We had another History of Russian Cinema class today and this is one of just about everybody’s favorite classes. Today we covered the cinema of the post revolution USSR in the twenties. We saw some amazing film work at the end of the silent film era. For example, we watched an entire film by Dziga Vertov from 1928 called The Man with the A Movie Camera. It was a film with not story and not actors because Vertov despised both! He and one of his brothers just set out with two cameras and shot a ton of footage of everyday life in a Soviet city, they edited together, and called it a film. The film worked on numerous planes and sets of parallels to bring things together. It’s a beautiful film and I highly suggest it, although it can be tough to find a version with the original soundtrack. The one we used in class had a new soundtrack from just about 10 years ago. It was alright but I think the original music would have been even cooler.
Painting class was alright, we just finished up our still life paintings from last week. Mine doesn’t look good to me but I’m super critical of my own stuff. I guess there are a few good things about it but I don’t consider myself an artist when it comes to fine art kind of painting. Next week we get to start a new project…hopefully I can do better.
Fun fact for the day…we went out to the metro station by Victory Park (mentioned a few days ago) because it has the largest escalator in the entire Moscow area. How long is it? Well, let’s just say I shot a video on my camera of the ride down…it took three full minutes to reach the bottom! Now that’s a long escalator…
Other than that, it was a rather ordinary day…Well, there were the belly dancers at the restaurant that we went to for dinner, but everything else not already mentioned was pretty standard…
Nice talking to you today. Skype is great. You look like a giant in that archway. Is it actually a door behind you?
ReplyDeleteYeah...it's some sort of side access for going into the lower parts of the church because we went up a series of stair to get in the main area. This is the cathedral in the Kremlin where several hundreds of years of emperors are interred.
ReplyDelete