Barnet, Boris (1902–1965)

Author(s):  
Vito Adriaensens

Boris Barnet (b. June 18, 1902, Moscow, Russia; d. January 8, 1965, Riga, Latvia) was a Russian actor, director, and professional boxer. He made his debut as an actor in Lev Kuleshov’s comedy Neobychainye priklyucheniya mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) (1924) along with Vsevolod Pudovkin, after they both famously attended Kuleshov’s three-year workshop on film principles that spawned the film. Barnet inherited Kuleshov’s montage principles, consisting of the combination of American-style fast cutting, combined with avant-garde techniques from French Impressionism and German Expressionism, thus setting it apart from its "dull" predecessors. For Kuleshov, the film came together in the editing room, where he insisted on the importance of the relationship between shots and scenes. Barnet debuted with the contemporary spy serial Miss Mend (1926), and became well known for his swiftly paced comedies; he was therefore somewhat of an anomaly in the propaganda-driven Soviet montage cinema. In his two most celebrated comedies, Devushka s korobkoi (The Girl with the Hatbox) (1927) and Dom na Trubnoi (The House on Trubnaya Square) (1928), Barnet took on the speed of modern city life and translated it into an elating style by combining the visual characteristics of Dziga Vertov with the rhythm and acting of someone like Buster Keaton. In the sound era, Barnet continued to impress internationally with lyrical masterpieces such as the understated Great War ensemble piece Okraina (Outskirts) (1933) and the impressionistic fisherman’s drama U samogo sinego morya (By the Bluest of Seas) (1936).

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 67-68
Author(s):  
Dumitru Chioaru

The article is a brief revisitation of the relationship between modern poetry and tradition, such as it was understood by poets starting with Charles Baudelaire. The theoretical proposition advanced here postulates the existence of two complementary attitudes in this respect: the first one progressive, characterized by the denial of tradition, represented by the European avant-garde (most of all futurism, dadaism, and surrealism); the second one conservative, illustrated first of all by German expressionism, but also by modernism and Anglo-American postmodernism’s attempts to recover or recycle the contents of tradition.


AJS Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-65
Author(s):  
Roni Hirsh-Ratzkovsky

The following article deals with the story of two German Jewish brothers, Alfred Lemm and Siegfried Lehmann. The first—a forgotten journalist and writer, the second—a doctor and educator, the founder of the Ben Shemen Youth Village in Mandate Palestine. Through the specific story of the two brothers, the article traces the path of messianic antiurban ideas prevalent in expressionist avant-garde circles in pre–World War I Europe, to the circles of German Jewish Zionism and from them to Palestine-Israel. Though German expressionism was itself an urban intellectual phenomenon, expressionist prose often exemplified antiurban and antimodern sentiments, as in the case of Lemm's prose. According to Lemm, redemption from the ills of modern society shall be found in withdrawal from the modern city and return to physical and metaphysical “roots.” Lemm's antiurban attitude influenced his brother Siegfried and found its full manifestation in the founding of the Ben Shemen Youth Village in 1927.


2021 ◽  
pp. 46-67
Author(s):  
Dijana Metlić

Ljubomir Micić was the founder of Zenitism and the editor of Zenit, the international avant-garde magazine published in Zagreb and Belgrade from 1921 to 1926. Sharply criticising a decadent European culture after the Great War and accepting progressive avant-garde ideas, Micić praised the New art founded on the principles of NEO-primitivism and Russian constructivism, following the technological and scientific progress of the 20th century. Analysing the Zenitist Balkanisation of Europe project led by Barbarogenius, I will point out to Micić's attitude towards the old continent, his efforts to oppose the image of the Balkans as "the inner other of Europe", and his aspiration to revive European culture with the primordial Balkan energy. Declaring the Balkans the sixth continent, the geographical space of the poets, Micić postulated a model of cultural barbarism by which he stood against the established primacy of Western European nations over those that were characterised "less civilised". This paper aims to point out to Micić's understanding of the relationship between the Balkans and Europe, as well as the so-called primitive-civilised opposition, in order to highlight internationalism, pacifism and cosmopolitanism as the key elements of his Zenitosophy


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-4
Author(s):  
Yonca Hurol ◽  
Ashraf M. Salama

Cities have always been sources of inspiration for poetry. However, the modern western cities, which are the origins of secularity, have inspired poets in different ways. Charles Baudelaire captured the poetic dimensions of modernity in Paris in the 19th century. He wrote about the night life of Paris which became possible after street lighting. He wrote about corruption. Baudelaire also wrote about the changing character of commercial places in cities and tried to grasp the feelings of people as a ‘flaneur': an individual stroller at city streets. The philosopher Walter Benjamin got inspired by Baudelaire's poems and formed his philosophy, which relates poetics to modernity during the 20th century. Modern cities take an important role in his philosophy too, because Benjamin was making a collection of political event news in the cities of Germany. Then he had to leave Germany because of the growth of fascism. He left his collection behind. When he went to Paris he wrote about the passages and the poetic dimensions of modern city life. When Nazi army came to France, he had to leave Paris too. The poetry of Baudelaire and the philosophy of Benjamin are evidences for the poetic nature of modern city life. The relationship between the modern city and the free individual can easily be felt in their works. However, when you read heir work, you can easily understand that today's Paris is not the same Paris any more. It is still poetic, but in another way.


