The key scene I will be examining is the " Odessa steps " sequence, a scene which has become iconic in cinema and acknowledged as a key example of Eisenstein's " montage " technique. However, my focus will not be primarily on the raw subject matter of the film, but instead on the formal techniques utilised by Eisenstein to execute his directorial vision. The film is thus a recreation with a great deal of artistic license exercised with regards to the actual events. We can first begin by examining Eisenstein's 1925 silent film " The Battleship Potemkin ", a dramatization of the historical events of the 1905 mutiny of the crew of the real life Battleship Potemkin against their commanding officers, commissioned to celebrate the 20 th anniversary of the 1905 Russian Revolution. I want to look at the ways both artists employ juxtaposition and collage techniques in their respective mediums in order to reveal contradictory and contrasting currents and tensions within the work, and how the two techniques differ in their approaches and historical precedents. I will situate the main thrust of my argument within the examination of the relationship between technology and the work within each, and how they both use technological and historical means to mount a critique of social institutions and systems of power. I also wish to situate historically the works I have chosen and as such formulate a view of the works that takes into account both the formal qualities present within the works and the historical circumstances which are in no way incidental to their creation and existence. In the form of this essay, I wish to undertake a study of the artistic language of both Soviet film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein and American hip hop group Public Enemy, as well as conducting a comparative of the two in order to uncover both similarities and divergences. The kinship between cinema and poetry was emphasized by Vertov when he noted in his diary, after having in vain waited to meet with Majakovskij: "I wanted to 44 The result is a palpable texture of visual analogies and rhythmic segments, homologous with the texture of a Futurist poem. Similarly, Vertov in his films destroys both the conventional semantics of the shots (by means of unusual frame compositions and camera angles), and the conventional syntagmatic relationships that would advance a narrative (by means of a striking use of montage). The arrangement of the words in rhythmical segments and by phonetic analogies endows the text with a new and fresh meaning, based on parallelism. In a poem such as, "Dyr bul scyl," by Alexander Kruchenykh, the destruction of the conventional semantic, syntactic, and prosodic elements liberates the words from every kind of causal relationships they become unmotivated and are therefore perceived as autonomous values. The constant foregrounding in Vertov's films of the two basic structural elements of cinema-the shot and the montage-is analogous to the Futurists' foregrounding of the structural elements of verse-sound and rhythm. Both in his writings and, implicitly, in his films, Vertov reiterated the fundamental principle that the artistic medium (in this case, the language of cinema) must be autonomous, self-referential and universal. His theoretical writings (especially his theory of the "cine-eye") as well as his films were avant-garde propositions, which had a long lasting and international influence.1 Vertov's concept of montage is particularly close to certain ideas and techniques which flourished among the Cubo-Futurists and the Formalists, and later in the LEF group. During that decade he completed three long series of newsreels, Kinonedelja, Kinopravda, and Goskinokalendar, and some twenty feature films. That's why I feel so close to both the folk songs and the poetry of Majakovskij." (Dziga Vertov) Among the masters of Soviet cinema of the 20's, Dziga Vertov played a very important role. "I work in the field of the poetic documentary film.
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