David Vining's Blog, page 21

The General Line (or, Old and New)

This is a very conscious change in direction from Eisenstein and his codirector Grigori Aleksandrov. Eisenstein’s first three films (including October: Ten Days that Shook the World which was also codirected by Aleksandrov) had no main characters. They barely had characters at all. Well, now, in The General Line, the entire film revolves around one character, a woman farmer. The pair do not remove themselves from the propaganda, but they do change what they’re propagandizing for. The former ...

October: Ten Days that Shook the World

This was the one Eisenstein film I was most looking forward to discovering. I’d seen five of the completed seven, but this was one of the two that I’d never seen. It interested me the most. A history of the period of just under a year leading up to the dissolution of the Provisional Government in St. Petersburg at the hands of the Bolshevik forces under Lenin, this had to have been Eisenstein’s unheralded epic and magnum opus. Except, it’s more like Strike in having no real core to it to car...

Battleship Potemkin

This is Eisenstein applying everything he’d pushed the envelope stylistically on in Strike and applying it in a more streamlined fashion. A stripped down version of a much larger project that was going to include a huge history of the 1905 Revolution, Eisenstein, convinced he didn’t have enough time, focused on one episode, the rebellion of the sailors on the eponymous battleship. And it works…extremely well. This is something of a marvel of silent filmmaking. It’s exciting, tight at only 70...

Well…

I guess I need to see Anora now. To keep the rankings up to date, of course.

Strike

In 1925, Sergei Eisenstein brought his experimental theatrics to the world of cinema, embracing cross-cutting, non-linear editing, and what would later get labeled as cinema verite, applying it all to what was supposed to be a giant, multi-part story of the proletariat from about 1905 to the October Revolution in 1917 (reminding me of Abel Gance’s large plan for a series of films about the life of Napoleon). They only got about three movies into the plan (Battleship Potemkin was a reworking ...

Sergei Eisenstein: A Statement of Purpose

Why Eisenstein?

Seriously, why not? One of the three men I consider to be the fathers of cinematic language (the others being Melies and Griffith), Eisenstein started the latest (the early 20s), comes from a distinctly different culture (Revolutionary Russia), and only ever made propaganda for an evil regime.

And he was really good at it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any of them, though. I saw both Strike and Battleship Potemkin in college. I purchased the Eisenstein The So...

Some Books!

I would have delayed a bit longer, but I’m about to start reading a larger work, and I just finished another longer work and didn’t want to lose my thoughts.

So, what have I been reading? It’s not a long list right now.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

I swore I had read this before, but I could only recall one scene. So, following that list of 50 best British novels of the 19th Century, I picked it back up. And…the scene I remembered is not in the book.

That’s weird.

I guess I haven’t...

Next…

Roger Corman: A Quick Break

As I said when I started, I was going to have a quick break in the middle of this Roger Corman run.

It’s a scheduling thing, mostly. I also figured I could use a break in the middle of the B-movie schlock. Well, I actually delayed things a week because I was having a good time.

But, scheduling demands remain, so here’s my break.

It’s only seven movies that are going to interrupt the King of Cult’s directorial run, so I’ll be back in just over a week.

The change is gonna be some w...

Tales of Terror

I was happy to see the return of Richard Matheson as writer on a Roger Corman Poe film, and yet it ends up being my least favorite of the Poe cycle so far. It’s not bad, but the three short films are quite uneven, the longest of them being the least of them, and I was left more frustrated than entertained on balance. It also doesn’t help that my favorite of the three is the first one, making everything afterwards a failure to live up to the opening.

The three tales of the macabre begin wi...