Montage Of Attractions Research Articles

Советское искусство на художественных выставках и в экспозициях российских музеев и галерей 1990–2020-х годов

The article systematizes the approaches to the study and presentation of Soviet art material in the post-Soviet period and gives a periodization of changes in these approaches. The author refers to the types of exhibition recycling of Soviet art, mainly in the practice of the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, and the Central Exhibition Halls of Moscow and St. Petersburg. In general, two types of temporary exhibitions of Soviet material stand out: research exhibitions and attraction exhibitions. The purpose of research exhibitions is to introduce previously unknown or marginalized layers of artistic culture into scientific circulation and the public sphere. In relation to this work, these are research exhibitions of the Russian-Soviet avant-garde and artistic movements of the 1920s-1930s and non-conformism of the 1940s-1980s. The goals of attraction exhibitions (the proposed term is based on S. Eisenstein’s well-known method of “the montage of attractions”) are associated with the creation of an entertaining visual environment that affects the viewer, offering them ways of understanding the Soviet past ideologized in the Soviet style. The purpose of the article is also to show how the cultural policy of temporary exhibitions affects the re-expositions of the State Russian Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery, that is, the formation of certain patterns or scenarios for the presentation of the art of the Soviet past.

«Назад к Островскому»: деконструкция постановки классики в режиссерском театре 1920-х годов

Ostrovsky’s centenary in 1923 gave impetus for a major leap in the history of directing. Ostrovsky turned out to be the first author whose plays were staged almost simultaneously (within 3 years) in all styles of Russian directing. Alexander Tairov staged “The Storm” at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre, in 1924, by mythologizing Ostrovsky’s tragedy. The myth of the Russian soul outside the boundaries of time turned out to be in the center of his performance. The psychological portrayal of the 19th-century drama’s character was mastered by the mythological approach. Such components as mythological thinking, constructivism, and the concept of Ostrovsky’s secret mysticism of the Russian soul were combined for the first time. Actress Alisa Koonen delved into the archetype of the heroine. The avant-garde production of Sergey Eisenstein’s “Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man” at the First Workers’ Theatre of Proletkult (1923) was connected with the ancient tradition of the fairground booth show. For the first time in the history of the Russian theatre, a director used the principles of open actualization of the classic play, the connections between drama and the circus, cinematic methods in the theatre, and a “montage of attractions”. “A Profitable Position” staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold (Theatre of the Revolution, 1923) was associated with Russian romanticism. The production revealed the two worlds — the spiritual reality in the opposition to the material everyday life. The metaphorical performance was built according to the principle of a thematic development similar to music. In “The Forest” at the Meyerhold Theatre (1924), the director contrasted three genres and semantic layers: a farcical level, a love line, as in Russian romanticism of the 19th century, and a layer that united the structure — acting and theatricality (the leitmotif of actors and acting). The visual dynamic of the dialogue with hyperbolic expression became the director’s principle approach. In his work on the production “An Ardent Heart” (Moscow Art Theatre, 1926), Stanislavsky created the phenomenon of the psychological grotesque. The performance was perceived by most critics as satirical and accusatory. Stanislavsky did not lose interest in the motives of human behavior, especially of a theatrical nature, and revealed a certain way of human thinking. The progress in the new discoveries in Ostrovsky’s dramaturgy in the first half of the 1920s shaped the main courses in which the Russian theatre was developing in the 20th century.

Acousmatic Foley: Son-en-Scène

“Acousmatic Foley” is practice-based research on sound dramaturgy stemming from musique concrète and Foley Art. This article sets out a theory based on the concept of “son-en-scène”, which forms the sonic content of the mise-en-scène, as perceived (esthesic sound). The theory departs from the well-known features of a soundscape (R. M. Schafer, 1999) and the listening modes in film as asserted by Chion (1994), in order to arrive at three main concepts: sound-prop, sound-actor and sound-motif. Throughout their conceptualization, the study theorizes a sonic dramaturgy that focuses on the sounds themselves and their practical influence on film's story-telling elements. For that, it conveys an assessment of sound in film-history based on the “montage of attractions” and foley art, together with the principles of acousmatic listening. This research concludes that film-sound should be to sound designers what a “sonorous object” is to musique concrète, albeit conveying all sound’s fictional aspects.

