Title: <i>The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty</i>(1927): A Constructivist Paradigm for<i>Neigrovaia Fil’ma</i>
Abstract: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement Adam Scott of Digital Outpost, Perth, Western Australia converted the images of The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty from VHS videotape into stills. Notes Notes 1. Although Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman 1895–1983) wrote a book in 1929 entitled Film Problems of Soviet Russia, unlike Esfir Shub, Bryher was not also a film-maker. 2. Sovkino released The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty [Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh] on 11 March 1927. 3. The first screening of October [Oktiabr’] by Sovkino, took place on 14 March 1928. 4. LEF, the acronym for Levyi front iskusstv literally Left Art Front but usually translated into English as the Left Front of the Arts, was an avant-garde movement in the arts initiated by Vladimir Mayakovsky in the early 1920s. It was an extension of the Russian Futurists and in 1923, it first published its highly regarded journal also called LEF. In 1927, Novyi LEF superseded the publication of LEF. Esfir Shub was coeditor of Novyi LEF with Mayakovsky and Osip Brik. 5. Only two of the three films in Shub's compilation trilogy still exist: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (which covers the years 1912–1917) and The Great Way (which covers the years 1917–1927). The Russia of Nikolai II and Lev Tolstoy (covering from 1897–1912) is no longer extant. 6. Esfir Shub, Zhizn’ moya—kinematograf (Moscow, Iskusstvo Publishing House, 1972), 260. 7. Esfir Shub, Krupnym planom (Moscow, Iskusstvo Publishing House, 1959), 92. 8. Aleksei Gan, The thirteenth experiment, Kino-Fot, December 1922, in: Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds) The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet cinema in documents 1896–1939 (Richard Taylor, trans.) (London, Routledge, 1994), 78. 9. Shub, Zhizn’ moya—kinematograf (hereafter Zhizn’), 260. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 264. 12. John Reed (1887–1920) was an American journalist and war correspondent who had covered both the Mexican War and World War I. His bestseller, Ten Days that Shook the World, published in 1919, became a political classic, an account of the October Revolution as seen through idealistic Western eyes. 13. Esfir Shub, This work cries out [Eta rabota krichit’], Kino, March 1928, in: Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds) The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet cinema in documents 1896–1939 (Richard Taylor, trans.) (London, Routledge, 1994), 217. 14. Ibid. 15. A more detailed account of this juxtaposed scenario between master and servant is provided later in this article. 16. Yuri Tsivian quoting Eisenstein, in Eisenstein: The little boy from Riga, Omnibus, BBC1 Television, 1988. 17. Nicholas Pronay and Derek W. Spring (eds) Propaganda, Politics and Film 1918–1945 (London, Macmillan, 1982), 250. 18. André Bazin, The ontology of the photographic image, in What is Cinema? (Hugh Gray, trans.) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, University of California Press, 1967), 12. 19. Ibid., 9. 20. Ibid., 14. 21. André Bazin, The evolution of the language of cinema, in What is Cinema? (Hugh Gray, trans.) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, University of California Press, 1967), 37. 22. On the perception of the storming of the Winter Palace scene in October as actual documentary, see Richard Taylor, From October to ‘October’: the Soviet political system in the 1920s and its films, in: M. J. Clark (ed.) Politics and The Media: film and television for the political scientist and historian (Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1979), 31. 23. Shub, Zhizn’, 24. 24. Ibid. 25. According to James Parkes, the Tsar not only supported the Black Hundreds but also publicly wore their badge. Reverend James Parkes, A History of the Jewish People (Harmondsworth, Pelican Books, 1967), 166. 26. Shub, intertitle, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. 27. Ibid. 28. Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in: Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (eds) Art in Modern Culture: an anthology of critical texts (London, Phaidon, 1992), 231. 29. Ibid., 232 (italic emphasis is in the original). 30. Eisenstein did not begin filming October until April 1927 (whereas The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was released on 11 March 1927). See Norman Swallow, Eisenstein: a documentary portrait (New York, E. P. Dutton and Co., 1977), 56. 31. Shub, The first work, in Zhizn’, 251. 32. Ibid. 33. George Orwell, Animal Farm: a fairy story (London, Penguin, 2003), 97.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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