Natasa Drubkova, 18. 1. 2012 10:38, 0 komentářů
Tagy
Nicole Brenez, Boris Barnet, Hyperkino Editon of "By the Bluest of the Seas", Milena Musina, Elena Kuzmina, Moviemail, Ruscico
The most recent review of a "lovely, windblown 'cinematic fairytale'" by Graeme Hobbs:
Rosenbaum calls this film (together with "Okraina") a "masterpiece".
"Okraina" and "A Girl with a Hat Box" by Barnet will soon be available from Moviemail, in Hyperkino editions, featuring annotations by Bernard Eisenschitz and Aleksandr Deriabin.
Hear Nicole Brenez on "Sensual Editing" in “By the Bluest of Seas” and its reception in France:
"Classic Russian cinema on DVD, presented in the innovative Hyperkino format created by Natascha Drubek and Nikolai Izvolov, produced by Ruscico and distributed in the UK by MovieMail.
The films are presented in 2-disc 'hyperkino editions' which features the standard film, with optional subtitles, on one disc, with the second disc featuring numerous scene-specific annotations, video clips and documents (in Russian and in English) that can be viewed on screen and which contextualise the film and enhance the viewer's understanding. It is one of the most exciting developments in DVD for years, and especially valuable for important works of world cinema whose historical contexts crave further exploration." (Moviemail)
Natasa Drubkova, 25. 3. 2011 14:29, 0 komentářů
Tagy
Annotationsverfahren, AbsolutMedien, Kuleschow, "Das Projekt des Ingenieurs Pright", "Der Große Tröster", "Streik", "Das Glück", "Oktober", Filme mit Fußnoten, Russenfilm, Hyperkino, RUSCICO, THE GAP. Magazin für Glamour und Diskurs, Joachim Schaetz
"Hyperkino as one of the most exciting forms of reflection on film one can experience today."
Joachim Schätz (Vienna) calls Hyperkino a "Mediated Revolution" and thinks that Hyperkino is not not only interesting for film historians.
The Russian Cinema Council (RUSICICO) has recently released the first five DVDs in its new “Academia” series. The first group comes from the Soviet silent and early sound era: Strike, October, Happiness, The Great Consoler, and Engineer Prite’s Project. They can easily be ordered on the company’s website. Googling will find a few smaller online companies in Europe that sell them, but they are not available (yet, at least) from the larger sites like Amazon.
A major feature of these discs is “Hyperkino,” a version in which numbers appear at intervals in the upper right; clicking on them summons up an explanatory text. For Strike, for example, one can read an explanation of the “Collective of the 1st Works’ Theater” when that phrase appears in the credits. (The complete text of the annotations for Engineer Prite’s Project have been printed as an article in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema[Vol. 4, no. 1, 2010].) These “footnotes” would be of interest to film students, mainly at the graduate level; they would be invaluable for lecture preparation. The Hyperkino version appears on the first disc of each two-disc set; the film without the feature appears on the other disc. Despite the fact that the text on the boxes are almost entirely in Russian, the films have optional subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Portuguese; the Hyperkino notes are available only in Russian or English. The discs have no region coding.
The prints of Strike and October are both the familiar step-printed versions. The visual quality is reasonably good.
(We did not purchase the Happiness disc, since the film had already been available in DVD and we’re not Medvedkin specialists.)
The most important contribution of the series so far has been to make two rare Kuleshov titles available to the general public for the first time. Engineer Prite’s Project was his first film. Previously it was available in archives in a print lacking intertitles. The story was so difficult to follow that the film seemed to be incomplete. Now, with the intertitles reconstructed and inserted into the film, it makes sense. It’s a short feature about industrial intrigue, notable in its mixture of traditional European tableau staging style and some sophisticated American-style editing that was a complete innovation for Russian cinema. The release of Engineer Prite’s Project on DVD fills a large gap in the history of the Soviet silent cinema, since it was the first film by one of the group that would form the Montage movement. Indeed, the fast cutting in a brief fight scene looks forward to that movement:
The DVD also includes a documentary, The Kuleshov Effect, made in 1969. It’s a helpful overview, with clips from the major films up to The Great Consoler, along with interviews with Kuleshov, scenarist and Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovski, and others. It’s just under an hour and would be a great teaching tool for a history or theory class.
If Engineer Prite’s Project is of interest mainly for its historical significance, The Great Consoler is perhaps Kuleshov’s masterpiece. The complex, multi-leveled narratives so popular in contemporary cinema have nothing on this film’s storytelling. It shifts among three levels with thematic parallels. In one, an abused, miserable shop girl (played by Alexandra Khokhlova, Kuleshov’s wife and leading proponent of the “biomechanical” school of acting) reads O. Henry short stories as escapism. In another, O. Henry himself is seen in prison (as he was in real life). In a third, we see a dramatization of his tale of convict Jimmy Valentine (“A Retrieved Reformation”). Each level is filmed in a slightly different style, and the moralistic lesson–those who suffer from exploitation under capitalism find only hollow consolation in popular culture–is somewhat undercut by the zestful stylization with which Kuleshov presents the sentimental tale of Valentine. […]
We often complain about seeing films for the first time on DVD when they were meant to be seen on celluloid projected on the big screen. But for rare silent films like these Chaplin shorts, DVD replaces the old 8mm and 16mm prints that I remember from my graduate-school days in the 1970s. Our friend and colleague Frank Scheide, who was writing his dissertation on Chaplin’s music-hall background, would present programs of such prints in his home, but there were items that remained elusive. (Frank has co-edited two anthologies on Chaplin’s later films; see here and here.) Now we’re lucky enough to have archives restoring films in part to make available in the new format. Most of these images are far better quality than 8mm or even 16mm could render.
