The Men with the Movie Camera: The Poetics of Visual Style in Soviet Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s - Softcover

"Cavendish's carefully researched book argues that men like Eduard Tisse, Anatolii Golovnia, and Danylo Demutskyi, among others, should be acknowledged as coauthors, in terms of visual styles, of the films on which they worked. [It] offers exacting descriptions of many shots, developing an appreciation for the styles cultivated by these camera artists despite differences in subject matter or dramatic theme. Though he may at times downplay the director's role in determining how shots were jointly shaped, Cavendish has written one of the most original works of scholarship on Soviet film practice since David Bordwell's brilliant The Cinema of Eisenstein. Summing Up: Essential." Choice

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.