The General Line : Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov
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Eisenstein’s The General Line [1929] is a series of intellectual montages consisting of stills which is more like a creative docufiction than feature narrative film. I think this one is a clean film following the principles and practices of Russian formalism in film.
Collage 1: Eisenstein
had an incredible artistic senses and skills to create a brief graphic
narrative just by sequencing motion profiles and stills images.
Collage 2: Melting candles, slavering cattle, waving flags and weeping devotees composed one of the intellectual montages in the film.
Collage 3: The rebellious woman formed a cooperative to earn
money and there was a conflict raised over profit distribution and followed a greedy
and violent consequences. This is a prototype of collective operation.
Collage 4:The woman in the slumber land dreaming of a herd of bovines at the beach and a god-like bovine appeared in the sky and poured milk on earth, this one so Dadaistic in nature. But it shifted immediately to the modern mechanic production system that reflects the industrialization in modern Russia. Could anyone other than Eisenstein [ as well Charlie] think of this montage to tell the story in the silent era?
Collage 5: The bare feet and the feet on
shoes are the elegant motifs in this sequence. More like the difference between
those have and those have not; more like the constant distance between the old
and the new.
Collage 6: This sequence consists of some pulsating myths that highlight the woman’s free fall and the balloon’s free flight and the cow’s appearance and the woman’s rising up with a mouthful of smile make a very measured and nerve tightening brief narrative- the style only Eisenstein have mastered in.
When I have started searching archival data and literary & artistic data on the Great Bengal famine to write a novel on pre-independence age, Japanese invasion of Burma [present Myanmar], American military base on Calcutta [present Kolkata], the Bengal famine, communal riot and partition in a greater scale back in 2018. I did not find much in Bengali initially significant except sketches of Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Zoynul Abedin; in 2021 I came to know that Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket [1973] is based on Bengal Famine which was adapted from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s eponymous novel [1959]. I read this novel in 2023. Chittaprosad, ‘’Life behind the Front Lines’’, page from People’s War, 24 September, 1944; Source: P.C Joshi Collections, Dr. B.R Ambedkar Central Library, JNU, Delhi Source: https://indigenousweb.com/blog/chittaprosad-bhattacharya-political-art/ Khwaja Ahmed Abbas’ Dharti Ke Lal [1946] shares some common features and outline of the narrative loosely both Me...
Two things that had made Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus [1928] very inimitable and grand. First the narrative style and second keeping the film silent in the advent of talkies. Another aspect that is very unusual and still mysterious to me as I have not finished my reading of Chaplin’s Autobiography. It is infamous that The Circus is the only Chaplin’s film which he didn’t mention in his autobiography. It should be researched well resourcefully whether it is that he went through the great turmoil in his private life during its production or it is that he faced an adversary in the professional settings and took the most risky decision not to go with the flow to uphold the aesthetic excellence and integrity of cinema. All the erstwhile feature films he followed the identical formula for dramatic structure of love triangle. In The Kid [1921], the woman was abandoned by the artist, Millet shot himself after being refused by Marie in The Woman of Paris [1923] and in his third fea...
The assembly of multi ethnic & religious people in the tumultuous time of great wars; the difficulties of verbal communications in the midst of various languages; the adversity and hardship in the desertion and escapement attempts in the life as a POW; overall, the unilateral suffering and futile purposes of wars are the concerns I have been researching for the literary and artistic documents and references of the situations in the Mesopotamian campaign [1914-1918]. I have already listed some references but I haven’t thought I will come across one of the finest artistic representations that has been expressed well in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion [1937] where I have found all of them in a single cinema. I am instantly enchanted by its pacifist and humanistic attitudes. Very few cinemas showed the unconventional friendship between Boëldieu [French aviator] & Rauffenstein [German aviator] like Frantz [German soldier] & Adrien [French soldier] in Frantz [2...
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