META-REFERENTIAL REALITY IN THE ABYSS OF MEDIA IMAGES AND THEORIES

McLuhan’s statement “the medium is the message”, made at the time of the expansion of television in the 1960s, was confirmed by the advent of the Internet, social media platforms and the digital transformation of modern society. The media form encircles the recipients, becoming an environment more real than reality, much like Baudrillard’s simulacrum. “Immersed” in a media kaleidoscope in which “pictures within a picture” are endlessly multiplied, users find it increasingly difficult to distinguish facts from interpretations, facts from factoids, lost like “Alice in Wonderland” in the virtual space of never-ending stories. Technological progress has preserved all the old media, while producing new ones, in a way similar to the Russian “matryoshka dolls”, but has pushed the truth and moral dilemmas into the background. Entertainment has become the main media content, information is delivered in the “infotainment” form, with the rapid succession of images as a popularized “montage of attractions”. Marx’s fascination with machines and productive forces as grounds of a “social existence that determines men’s consciousness” has undergone an unusual inversion: the media production represents and creates a worldview in a much more sophisticated way than heavy industry, which as a relic of the past becomes an ecological threat to humanity and the planet. “Reality”, the one word that, at the insistence of writer Nabokov, should always appear in quotation marks, is an astonishing artifact of the media and their powerful masters, and the Earth itself has been utilized as Duchamp’s “readymade”, thus becoming an artwork subjected to relentless exploitation for profit. Mastering Manovich’s “language of new media” is necessary for understanding modern information and visual culture, in order to make communication between people possible at all, because the contemporary culture is meta-referential and self-centered. A critical understanding of the world, which requires media literacy and continuous media education, is the only way to avoid complicity in the collapse of reality under the weight of media images that erase the boundaries between reality and fiction, facts and theoretical interpretations.

Martin M. Winkler, Ovid on Screen, A Montage of Attractions

Martin M. Winkler, Ovid on Screen, A Montage of Attractions

«Монтаж аттракционов» в «Бесплодной земле» Т.С. Элиота

The article deals with the importance of the music hall for The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. This form of entertainment art, at first glance, does not fit well with the deep religious and philosophical message that is traditionally seen in the poem, but it is attracting more and more attention from researchers. The term “music hall” in the article refers to a type of theater that was represented by the English music hall, the American minstrel shows, vaudeville and musical comedy of Eliot's youth, the Parisian variety theater which he came to know intimately in the early 1910s, and revue. The English music hall was chosen to refer to the phenomenon because it was the one that occupied Eliot's imagination at the time when The Waste Land was being written. The article describes T.S. Eliot as a music hall habitué in the 1910s — early 1920s, his essays on the music hall in the magazines Dial and Tyro are analyzed. The author proves that the importance of the music hall song for The Waste Land is not limited to the usage of the rhythm and any kind of musical technique. The songs are not important in themselves, but as part of the performance. The fragment that opens the first version of the poem is a striking revelation of the music hall. The fragment is read as representing the music hall performance, starting with the motive of a “hot night” and ending with quotes from various music hall songs. From the same point of view, the original title of the poem is analysed. The presence of the music hall in the final version of The Waste Land is shown in connection with the characters from the working class and the image of Tiresias. The general principle on which the artistic whole is built in The Waste Land is presented as reproducing the structure of a music hall performance; the author takes the name “montage of attractions” for it from S. Eisenstein.

