avant garde cinema
ESSAY 1: AVANT-GARDE CINEMA The avant-garde movement, which was one of the most controversial art movements, began in France in the 1850s. ... The avant-garde movement, in its film form, developed in the 1920s, primarily in France, when motion pictures became the new art of the twentieth century. ... The expression “avant-garde,” which is of French origin, is a military metaphor, literally meaning, “advance-guard. ... In the same way, the aim of the avant-garde cinema was to challenge the clear-cut rules of the traditional films, and its rationalism and its realism, and the values held by society as a whole -- a culture dominant of the upper crust, elite, bourgeois -- freeing themselves from the demands and constraints of commercial film-making conventions, and broadening the perspective of a close-minded society. Avant-garde explored the limits of cinema by radical and innovative ways films could be made, and the ways stories could be told; it was political, experimental, progressive, counter-cultural, alternative, modernistic, futuristic, confrontational, shocking, and provocative. Certain artistic movements within the avant-garde movement itself were more intense in different parts of the world: such as futurism in Italy, expressionism in Germany, and surrealism in France. These individual artistic movements, along with many more, all with their own unique characteristics, grouped together as a collective, became known as the avant-garde movement. ... Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, a Russian film done in 1929, is an example of what was called the Soviet Avant-Garde. ... The camera, portraying a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk, and at the same time glorifying industrialism, travels where we cant -- up smokestacks, under train tracks-- and through continuous explosions of cinematic trickery and radical film editing – undercover filming, distance shots, variable camera speeds, dissolves, superimposition, slow motion, crude animation, freeze frames, split-screen effects, the use of prismatic lenses, and tightly structured montage -- Vertov transformed not only reality, but also traditional narrative cinema; he used the occasion to demonstrate every resource at the directors command - the picture becomes not only a record of a day in the life of a city, but an essay on the art of filmmaking itself.