I looked for them on the web; I bought also a lot of DVDs: I'll start here on the blog with a forerunner, Griffith, then Eisenstein will follow, then Vertov and Ruttmann, Protazanov and Lang, Kirsanov and Epstein, Ralph Steiner and Eggeling, Leni Riefenstahl, Man Ray, Hammid; though before all of them I should mention Ivens, with his masterpieces, De Brug and Regen.

Some of them were persuaded by the musical structure of the cinematic language (and this in the epoch of silent); some others were persuaded by the rapport between plot and camera; some others had an extraordinary sense of the rhythm in telling the story; some had that particular balance in telling the story, a secret that only great poets posses.

They would be followed by other generations: the unique Maya Deren, then Stan Brakhage.... Ozu... De Sica... Parajanov... Hou Hsiao-Hsien... Kim Ki-Duk... Wong Kar-Wai...

It is the place to name some great cameramen: Bitzer... Tisse... Chris Doyle...

• Un film esential - Intolerance
• Dziga Vertov
• Joris Ivens
• De Hef: a Dutch Documentary from the Second Half of the Twenties
• Rien que les heures - Parisul lui Alberto Cavalcanti
• Fifo - Film und Foto Internationale Ausstellung - Stuttgart, 1929
• Aelita - povestea unui film constructivist
• Innemann, Miller, Kminek - The Czech Way of Reinventing the Fairy Tales
• Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling
• Mannahatta
• ¡Qué viva México!
• Vormittagspuck
• Hans Richter - Filmstudie, 1926
• Caligari
• Leni Riefenstahl: Olympia
• Menschen am Sonntag
• Un Chien Andalou
• Majakovsky: a Movie from 1918
• Robert J. Flaherty
• F. W. Murnau 
• Herman G. Weinberg, Autumn Fire, 1931 
• John Grierson
• André Sauvage: Études sur Paris (1928)
• Olga Preobrazhenskaya
• Lev Kuleshov
• Yakov Protazanov
• Vsevolod Pudovkin
• 1920's Finland - Arrival of the Ice Breaker
• In the Year 2017
• Abram Room
• Grigori Kozintsev

(Filmofilia)

(Avangarda 20)