Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1918 as a volunteer at the Moscow Cinema
Committee, in charge of editing the first news-
reels sent from the
AGIT
-
TRAINS
in the country-
side. He then traveled in propaganda trains and
shot his first film,
Godovshchina revoliutsii
(
The
Anniversary of the Revolution
) (1919). A member of
the Kinoglaz (Cine-Eye) group, Vertov worked
on its first manifesto, issued in August 1922.
Entitled
We: Variant of a Manifesto,
the manifesto
asserted that “future of cinema art lies in a rejec-
tion of its present,” and extolled the virtues of
the machine, and particularly the camera, in
creating, new Soviet man and, new Soviet real-
ity. Kinoglaz's second manifesto,
The Cine-Eyes: A
Revolution
(1923), further developed the mech-
anical theme, stating “I am the Cine-Eye. I am
the mechanical eye. I, the man-cine, show you
the world as only I can see it.” Vertov first devel-
oped his ideas on the construction of new reality
through dynamic editing (montage) in a series of
Kinopravda (Cine-truth) newsreels (1922-24).
He also worked on a series of feature-length
documentaries,
Shagai, Sovet!
(
Forward, Soviet!,
1926),
Shestaia chast mira
(
A Sixth Part of the
World,
1926),
Odinnatsatyi
(
The Eleventh Year,
1928), and
Chelovek s kinoapparatom
(
Man with the
Movie Camera,
1929), the latter perhaps his best-
known work. Vertov experimented next with
editing sound both in harmony with and in
counterpoint to edited images:
Sinfoniia Donbassa
(
Symphony of the Donbass,
known also as
Enthusi-
asm,
1930),
Tri pesni o Lenine
(
Three Songs of Lenin,
1934), and
Kolybelnaya
(
Lullaby,
1937). Vertov
fell from favor in the 1930s as his films became
increasingly inaccessible to mass audiences, but
he remains perhaps the most important theo-
retician of documentary cinema. He was arrested
during the Great Purge but later released and
permitted to continue his career, although no
further films appeared under his name.
avant-garde architecture in Russia and the
Soviet Union. Leonid was educated at the Acad-
emy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg (1901-9),
while Viktor and Aleksandr graduated from the
Institute of Civil Engineering in St. Petersburg.
Of the three, Aleksandr stood out as the leader,
not only in shaping their joint designs but also
because of his work in the fields of design phi-
losophy, theory, and criticism. Aleksandr was
one of the main forces behind the creation of the
architectural faculty of the seminal State Higher
Art and Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas) in
1920. With Moisei
GINSBURG
, he founded the
Society of Contemporary Architects in 1925 and
edited its journal,
Sovremennaia arkhitektura
(
Con-
temporary Architecture
) from 1926 to 1930.
Although a number of their constructions sur-
vive to this day, mainly in Moscow, the Vesnin
brothers staked a claim in the history of Soviet
architecture for designs that were either later
torn down (the Karl Marx monument on Mos-
cow's
RED SQUARE
) or never built (designs for the
Palace of Labor competition, the Leningrad
Pravda building). Their designs were often char-
acterized by asymmetrical structures. The Vesnin
brothers also contributed to town planning,
applying the ideas of the “ribbon city” in designs
for Stalingrad and Kuznetsk in 1930, which later
formed the basis of Soviet town-planning princi-
ples. When the newly formed All-Union Acad-
emy of Architecture adopted the tenets of
socialist realism in 1932, the Vesnin brothers
remained true to their principles. No longer in
the mainstream of Soviet architecture and town
planning, they concentrated on industrial pro-
jects such as the Dneprostroi hydroelectric
power dam on the Dnieper River in the Ukraine.
village prose
A literary movement that flourished from the
1950s through the 1970s, Russian “village prose.”
Its members were known as
derevenshchiki,
a term
derived from the Russian word for village,
derevnya.
Among the leading
derevenshchiki
were
authors such as Vasili
SHUKSHIN
Vesnin Brothers
architects
Three brothers, Leonid (1880-1933), Viktor
(1882-1950), and Aleksandr (1883-1959), who
were influential in developing constructivist
(1929-74),
Feodor
ABRAMOV
(1920-1983) and Valentin
Search WWH ::
Custom Search