USSR

14 pages about Sergei Eisenstein and Montage.
Read More »

‘Watson and Scotland Yard always work along the line of direct
logic, Sherlock Holmes works not by logic, but by dialectics’. This
dialectics, in its turn, draws on ‘the whole fund of prelogical,
sensuous thought’ that ‘serves as a fund of the language of form’ that
Eisenstein defines as ‘readable expressiveness’. Eisenstein’s
elaborate study of a method of art rooted in ‘the twilight stage of
primitive thought’ moves from folk tales to Shakespeare, Balzac,
Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Mayakovsky, to come eventually to
the detective story, ‘the most effective genre of literature’ and ‘the
most naked expression of bourgeois society’s fundamental ideas on
property’, as it is told by Poe, Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery
Queen, and Hitchcock in Spellbound.
Writing while he was making Ivan, Eisenstein opens up, in his
characteristic manner, a whole area of thinking on ‘the psychology
of composition’. Published in English for the first time, these lectures
and lecture notes have been assembled and translated by Jay Leyda
and Alan Upchurch.Read More »

Synopsis (From IMDB)
Four vignettes in Batista’s Cuba dramatize the need for revolution; long, mobile shots tell almost wordless stories. In Havana, Maria faces shame when a man who fancies her discovers how she earns her living. Pedro, an aging peasant, is summarily told that the land he farms has been sold to United Fruit. A university student faces down a crowd of swaggering U.S. sailors and then watches friends shot by police when they try to distribute a pro-Castro leaflet. The war arrives on the doorstep of peasants Mariano, Amelia, and their four children when Batista’s forces bomb the hills. Mariano wants peace, so he seeks out the guerrillas to join the fight.Read More »

Description: This is not Eisenstein’s film, but a series of montage lessons by V. Chubisov using Eisenstein’s films for examples…

levchin specifies

Quote:
that the filmmaker is Vadim CHUBASOV, not Chubisov, who taught at the Kiev Theater/TV/Film Institute for many years, and died recently. Moreover, the title of this film is Lessons in Editing, not A Montage Lesson.
No one seems to know when it was made. Judging by the video style it must be the ’80s. Clearly this is an instructional film, commissioned and produced by the Karpenko-Kary film school in Kiev.

Credits, Production and Release Information
Director, Scenario: Vadim Chubasov
Comissioned and produced by: Karpenko-Kary film school (Kiev)Read More »

plot:
Film is set in the future. A spaceship named “Tantra” is exploring the unknown part of the
Universe, and gets trapped by the “Iron Star”. It’s powerful force of gravity is to hold the
spaceship for 20 years. The crew is facing a very tough survival challenge, being surrounded
by the invisible predators. The predators can eat human flesh right through the heavy
spacesuit. Only the light can scare them away.Read More »

Quote:
Based on a novel by Isaac Asimov, the film deals with the idea that some people could get immortality by means of controlling the time periods inside the special lab-city called “Vechnost”. They look like people but they are trained to work for Vechnost forever, as a part of its mechanism. They correct time holes, help people from other times to solve their problems by means of a special mind operating system. Everyone from Vechnost is immortal and they live in a very futuristic looking place in the center of time . As some periods of time get blocked from them, two engineers are sent to solve the problem but the operation starts to go wrong.Read More »

Ankara – serdtse Turtsii aka Ankara-The heart of Turkey is a Soviet documentary made for the 10th anniversary of the new Turkish Republic in the year 1934.

The story starts over a pastoral view of Turkey, we see some country people going to the new capital : Ankara. Same time, there is Soviet ships passing thru Bosphorus, Istanbul. Soviet military and diplomatic people reach Ankara by train as young turks and scooters. We watch the city by the air… Some archeological views… The new city, the young people, some folkloric plays, modern buildings, gymnasium, modern art school, university studies and finally 10th anniversary stadium ceremony…Read More »

SYNOPSIS
With Zerkalo (The Mirror), legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky crafts perhaps his most profound and compelling film. What started off for Tarkovsky as a planned series of interviews with his own mother evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Time shifts and generations merge as a single extraordinary actress (Margarita Terekhova) plays the narrator’s former wife as well as his mother. Tarkovsky’s memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of Tarkovsky’s father reading his own elegiac poetry. The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is captured by Tarkovsky’s camera as if by magic–the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a wheat field–all creating indelible images with deep if mysterious emotional resonance. As the timeline shifts between the narrator’s generation and his mother’s, newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs, and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present, and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panopticon of memory, history, and nature. (Rotten Tomatoes)Read More »

Ernest Hemingway’ wrote a short story called “The Killers”. It has penetrated the interest of readers and filmmakers since it was initially brought to the public. First in film in 1946, by director Robert Siodmak with his adaptation of ‘The Killers’. It was the epitome of the term ‘film noir’. In 1956, then-film student Andrei Tarkovsky brought the world his version in a 19-minute short and then in 1964, Don Siegel (originally on tap to direct the 1946 version) took the reigns for yet another version.Read More »