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A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
Dziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Kaufman also appears as the eponymous Man of the film.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
The Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) is an annual nonprofit international festival dedicated to the exhibition of underground and avant-garde cinema, video, and performance.The festival offers an opportunity for independent artists who are frequently overlooked by other conventional, market-driven film festivals to showcase and be recognized for their work though jury and audience awards. In addition to screenings, the festival also hosts events to build community amoungst the audience. Founded in 1993, the festival is widely regarded as the longest running festival of its kind.
Political cinema, in the narrow sense, refers to cinema products that portray events or social conditions, either current or historical, through a partisan perspective, with the intent of informing or agitating the spectator.
Rien que les heures is a 1926 experimental silent film by Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti showing the life of Paris through one day in 45 minutes.
Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing. It is the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to global cinema, and brought formalism to bear on filmmaking.
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis or Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is a 1927 German silent film directed by Walter Ruttmann, co-written by Carl Mayer and Karl Freund. Much of the motion in the film, and many of the scene transitions, are built around the motion of trains and streetcars.
The Shanghai Document is an early documentary film. This silent film was directed by Yakov Bliokh and was released in the USSR in 1928.
One of the principal features defining traditional cinema is a fixed and linear narrative structure. In Database Cinema however, the story develops by selecting scenes from a given collection like a computer game in which a player performs certain acts and thereby selects scenes and creating a narrative.
Rain is a 1929 Dutch short documentary film directed by Mannus Franken and Joris Ivens. It premiered on 14 December 1929, in the Amsterdam Filmliga's theater, De Uitkijk.
Documentary mode is a conceptual scheme developed by American documentary theorist Bill Nichols that seeks to distinguish particular traits and conventions of various documentary film styles. Nichols identifies six different documentary 'modes' in his schema: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative. While Nichols' discussion of modes does progress chronologically with the order of their appearance in practice, documentary film often returns to themes and devices from previous modes. Therefore, it is inaccurate to think of modes as historical punctuation marks in an evolution towards an ultimate accepted documentary style. Also, modes are not mutually exclusive. There is often significant overlapping between modalities within individual documentary features. As Nichols points out, "the characteristics of a given mode function as a dominant in a given film…but they do not dictate or determine every aspect of its organization."
A Sixth Part of the World, sometimes referred to as The Sixth Part of the World, is a 1926 silent film directed by Dziga Vertov and produced by Kultkino. Through the travelogue format, it depicted the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and detailed the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land. Focusing on cultural and economic diversity, the film is in fact a call for unification in order to build a "complete socialist society".
Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
An agit-train was a locomotive engine with special auxiliary cars outfitted for propaganda purposes by the Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia during the time of the Russian Civil War, War Communism, and the New Economic Policy. Brightly painted and carrying on board a printing press, government complaint office, printed political leaflets and pamphlets, library books, and a mobile movie theater, agit-trains traveled the rails of Russia, Siberia, and Ukraine in an attempt to introduce the values and program of the new revolutionary government to a scattered and isolated peasantry.
In Spring is a 1929 Soviet silent experimental documentary directed by Mikhail Kaufman. It was the first independent work of the cinematographer, made in accordance with the ideas of the avant-garde manifesto Kinoks and was Kaufman's directorial debut.
Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas, also referred to as Donbas Symphony or The Symphony of the Donbas Basin, is a 1931 sound film directed by Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. The film was the director's first sound film and also the first of the Soviet production company Ukrainfilm. The film's score is considered experimental and avant-garde because of its incorporation of factory, industrial, and other machine sounds; human speech plays only a small role in the film's sounds.
Kino-Eye is a film technique developed in Soviet Union by Dziga Vertov. It was also the name of the movement and group that was defined by this technique. Kino-Eye was Vertov's means of capturing what he believed to be "inaccessible to the human eye"; that is, Kino-Eye films would not attempt to imitate how the human eye saw things. Rather, by assembling film fragments and editing them together in a form of montage, Kino-Eye hoped to activate a new type of perception by creating "a new filmic, i.e., media shaped, reality and a message or an illusion of a message - a semantic field." Distinct from narrative entertainment cinema forms or otherwise "acted" films, Kino-Eye sought to capture "life unawares" and edit it together in such a way that it would form a new, previously unseen truth.
Skyscraper Symphony (1929) is an avant-garde silent short film by French-American filmmaker Robert Florey. The film was shot in the early morning hours in New York City. It captured skyscrapers which, by the late 1920s had become a global trademark of the city and became a representation of the ever-developing technologies in America, as well as the rapid growth of capitalism. Florey’s focus on the booming metropolitan in the post-World War I era has solidified this film as a “city symphony,” and he draws upon his own experience as a tourist in America to capture the excitement and uncertainty of being in New York City.
References
- 1 2 3 Weinberg, Herman (2018-07-20). The City Symphony Phenomenon. Routledge. p. 271. doi:10.4324/9781315619989-62.
- ↑ MUBI Collection: CITY SYMPHONIES|MUBI
- 1 2 Hutchinson, Pamela (2017). "Where to begin with city symphonies". BFI. Retrieved 2024-02-20.
- 1 2 3 4 The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars - Routledge
- ↑ The sound of silent s: is it time to revive the 'city symphony' film genre?|Cities|The Guardian