The role and basic aspects of ‘‘the montage of attractions’’ in Russian cinema

The essay is devoted to the application of the concept of the Montage of Attractions in Russian cinema in different time periods. The relevance of the essay is determined by the need to explore the influence of the Russian avant-garde on the world artistic process. In the opinion of the author, the key concept of the avant-garde film thought of the 1920s, the theory of the Montage of Attractions, deserves a separate independent study.
 Considering "the Montage of Attractions" from a historical perspective, the author analyzes various trends in Soviet cinema. Starting from the basic idea of Sergei Eisenstein, the author pays special attention to the use of the Montage of Attractions in the work of Mikhail Romm and Aleksandr Mitta.
 The article looks at the main features of the actualization of the Montage of Attractions at different stages of the development of Russian cinema. In the 1920s, the attraction was perceived as an aggressive element exposing the viewer to ideological influence. In the 1960s, the Montage of Attractions meant the reception of a contrast connection between the semantic parts of the film. In the 1970s, the principle of attraction was the basis for the plotting of genre films.
 Summarizing the information obtained, the author comes to the conclusion about the universal nature of the theory of the Montage of Attractions and introduces her definition of an attraction. The essay also lists such basic aspects of the attraction as conflict, suggestiveness, universality.

O espetáculo de Philip Astley (Paris, 1786)

Documento anônimo de 1887 descreve e comenta um espetáculo circense apresentado pela companhia de Philip Astley, em 1786, em Paris. Ele se baseia em escritos de Pidansat de Mairobert. O espetáculo de Astley era organizado a partir do princípio da montagem de atrações, base para os futuros espetáculos circenses.

‘Crows’ vs. ‘Avatar,’ or: 3D vs. Total-Dimension Immersion

Abstract 3D film’s explicit new space depth arguably provides both an enhanced realistic quality to the image and a wealth of more acute visual and haptic sensations (a ‘montage of attractions’) to the increasingly involved spectator. But David Cronenberg’s related ironic remark that “cinema as such is from the outset a ‘special effect’” should warn us against the geometrical naiveté of such assumptions, within a Cartesian ocularcentric tradition for long overcome by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment of perception and Deleuze’s notion of the self-consistency of the artistic sensation and space. Indeed, ‘2D’ traditional cinema already provides the accomplished “fourth wall effect,” enclosing the beholder behind his back within a space that no longer belongs to the screen (nor to ‘reality’) as such, and therefore is no longer ‘illusorily’ two-dimensional. This kind of totally absorbing, ‘dream-like’ space, metaphorical for both painting and cinema, is illustrated by the episode Crows in Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990). Such a space requires the actual effacement of the empirical status of spectator, screen, and film as separate dimensions, and it is precisely the 3D characteristic unfolding of merely frontal space layers (and film events) out of the screen towards us (and sometimes above the heads of the spectators before us) that reinstalls at the core of the film-viewing phenomenon a regressive struggle with reality and with different degrees of realism, originally overcome by film since the Lumière’s Arrival of a Train at Ciotat (L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat, 1896) seminal demonstration. Through an analysis of crucial aspects in Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) and the recent Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010), both dealing with historical and ontological deepening processes of ‘going inside,’ we shall try to show how the formal and technically advanced component of those 3D-depth films impairs, on the contrary, their apparent conceptual purpose on the level of contents, and we will assume, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, that this technological mistake is due to a lack of recognition of the nature of perception and sensation in relation to space and human experience.

From stage to brain: Montage as a new principle of scientific narrative

German Dadaists, Italian and Russian Futurists and Constructivists created in their experiments multi-medial orthopedic bodies as products of collage and montage. Sergei Eisenstein, who was influenced by these experiments, organized his theatrical productions as a chain of independent fragments capable of entering any possible combination/recombination and labelled this method “montage of attractions”. He used the same montage principle not only for a new theatrical or cinematic narrative but also to conceptualize the expressive movement of the theatrical or cinematic body created on stage and on screen. Finally he conceptualized montage not only as a means of conveying movement, but also of conveying a way of thinking. This inspired him to create a new form of scientific narrative in his two unfinished books. The subject to be analysed in the first book from 1929 – montage – inspired him to look for a new structure by organizing different texts in the form of a sphere. This form defined the method of writing his second project on the theory of the arts as a hypertext. Eisenstein gave this book the title Method (1932–1948).

