Garage Auditorium
19.00
Free
Limited places, drop in early to avoid disappointment
The avant-garde cinema emerged in the USSR thanks to a program of commercial
films which were shown in Moscow by Ilya Ehrenburg. However, there was also an
influence from European non-objective experimental cinema on Soviet social
cinema. The most notable of these films is “The Mechanical ballet” by Fernand
Leger. Film scholars believe that its “dancing bottles” influenced the “glasses
dancing” on the table of the Provisional Government in Sergei Eisenstein’s
“October”. In the lecture and screening you will have a chance to watch
fragments of many of these important films, including Eisenstein’s “Strike”,
“Cine-eye”, “Man with a Movie Camera”, by Dziga Vertov, “Berling: Symphony of a
Great City” by Walter Ruttmann and “Moscow” by Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya
Kopalin.
Concluding the evening will be Rene Clairs witty film “Intermission” – a parody
on the avant-garde cinema by the film director of commercial cinema.
Nikolay Izvolov is a film historian and head of the Department of the history
of home moviemaking and theory of film art at Scientific Research Institute of
Film Art
