The Battleship Potemkin

the cause of this war was mainly due by the issue of education and labor. During this year the people of Russia were protesting in order to see change socially and politically. Another important event that happened in 1905 was the Russian Battleship Potemkin. It was a Navy black sea fleet operations ship that sailed on the black sea. While the ship was on a operation crew members later found that their food was not eatable, they complained to the captain. “At sea on June 14th (June 27th, Old…

Every country goes through or experiences something traumatic and drastic that changes the country’s paths along with their citizen forever and goes down in history, and for Russians that is the Russian Revolution. And with the Russian Revolutions comes a string of cause and effects leading to the “big event”. The Russian revolution brought a lot of transformation, replacing the traditional monarchy to the world’s first ever communist state. The Russian revolution came incontinently but the…

According to Tyler, “cinema was the ideal propaganda weapon for the second quarter of the twentieth century.” With the spread of communism in USSR in the 1920s, Soviet films- especially soviet montage was influenced by it. This essay will be exploring the ways in which Soviet montage film form or aesthetics have been affected by state ideology. In 1905, there was a turmoil and social unrest in Russia. Russian citizens, especially working class, who were outraged at their government began to…

The films of the Soviet Union and their relevant content very closely mirrored the changing eras and political climate of the times they were released. Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, film played a critical role in both perpetuating and diminishing the socialist ideologies of the Party, while providing artists and auteurs with a creative outlet in a relatively totalitarian state. Film as an art form was highly compatible with communism and the socialist ideologies of the Soviet Union…

A dejected and love struck movie projectionist dreams his way into the film world and in doing so reflects the audiences escapist tendencies, this is the crux of Buster Keaton’s 1924 silent comedy film Sherlock Jr. The film is a great example of silent era comedy films, of which Keaton was a prolific figure. Sherlock Jr. is just one of many that he starred in and directed throughout the first part of the twentieth century. Many times Keaton is contrasted with another great slapstick comedy…

German Expressionism was well known to be bold, dark, distorted and spooky. It was emerged in Germany before World War I but, it tremendously influenced music, theater, painting, sculpture and architecture. These German Expressionism films at first were non-realistic, geometrically absurd angles, as well as designs painted on walls and floors represent light, shadows and objects. Meanwhile, many of these films plots dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal and other intellectual topics were…

Imagine living in a world devoid of music. Of course we could survive without it, but everyday life would feel incredibly dull in comparison. While reading Richard Wright’s short story “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” you can already feel the varying emotions the author is portraying through his frustrated young protagonist Dave Sanders. This coming of age story set in the rural south was later turned into a 1961 TV movie starring LeVar Burton. In Almos’ a Man, a film version of the short story…

Dziga Vertov’s conception of montage is defined by a borrowed reference to music called the theory of intervals. In music, an interval is the difference between two notes and can be wide or short. More than a mere parallel montage, Vertov’s montage using intervals consists in extending a filmic movement by using another shot placed in the same filmic continuity, even if this second shot has been recorded elsewhere or in another time. Like in symphonic music, with recurrent themes and patterns…

Night and Fog, a short war documentary filmed ten years after world war two, was directed by Alain Resnais opened up with depicting the heavily guarded landscapes surrounding the concentration camps in color. While some scenes were portrayed in color, the majority of the film was depicted in black and white. This film was narrated in French by Michel Bouquet. Displaying Nazi terrorism, this film was proven to be disturbing among many audiences. The Nazi’s dehumanized the members of the…

that time an illegal organisation, had been propagating an insurrection of previously subjugated knowledges via the distribution of unofficial posters, leaflets, and most interestingly, postage stamps. Prisoners, who carved imprints out of leather and smuggled them to the outside, produced some of these stamps. The stamps constructed and represented a different history of Poland and located Solidarity within that history, in opposition, as Evans put it, “to the official histories produced by the…