Sightseeing Buses: Cruising, Timing and the Montage of Attractions

This article focuses on spatial performances, modes of vision and touring practices enabled by sightseeing bus‐tours. Thereby, three aspects of the process by which these buses transform urban space into destination space are discussed. First, bus‐tours delineate, as they move, a unique geography of routes and stops, which is based on structured improvisation. Second, guiding practices of tour guides are crucial for assembling together a destination and their success depends on timing. Third, tourist experiences enabled by sightseeing bus‐tours involve a ‘cruise‐ship‐like’ style of movement and a mode of vision reminiscent of the ‘montage of coming attractions’ characteristic of film‐trailers. The article concludes by stressing the multiple spatial displacements involved in bus‐tour production of destination space.

Авангард и идеология

In this paper the role of “ideology” in the Russian Avant-Garde is examined in its historical development. Within this period two phases can be distinguished, running parallel to socio-political events. The author demonstrates the difference between the two by contrasting two key texts, Shklovskii's ‘Art as Device’ and its central concept of “ostranenie”, and Eisenstein's discussion of the principle of “montage of attractions”.

The place of nature in Godard's late films

The place of nature in Godard's late films

Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry by Alexandra Smith (review)

706 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 Smith, Alexandra. Montaging Pushkin:Pushkin and Visions of Modernity inRussian Twentieth-Century Poetry. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 46. Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2006. 361 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 72.00: $90.00 (paperback). Anyone who isuncomfortable with the language of twentieth-century literary criticism should perhaps turn firstto page thirty-sixof the long and valuable introduction to this book. There s/he will find an excellent definition (by Marc Schreurs) of the term 'montage', as applied to literature. Failing that, there are definitions of the term by Iurii Tynianov and Boris Eikhenbaum (p. 69), and by Sergei Eizenshtein (as interpreted by Susan McCabe, p. 182). Reduced to itsbarest essentials, the thesis of this book is that Pushkin used techniques which might be described as 'cinematographic', notably in 'K moriu', 'Pamiatnik', 'Mednyi vsadnik' and 'Evgenii Onegin'. Many major twentieth-century poets followed suit, both in response to Pushkin and in response to the new art of the cinema. This summary does not, of course, begin to do justice to thisbook. A whole chapter isdevoted to twentieth-century responses toPushkin, including those of such familiar names as Akhmatova, Innokentii Annenskii, Blok, Briusov, Gippius, Gumilev, Viacheslav Ivanov, Khodasevich, Maiakovskii, Nabokov, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, as well as those of such lesser known figures such as Alexander Kushner, Ida Nappel'baum, Larissa Reisner and Aleksei Parshchikov. The whole of the final chapter isdevoted to emigre writers both famous and obscure. These include Georgii Adamovich, Iosif Brodskii, 'Don Aminado' (A. P. Shpolianskii), Mikhail Eisenshtadt, Lidiia Nelidova-Fiveiskaia and Elena Shvarts, inwhose 'Detskii sad tridtsat' let nazad' and 'Ballada o spiriticheskom seanse i teniAleksandra Pushkina' Alexandra Smith, following Stephanie Sandler, identifiesPushkinian subtexts and metrical echoes. Even when dealing with more familiar authors, Smith manages to choose works which have hitherto been subject to critical neglect. Annenskii's 'Bronzovyi poet', Gippius's 'Peterburg', Gumilev's 'Pamiati Annenskogo', Ivanov's narrative poem 'Mladenchestvo' and Khodasevich's 'Iz okna.i' are clearly major works and have not hitherto been given the attention they deserve. That omission is here handsomely rectified. In addition, Smith's analysis of over twenty works byMarina Tsvetaeva, notably her long poem 'S moria' and her autobiographical essay 'My Pushkin', stands out, as one might expect from someone who has written widely on the subject elsewhere. So too does her treatment ofMaiakovskii's 1916 poem 'Posledniaia peterburgskaia skazka', which forms the basis of an interesting sub-chapter entitled 'Urban spectacles and Eisenstein's montage of attractions'. All quotations from thepoems referred to are supplemented by translations intoEnglish. Although some of Smith's renditions are open to debate ('heap', for 'gorstka', p. 90, 'entertaining cup', rather than 'cup that cheers' for 'uveselitel'naia chasha', p. 167, 'impetuous' for 'nakhal'nyi', p. 229, 'swearing word', p. 300) the translations are, on the whole, accurate and helpful. With her Russian background, Smith brings to this book an impressively wide knowledge and understanding of her native literature. More importantly, REVIEWS 707 perhaps, she displays an infectious enthusiasm for her subject. The biblio graphy is comprehensive and there are extensive quotations from secondary sources. Quotations fromRussian critics are given firstinEnglish translation and then in the original. The author is a little over-conscientious in this respect and thebook isoccasionally rather too reminiscent of a doctoral thesis. In one place, for instance, (p. 42) Simon Dixon's perfectiy sound, but unexcep tional, observations about the importance of the Decembrist Revolt are perhaps given undue weight, whilst in at least one other place (p. 31) the reader isat three removes (in this case Smith ? Schweikart ? Fish) from the body ofwork under discussion. The proof-reading of thisvolume could have been better. There are at least thirty-seven typographical errors, and a number of names are wrongly spelled: Adolphe, Bayley, Beranger (who does not appear in the index under any spelling), Breton, Boccaccio, Diderot, Fennell, Ginzburg, Holderlin, Loseff, Propertius and Schopenhauer. The name of Pushkin's nemesis is spelled Benckendorff and Benkendorff on the same page (p. 209) and is given two apparently unrelated entries in the index. Petr Viazemskii suffers much the same fate.A couple of dates ? those ofMaiakovskii's death and theBattle of...