Author(s):  
Amra Latifić

This text presents an analysis of the relationship between Kino-Eye, the Russian montage technique that was most clearly demonstrated by Dziga Vertov in his 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera, and Russian Formalist theory, which underwent an intensive period of development during the 1920s. Russian Formalism, established primarily as a theory of literature, was likewise applied in film and the visual arts. A dominant characteristic of Soviet film authors and theorists from the avant-garde period was a preoccupation with linguistic aspects and an understanding of film itself in terms of language. Transposing Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization [остранение, ostranenie] to the visual experience of Vertov’s film contributes to an additional understanding of the usage of unconventional camera angles, diagonal camera positions, as well as to the interpreting of the Kino-Eye montage procedure. The experimental montage procedure of Kino-Eye is posited as an attempt to decode the world through the lens of a film camera, while understanding this procedure is linked to the impact of Shklovsky and Russian Formalism on Russian 1920s cinema. Article received: December 15, 2017; Article accepted: December 30, 2017; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Latifić, Amra. "The Kino-Eye Montage Procedure as a Formal Experiment." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.227


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.


Author(s):  
N. Ivanova ◽  
А. Mykhailova

The research is devoted to the analysis of the editorial and publishing policy of “Solomiia Pavlychko’s Publishing House “Osnovy”. One of the important tools of “Osnovy” publishing strategy at the present stage is the modernization of its product, which consists of the original visualization of the artistic text. In accordance with the new publishing policy, “Osnovy” launches the “Alternative Series of Ukrainian Classics” with the illustrations of young Ukrainian artists.The scientific novelty of our research is the conceptual comprehension of the publishing project “Alternative Series of Ukrainian Classics”. The visual version of the novel “The City” by V. Pidmohylnyi is of special attention. In the study, we suggest that the name “Alternative Series ...” is a successful marketing technique, as for many readers, classics is related to the official ones, sometimes boring and formalized “school” ideas about literature. So, it was planned that the concept “alternative” would become a modern slogan for the project and expand the audience of potential readers. Thus, the works of Ukrainian classics received an entirely new illustration for a modern Ukrainian.The analysis of the illustrative presentation of novel “The City” by V. Pidmohylnyi, published in “Osnovy” in 2017, affords the ground for the suggestion that the work became a truly alternative in the sense of avant-garde design. The article emphasises the idea that “The City” (2017), which is being investigated by us, is especially distinguished among other reprints of classical Ukrainian literature by the collision and dialogue of the verbal urban text of V. Pidmohylnyi (1927) with the avant-garde, postmodern, comic visual text of modern city by M. Pavliuk (2017). New meanings of the verbal text are born on the collision of two urban discourses. Thus, through the illustrative material, the modern city, described in the novel by V. Pidmohylnyi 90 years ago, becomes relevant and modern for the citizens of 2017. So, we are dealing with the postmodern illustrative design of the classical edition, which through the latest forms of visualization, creates new visions and contexts.The offered study states that “Osnovy” is not only a publishing house, creating a quality publishing product concerning the latest news, but also uses modern marketing strategies to implement its products.


Urban History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-680
Author(s):  
GESA ZUR NIEDEN

ABSTRACT:This article examines the relationship between the processes of urban renovation in European capitals and the internationalization of musical theatre productions, using the example of theatres constructed in Paris and Rome at the end of the nineteenth century. Due to the limited availability of governmental and municipal funding, the more popular theatres in both capitals came to provide an important space for musical productions on an avant-garde level, with international repertoires and casts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-545
Author(s):  
Julia Jordan

This article will explore the relationship between linguistic puns and knowledge, in particular puns in Christine Brooke-Rose's work, and what they tell us about knowledge: secret knowledge; encoded knowledge; latent knowledge that remains latent; and the refusal of knowledge. My title is an allusion to Frank Kermode's 1967 essay ‘Objects, Jokes, and Art’, where he puzzles away at his own difficulty with distinguishing avant garde writing and art, especially what he calls the ‘neo-avant garde’ of the 60s, from jokes. ‘I myself believe’, he writes anxiously, ‘that there is a difference between art and a joke’, admitting that ‘it has sometimes been difficult to tell.’ Brooke-Rose, whose work Kermode admired, is a perfect example of this. Her texts revolve around the pun, the surprise juxtaposition between semantic poles, the unexpected yoking together of disparate elements. Puns, for Brooke-Rose, sit at the juncture between the accidental and the overdetermined. So what is funny about the pun? Not much, I propose, or rather, it provokes a particular sort of ambivalent laughter which becomes folded into the distinctive character and affective potency of late modernism itself: its deadpan silliness; its proclivity to collision and violence; its excitability and its melancholy. Brooke-Rose's humour is thus of the difficult sort, that is, humour that reveals itself at the moment of its operation to be not all that funny. The unsettling laughter, I propose, that exposes literature's own incommensurability with itself. For Jacques Rancière, the novel must illuminate somehow the ‘punctuation of the encounter with the inconceivable’, in the face of which all is reduced to passivity. The pun, in particular, forces the readers’ passivity, and exposes us to limits of what can be known.


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