Categorical Aperitif

With all this talk of government takeovers of the financial industry in the air, I was put in mind of an interesting corner of the blogosphere that I stumbled across a while back and have been meaning to mention: A Soviet Poster a Day. It's a site devoted to, well, Soviet posters. The "a day" part hasn't exactly been true for a while, but the "Soviet poster" part definitely is. You don't have to be a communist (I'm not) to enjoy the bold graphics, the startling combinations of text and image—the artistry of propaganda. And it isn't all propaganda. Perusing the tags there, the name "Dziga Vertov" caught my eye. The link took me to this:

It's a movie poster for a film by the decades-ahead-of-his-time director Dziga Vertov. (Real name: Denis Kaufman. The nifty pseudonym means "spinning top.") In the interregnum between the post-Revolution Civil War and the rise of Stalin, Vertov was one of a number of cinematic innovators (Eisenstein was another) whose best works still have the power to startle, even most of a century later. Vertov was a devoted nonfictionalist who wanted to use film to reveal "the real world" in new ways—as opposed to using new technologies to recycle old dramas and fantasy stories. He helped to pioneer techniques that we take for granted today: dissolves, split-screens, superimpositions, microphotography, variable camera speeds, elaborate editing, hidden cameras, stop-motion animation, even slow-motion sports photography. All of these and more may be found in abundance in his 1929 masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera, which is at once an innovative chronicle of "a day in the life" of the Soviet Union and a relentlessly self-reflexive study of its own making (the film's "star" is really Vertov's ace cameraman brother, Mikhail Kaufman, and the film revels in showing its audience the mechanics of shooting and editing: how a film is constructed). If you haven't seen it, you could do worse than to track down the DVD version with a rollicking score by the Alloy Orchestra (based on Vertov's notes). You will not be disappointed. It remains one of the most astonishing things I have ever seen.

Nash-Bob says check it out, comrade.