scholarly journals The Issue of Unity of Style in Soviet Cinema in the Late 1920s — Early 1930s (By the Example of Nikolay Iezuitov’s Works)

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-35
Author(s):  
Sultan I. Usuvaliev

This article discusses the formation of style in Soviet film studies of the late 1920s — early 1930s in the aspect of discussions on art movements and trends in Soviet cinema. Although there are some theoretical and historical film studies on the formation of style trends of that period, much less attention has been paid to the historiography of this matter. Because of the small number of comprehensive historiographic research on this topic, the author decides to study the process of forming classifications of those movements. This article uses traditional research methods, introduces new archival sources into scientific circulation for the first time; and its main tasks are the historiographic study of the subject and the analysis of its key concepts and provisions. The article examines the unity of style in Soviet film studies of the 1920s — early 1930s on the example of works by Nikolay Mikhailovich Iezuitov (1899—1941), one of the founders of Russian film studies, who proposed in 1933 a concept of Soviet cinema development, the main category of which was style. Linking the concepts of “style” and “art movement (trend)”, Iezuitov identified two styles: the one of socialist concepts and the other of socialist feelings. In this, Iezuitov followed the logic of the book “Art Movements in Soviet Cine­ma” (1930) by Adrian Piotrovsky (1898—1937) — the author of the “intellectual” and “emotional” film classification. Iezuitov’s concept was criticized, especially at the jubilee session of the Scientific and Research Sector of the State Institute of Cinematography (now VGIK) in 1934. In the same year, the first history of Soviet cinema “The Ways of Feature Film” was published. It regarded the movements and their contribution to the development of Soviet cinematography according to the criteria of innovation and realism. Socialist realism was declared a platform, a common style that included all the various trends and styles of Soviet cinema. Iezuitov, who died in the war in 1941, did not get a chance to complete his fundamental study “The History of Soviet Film Art”. The story of the victory of socialist rea­lism was declared one of the main tasks of the textbook, and the process of formation of socialist rea­lism became the content of the science of film history. The article shows that socialist realism, as a unity of diversities and contradictions, allowed Iezuitov, on the one hand, to adhere to its normative aesthetics and, on the other hand, to conduct a stylistic analysis of schools and specific movies within this aesthetics.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Sultan I. Usuvaliev

The article is devoted to the history of the Russian film studies and methodology of film history as science using the example of the Introduction of History of the Soviet Film Art by Nikolai Iezuitov (18991941), one of the founders of the national film studies. Since the manuscript of History of the Soviet Film Art the first history of the Soviet cinema has not yet been published and introduced into scholarly use, the author pays special attention to archival sources. Despite a number of essays and discussions about film history and its methodology, a fundamental scholarly work on the historiography of the history of Soviet and Russian cinema has not yet been written. The relevance and novelty of the article is that it is based on the study of archival manuscripts of Nikolai Iezuitov. The exploration of early approaches to the study of the history of the Soviet cinema is important both historically and pedagogically. One of the most important sources of the concept of film history at an early stage of the national film studies is Iezuitov's Introduction to History of the Soviet Film Art. The Introduction is valuable because: 1) it is a rare evidence of reflection on the foundations of film history as scholarship and its methodology; 2) it is given by the author of the first history of the Soviet cinema; 3) it is represented by the author not as a separate abstract essay but as a part of the history itself. The Introduction defines the scholarly tasks and content of film history; overviews foreign books on the history of cinema; emphasizes specific periods of Soviet film history; and indicates the principles of work with relevant sources. Iezuitovs main principles in relation to film history are established in connection, firstly, with Soviet history scholarship; and secondly, with the vision of film history as the history of film art. Thus, film history, according to Iezuitov, is the unity of Marxist understanding of history and art-historical (stylistic) analysis of films and the main film movements in Soviet cinema.


Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).