Buñuel, Eisenstein, and the ‘Montage of Attractions’: An Approach to Film in Theory and Practice

The now abundant amount of criticism dedicated to Luis Bunuel can generally be divided into two categories: (1) treatment of his filmography; and (2) biographical criticism that is preoccupied with...

The Subway Grate Scene in The Seven Year Itch: “The Staging of an Appearance-As-Disappearance”1

The subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch is placed in context, creating a “montage of attractions” that illuminates the iconic images of Marilyn Monroe. Parallels in earlier films situate these images in cinematic history, while later references to them demonstrate their continuing modernity. The “wondrous revealment” of women’s undergarments is also a common theme in literature. Freud’s writings on sexuality explain this preoccupation, while Barthes’s focus upon the erotic character of “intermittence” points to fundamental differences between “appearance-as-disappearance” in cinema and literature and the treatment of similar subjects by still photographers.

Eisenstein's Later Work at the Proletkult

In September 1923, four months after the premiere of his provocative circus production of The Wiseman and three years before his recognition as Europe's foremost filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein collaborated with the writer and linguist Sergei Tretyakov in the preparation of two new revolutionary plays, Do You Hear, Moscow?! and Gas Masks. More than Nikolai Foregger and Meyerhold, more than all of his teachers, the twenty-five-year-old Eisenstein was now considered by many as the most radical director in a theatre-mad Moscow. His manifesto “Montage of Attractions” [LEF #1 May 1923] and extreme reworking of Alexander Ostrovsky's nineteenth-century comedy, Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman set theatrical circles on edge. [See T61 for a translation of the essay and a description of this production.] The young proponents of left-wing culture, centered around the poet Mayakovsky and the periodical LEF, hailed Eisenstein as the next intellectual/artistic savior.