It’s a thermometer or aerometer of our reality, and its significance is unquestionably higher than the inventions of individual authors, individual writers or directors. It’s a general checkup on our entire transitional time and at the same time, an on-the-spot checkup, among the masses, on each individual decree or resolution. It is an objective with tremendous and far from merely experimental significance. “To see and hear life, to note its turns and turning points, to catch the crunch of the old bones of everyday existence beneath the press of the revolution, to follow the growth of the young Soviet organism, to record and organize the individual characteristics of life’s phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclusion – this is our immediate objective. Ideally, I desire to understand the need for avant-gardism, and how this need could exist and develop in capitalist America.A lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbass who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the Five Year Plan. Vertov’s first sound film, Enthusiasm explores the complex interaction between sound and image. While the works greatly vary, I tend toward those that attempt to locate and reveal the unconscious origins of avant-gardism these authors suggest anything from early cinematic constructions to communist or capitalistic economies to the very functions of the human mind. Most of the authors on my reading list discuss the aesthetic implications and social ramifications of modern media, particularly that of cinema. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. 'Kino-Eye.' In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. 'The Originality of the Avant-Garde.' In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and 'Grids.' In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Garde.' In Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative. 'The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant

'Avant-Garde and Kitsch.' In Art and Culture. 'Art and Objecthood.' In Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews.Ĭhicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.įreud, Sigmund. NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949.įried, Michael. 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.' In Berkeley: University of California Press,īenjamin, Walter. 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image.' In What is Cinema? Volumeġ.

Kino-Eye by Kevin O'Brien