1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 301-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Govert D. Geldof

In integrated water management, the issues are often complex by nature, they are capable of subjective interpretation, are difficult to express in standards and exhibit many uncertainties. For such issues, an equilibrium approach is not appropriate. A non-equilibrium approach has to be applied. This implies that the processes to which the integrated issue pertains, are regarded as “alive”’. Instead of applying a control system as the model for tackling the issue, a network is used as the model. In this network, several “agents”’ are involved in the modification, revision and rearrangement of structures. It is therefore an on-going renewal process (perpetual novelty). In the planning process for the development of a groundwater policy for the municipality of Amsterdam, a non-equilibrium approach was adopted. In order to do justice to the integrated character of groundwater management, an approach was taken, containing the following features: (1) working from global to detailed, (2) taking account of the history of the system, (3) giving attention to communication, (4) building flexibility into the establishing of standards, and (5) combining reason and emotions. A middle course was sought, between static, rigid but reliable on the one hand; dynamic, flexible but vague on the other hand.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Scerri

<span>The very nature of chemistry presents us with a tension. A tension between the exhilaration of diversity of substances and forms on the one hand and the safety of fundamental unity on the other. Even just the recent history of chemistry has been al1 about this tension, from the debates about Prout's hypothesis as to whether there is a primary matter in the 19th century to the more recent speculations as to whether computers will enable us to virtually dispense with experimental chemistry.</span>


Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.


Author(s):  
James Meffan

This chapter discusses the history of multicultural and transnational novels in New Zealand. A novel set in New Zealand will have to deal with questions about cultural access rights on the one hand and cultural coverage on the other. The term ‘transnational novel’ gains its relevance from questions about cultural and national identity, questions that have particularly exercised nations formed from colonial history. The chapter considers novels that demonstrate and respond to perceived deficiencies in wider discourses of cultural and national identity by way of comparison between New Zealand and somewhere else. These include Amelia Batistich's Another Mountain, Another Song (1981), Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973) and Black Rainbow (1992), James McNeish's Penelope's Island (1990), Stephanie Johnson's The Heart's Wild Surf (2003), and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006).


Proceedings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Shan Zhang

By applying the concept of natural science to the study of music, on the one hand, we can understand the structure of music macroscopically, on the other, we can reflect on the history of music to a certain extent. Throughout the history of western music, from the classical period to the 20th century, music seems to have gone from order to disorder, but it is still orderly if analyzed carefully. Using the concept of complex information systems can give a good answer in the essence.


2014 ◽  
Vol 107 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-398
Author(s):  
James Carleton Paget

Albert Schweitzer's engagement with Judaism, and with the Jewish community more generally, has never been the subject of substantive discussion. On the one hand this is not surprising—Schweitzer wrote little about Judaism or the Jews during his long life, or at least very little that was devoted principally to those subjects. On the other hand, the lack of a study might be thought odd—Schweitzer's work as a New Testament scholar in particular is taken up to a significant degree with presenting a picture of Jesus, of the earliest Christian communities, and of Paul, and his scholarship emphasizes the need to see these topics against the background of a specific set of Jewish assumptions. It is also noteworthy because Schweitzer married a baptized Jew, whose father's academic career had been disadvantaged because he was a Jew. Moreover, Schweitzer lived at a catastrophic time in the history of the Jews, a time that directly affected his wife's family and others known to him. The extent to which this personal contact with Jews and with Judaism influenced Schweitzer either in his writings on Judaism or in his life will in part be the subject of this article.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven S. Lee

In this article, Sacha Baron Cohen'sBoratappears as just the latest in a decades- long exchange between American and Soviet models of minority uplift: on the one side, civil rights and multiculturalism; on the other,druzhba narodov(the friendship of peoples) andmnogonatsional'nost’(multi-national- ness). Steven S. Lee argues diat, with Borat, multiculturalism seems to have emerged as the victor in this exchange, but that the film also hearkens to a not-too-distant Soviet alternative. Part 1 shows how Borat gels with recent leftist critiques of multiculturalism, spearheaded by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj żižek. Part 2 relates Borat to a largely submerged history of American minorities drawing hope from mnogonatsional'nost', as celebrated in Grigorii Aleksandrov's 1936 filmCircus.The final part presents Borat as choosing neither multiculturalism nor mnogonatsional'nost', but rather the continued opposition of the two, if not a “third way.” For a glimpse of what this might look like, the paper concludes with a discussion ofAbsurdistan(2006) by Soviet Jewish American novelist Gary Shteyngart.


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