Russian Formalism PDF

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Russian Formalism...

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Russian Formalism

Russian formalism appeared in Russia in the early twentieth century as a theory of literature (1915). More specifically, it is the first text-centric view of text in the theory of literature. Examining the concept of Formalism, as a broader art form, we will see that it strongly influenced the formation of cinema, taking the form of a movement. Formalism is a style of filmmaking in which aesthetic forms take precedence over the subject matter of the film as content. Time and space are distorted. The emphasis is on the essential, symbolic characteristics of objects and people, and not necessarily on the external appearance. Formalists are often lyrical, and consciously sharpen their style in order to draw attention to it as if it has value in itself. In the mid-1890s in France, the first short films began to appear, in which their directors were interested in expressing their unshakable subjective experience of reality, and not how it was treated by the wider society. The camera is used as a method of commenting on the subject matter, a way of emphasizing the substantive rather than the objective nature. In formalist films there is a high degree of manipulation, reshaping of reality. But it is precisely these "distorted" products of the imagination that can be so artistically striking in these films. In the 1920s, Russian filmmakers forced people to pay attention to them. Of course, the conditions under which they worked were special, at least until the end of this decade. This huge work of Soviet cinema, mainly on its expressive methods and with special emphasis on the element of editing, actually begins in 1922 and flourishes until about 1927. Russian Soviet formalism was the first film school of art to emerge from 1924 to 1933. The most important exponents and creators of this great school were: Lev Kulesov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov and especially Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein. Aesthetics came in contact with the artistic avant-garde, academic conservatism was receding, and artists from all fields of art rallied, in the name of art. This spiritual movement did not experience a moment of relaxation, on the contrary it was activated and was in constant intensity. This tension had as a direct result the creation of a genuine intellect and not an academic hierarchy, it was the culmination of "Russian Formalism". Cinema was influenced by this climate. Lenin more specifically described the art of cinema as "the most important of all the arts," a fact which was attributed to the enormous expressive power of cinema and, above all, to its great appeal to the masses. Intellectuals from all fields of art, they were

passionately involved with the "newborn art", causing with their theoretical and practical work, awe. Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Vertov, and especially Eisenstein, were at the forefront of this majestic "outbreak" of Soviet cinema during its heyday. Here we will briefly present the main features of the work of the first. Lev Kulesov (1899-1970) was in fact the first theorist of cinema aesthetics. More than half of the directors have been students since 1920, in the "experimental film workshop" he founded, which included Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and most recently Parazanov. From the beginning, Kulesov dealt with problems of form and structure. He wanted to recognize the material nature of cinema, believing that it should be the film itself and not the photographic image. Just as music was the manipulation and arrangement of sounds and painting the application and arrangement of colours, so cinema was the quintessence of the arrangement of film strips. Consistent with this reasoning, he boldly announced that what was called the narrative or dramatic content of a film was irrelevant to the structural articulation of its material. In other words, as he himself argued, form is more important than content. So he wrote in one of his first articles, that the order in which different pieces of film are glued - the editing - was the alpha and omega of the cinematic effect on the viewer and he repeated that the most important thing is "how" they are assembled the shots, despite the "about whom" it was. In this way the "how" the elements of the film were connected became as important as the elements themselves (content). More specifically, he was the first to consciously perceive and practice experimentally on the strong influence of cinema, through the influence of editing, on the viewer. In other words, investigate the effect that two or more images connected to the montage would have, one behind the other, in the viewer's mind, even if they do not have such a relationship in reality. Here it would be important to mention the well-known "Mozukin Experiment", with which Kulesov confirmed the above-mentioned hypothesis. Having found a close-up, meaning a very close-up shot of the face of the completely expressionless and neutral face of Russian actor Ivan Mozukin, he intervened three different shots. The first was a shot of a steaming soup plate, a woman in a coffin and a child playing with a teddy bear. The main purpose of the director was to create in the viewer's mind three different emotions, exclusively through the editing and not at all through Mozukin's acting, which as we mentioned remained unexpressed. When the shot of Mozukin stuck to the shot of the plate with the food the hunger was expressed, when the shot of the coffin was stuck the sadness was expressed and when the happy child was stuck the joy of the actor was expressed, even if the actor did not make a face .

Combining shots of the White House with steps from a famous building in Moscow, where his actors walked, he also created "artificial cities" and buildings that did not exist in reality. As a result, he composed with the help of the montage a woman using body parts of four different women. What he wanted to prove with these targeted distortions of reality was the fact that physical space and "real" time could indeed be subject to editing, since in the viewer's consciousness the edited material definitely has a relationship with each other, even if as we have mentioned, this relationship is absent from reality. Finally, Kulesov gives weight to the position of the objects in each frame, while equating him with this actor, who calls him a "model" and requires him to prepare hard....