The men with the book cameraata

Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant garde during the silent era which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films especially on the poetics of composition and lighting In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s owing to the fetishization of the camera as an embodiment of modern technology the cameraman was an iconic figure whose creative contribution was encouraged and respected Drawing upon the film literature of the period Philip Cavendish describes the culture of the camera operator charts developments in the art of camera operation and studies the mechanics of key director cameraman partnerships He offers detailed analysis of Soviet avant garde films and draws comparisons between the visual aesthetics of these works and the modernist experiments taking place in the other spheres of the visual arts The Men with the Movie Camera The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant Garde Cinema of the 1920sA fascinating take on a little written about subject the contribution of camera operators to Soviet cinema Cavendish guides the reader through the major collaborative partnerships of early Soviet film Eisenstein and Tisse Pudovkin and Golovnia Moskvin and FEKS Demutsky and Dovzhenko and explores the specific contribution that the camera operators made He highlights how at some points their role was at least as significant as the directors He also looks at the conflicts between them and the directors and how often the directors would underplay the role of their operators in the making of the film Cavendish does an excellent in restoring their place and also looks at the artistic influences that would inspire these operators He then highlights how the 1930s with the invention of sound the advent of socialist realism and stalinist repression indeed a number of camera operators were affected by this most notably Vadimir Nilsen who was shot in 1938 and left to posterity a pioneer study on the creative use of the camera The Cinema as a Graphic Art meant that the role of the camera operator was downplayed By focusing on the camera operator Cavendish gives us a much wider understanding of the classic Soviet montage classics themselves and adds immeasurably to our understanding of these films Hardcover