The Men With The Movie Camera

Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting.

In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, owing to the fetishization of the camera as an embodiment of modern technology, the cameraman was an iconic figure whose creative contribution was encouraged and respected. Drawing upon the film literature of the period, Philip Cavendish describes the culture of the camera operator, charts developments in the art of camera operation, and studies the mechanics of key director-cameraman partnerships.

He offers detailed analysis of Soviet avant-garde films and draws comparisons between the visual aesthetics of these works and the modernist experiments taking place in the other spheres of the visual arts. Review: - very well written - The author's methodology is extremely well suited to the topic and the conceptual concern is simply path breaking - The author presents an invaluable theoretical introduction (fundamentally redefining the traditional attributions of cinematic innovation) and provides four very detailed case studies to demonstrate and ground his reading. * Vladimir Padunov, University of Pittsburgh This is an excellent piece of scholarship.

It is detailed and superbly referenced, with a great amount of detail in each chapter, and is obviously the fruit of many years' work. The author has identified a major new area of investigation in what is otherwise a crowded field: Soviet cinema in the 1920s. Nevertheless, there has until this work been no sustained examination of the role of the camera operator in the films of these years. * David Gillespie, University of Bath