The Men with the Movie Cameras: The Theory and Practice of Camera Operation within the Soviet Avant-Garde of the 1920s

Abstract

This article is about the camera operators who worked alongside the key film-directors of the Soviet avant-garde. This was a period when, on a theoretical level, cinema was increasingly defined in terms of photography and as a visual means of representation. Within the collaborative nature of the avant-garde units which emerged during the 1920s, the camera operator was regarded as a creative artist in his own right whose importance in terms of the development of a new film-language was critical. The article examines the intense and long-lasting nature of the collaborations between individual directors and their respective camera operators, and seeks to analyse the ways in which, working in harmony, they overturned pre-revolutionary visual conventions and forged a new expressive aesthetic. It also discusses the developments in technology which made this new aesthetic possible.