diff --git a/content/syllabus/firstsyllabus.md b/content/syllabus/firstsyllabus.md index deec37b..af6babf 100644 --- a/content/syllabus/firstsyllabus.md +++ b/content/syllabus/firstsyllabus.md @@ -21,6 +21,10 @@ Author’s note: I have chosen to insert youtube clips throughout my analysis—
+* Odessa +* The Steps + + Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929), having recently celebrated its 80th anniversary, is a treasure of Soviet cinema. Of all cinema, really. Vertov’s film is a courageous and formidable work in countless respects, well deserving the popular and academic attention it has received throughout its 80 years. It’s fair to argue that such a film is therefore quite undeserving of the sordid analysis presented here. Alas, that argument awaits my critics, and certain viewers who choose to ignore the barefaced and brazen sexual insinuation coursing through this film. My claim here is to present striking parallels between Vertov’s Camera (potent images of a film Camera appear throughout the film, both with and without a camera operator) and the ubiquitous cock in heterosexual, narrative pornographic film. This study will not be limited to a simple Camera-as-Cock comparison, but will also comprise an analysis of Vertov’s depictions of the Camera Operator’s relationship to his hefty tools of empowerment, capture, and ejaculation (the film Camera and the film Projector) in relation to the (generalized) male pornstar’s reliance on his equally essential tool of sexual triumph—the Cock. But let us not rush to penetration before we have set the mood… Dziga Vertov was a racy figure, both socially and politically; his artistic body of work served principally to advance his contentious ideals. [1] As a teenager, he began writing extensively on the subject of cinema; his poems and manifestos were remarkably confident and sometimes virulent. He unequivocally despised traditional narrative filmmaking and sought to establish a cinematic language independent of literature and theatre (as proclaimed most succinctly in the opening titles of Man With a Movie Camera). An account of Vertov’s writings and contemporary critical responses to his work are found in Yuri Tsivian’s Lines of Resistance, skillfully tracking Vertov’s career through the 1920’s as he built toward realizing Man With A Movie Camera, the pinnacle of his artistic and critical success.