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.
Guy Hughes Carawan Jr. was an American folk musician and musicologist. He served as music director and song leader for the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee.
The Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, is a social justice leadership training school and cultural center in New Market, Tennessee. Founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski, it was originally located in the community of Summerfield in Grundy County, Tennessee, between Monteagle and Tracy City. It was featured in the 1937 short film, People of the Cumberland, and the 1985 documentary film, You Got to Move. Much of the history was documented in the book Or We'll All Hang Separately: The Highlander Idea by Thomas Bledsoe.
Myles Falls Horton was an American educator, socialist, and co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, famous for its role in the Civil Rights Movement. Horton taught and heavily influenced most of the era's leaders. They included Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and others who would create the Nashville Student Movement, Ralph Abernathy, John B. Thompson, and many others.
Work People's College was a radical labor college established in Smithville (Duluth), then a suburb of Duluth, Minnesota, in 1907 by the Finnish Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party of America. School administrators and faculty were sympathetic to the syndicalist left wing of the Finnish labor movement and the institution came into the orbit of the Industrial Workers of the World during the 1914-1915 factional battle that split the Finnish Federation. The school ceased operation in 1941.
The Workers Film and Photo League was an organization of filmmakers, photographers, writers and projectionists in the 1930s, dedicated to using film and photography for social change.
Lee Elhardt Hays was an American folk singer and songwriter, best known for singing bass with the Weavers. Throughout his life, he was concerned with overcoming racism, inequality, and violence in society. He wrote or cowrote "Wasn't That a Time?", "If I Had a Hammer", and "Kisses Sweeter than Wine", which became Weavers' staples. He also familiarized audiences with songs of the 1930s labor movement, such as "We Shall Not Be Moved".
Sidney Meyers, also known by the pen name Robert Stebbins was an American film director and editor.
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.
Jay Leyda was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film historian, noted for his work on U.S, Soviet, and Chinese cinema, as well as his documentary compilations on the day-to-day lives of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson.
Zilphia Horton was an American musician, community organizer, educator, Civil Rights activist, and folklorist. She is best known for her work with her husband Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School where she is generally credited with turning such songs as "We Shall Overcome", "We Shall Not Be Moved," and "This Little Light of Mine" from hymns into protest songs of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Long Haul is an autobiography of Myles Horton, labor organizer, founder of the Highlander School and perhaps the first practitioner of what would later be called popular education. Highlander used the principles of democratic education - where students were the authorities in the classroom, the teacher is a facilitator, and the focus of education is teaching collective action for social change - to play a key role in the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Horton pioneered many of the educational principles Paulo Freire would make famous worldwide in the 1980s.
"Cumberland Gap" is an Appalachian folk song that likely dates to the latter half of the 19th century and was first recorded in 1924. The song is typically played on banjo or fiddle, and well-known versions of the song include instrumental versions as well as versions with lyrics. A version of the song appeared in the 1934 book, American Ballads and Folk Songs, by folk song collector John Lomax. Woody Guthrie recorded a version of the song at his Folkways sessions in the mid-1940s, and the song saw a resurgence in popularity with the rise of bluegrass and the American folk music revival in the 1950s. In 1957, the British musician Lonnie Donegan had a No. 1 UK hit with a skiffle version of "Cumberland Gap".
Lester Balog was a labor activist and founding member of the Workers' Film & Photo League.
Leo Hurwitz was an American documentary filmmaker. Among the films he directed were Native Land (1942) and Verdict for Tomorrow (1961), the Peabody Award-winning and Emmy Award-nominated film of the Eichmann trial. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy period for his strong left-wing political beliefs.
The California Labor School was an educational organization in San Francisco from 1942 to 1957. Like the contemporary Jefferson School of Social Science and the New York Workers School, it represented the "transformed and upgraded" successors of the "workers schools" of the 1920s and 1930s.
Thomas J. Brandon (1908–1982) was a founding member of the New York Workers Film and Photo League. He later worked as a film distributor for Garrison Films before founding his own company, Brandon Films in November 1940. During the 1950s, Brandon Films owned the largest collection of 16mm available for general release in the United States. He was the first president of the New York Film Council, and helped to found the short-lived Film Forum in 1933 with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sidney Howard. In 1968, Brandon sold his company to Macmillan; the new entity became known as Audio-Brandon. His work in the 1970s to reclaim and publicize the history of 1930s film activism is an important source for film historians. Brandon's unpublished manuscripts and documents on radical film history are deposited at the New York Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center. Films from his collection were donated to several archives including the Museum of Modern Art and the U.S. Library of Congress, and others.
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.
Bev Grant is an American musician, photographer, filmmaker, and activist based in New York City.