As with the giant Georges Méliès boxed set released in 2008, the new Chaplin discs make it easy to go through his career in strict chronological order, either as the films were made or as they were released (often not the same thing in those early days). The set is a vital item for collections of silent films and will no doubt feature among the nominees in the DVD awardsfor next year’s Bologna festival, Il Cinema Ritrovato. Three Hyperkino titles were among last year’s winners.
"OK, I've finally got round to exploring an Academia DVD in depth - Lev Kuleshov's Engineer Prite's Project (1918), the oldest of the initial batch of titles.
Although no masterpiece, the film itself is a fascinating slice of history - made when Kuleshov was just eighteen, it's one of the first films funded by the recently victorious Bolsheviks (which accounts for the aggressively anti-capitalist message, vaguely reminiscent of The Man in the White Suit in its tale of an engineer who devises a method of extracting electricity from peat, only to find himself undermined by American oil magnates seeking to protect their share price), but it also marks a clear link between the pre-revolutionary work of Yevgeny Bauer (Kuleshov's former boss) and what would eventually become Soviet montage (many of whose underlying theories would later be devised by Kuleshov). The montage here is far less flamboyant than what was to come, but there are already considerably more shots than would be the case with an equivalent American or earlier Russian film.
Like all the Academia releases, this is presented as a two-disc set, with one disc presenting an unadulterated version of the main feature (original Russian soundtrack/intertitles, with optional subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch or Portuguese), and the other offering the same transfer of the feature but with 'Hyperkino' contextual backup available in Russian or English.
In practice, this means that an orange number will occasionally pop up on the screen, indicating that contextual information is available - pressing 'enter' on your remote lets you jump to the relevant screen, which offers a mini-essay analysing or contextualising that particular part of the film (taking up multiple pages if necessary), complete with further links to stills, facsimile documents and even video clips - in this particular case, from the Yevgeny Bauer films on which Kuleshov originally cut his filmmaking teeth, and whose influence can clearly be seen. Annoyingly, the facsimile texts in Russian (original reviews, scripts, etc.) generally aren't translated, though the entire original treatment is presented in English.
With 27 contextual sections servicing a film running just 30 minutes, you can probably already appreciate that there's a fair bit of material to explore - it runs the gamut from production anecdotes through reception and its subsequent archival life, together with a fair bit of analysis, including clips from the actual film with added onscreen graphics to highlight key details. There's also a themed index of subjects in the style of one of Criterion's commentary indexes - for instance, 'Russian cinema of 1918', 'The film's plot and libretto', '"Super American drama"', 'First formula of montage', and so on.
As for the print and transfer, it's in pretty good condition for a 1918 film, and has clearly undergone a fair bit of restoration - purists may baulk at the fact that the intertitles are so obviously electronically-created, but the layout and typesetting seem appropriate to the period. English subtitles"
«Кино по пятницам». Еженедельная авторская программа Валерия Кичина:
24 сентября 2010: "В этой программе речь пойдет о выпуске кинокомпанией «R.U.S.C.I.C.O.» на dvd отечественной киноклассики с комментариями и системой ссылок. В гостях у Валерия Кичина: генеральный директор компании Роман Дихтяр; киновед и главный редактор серии Николай Изволов; участник проекта и один из его вдохновителей преподавательница из Германии Наташа Друбек."
"The Mosaic Approach. In defense of a nonlinear film criticism"
posted August 18, 2010, in the journal Moving Image Source, Museum of the Moving Image, N.Y.
"The fact that these commentaries belong to a hybrid form—existing somewhere between reading and watching, like various computer-related activities—is part of what seems forward-looking about them […] What all these forms of criticism suggest is not merely a less linear way of approaching film experience but also a more interactive methodology. The fact that movies are being seen more and more often away from public theaters shouldn't necessarily mean that the way we all experience them and share our experiences is any less social. Perhaps it's more pertinent to note that the very forms of our social interactions in relation to films are changing as well."
IL CINEMA RITROVATO DVD AWARDS 2010 VII edition. BEST SPECIAL FEATURES (BONUS). "Our BEST SPECIAL FEATURES (BONUS) award goes jointly to:
(a) three recent Ruscico releases of classic Russian films (two previously unavailable films by Lev Kuleshov, ENGINEER PRITE’S PROJECT and THE GREAT CONSOLER, and Sergey Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s OCTOBER)—both for their innovative handling of printed and illustrated commentaries by scholars and for their subtitles in many languages, despite the unfortunate fact that all three releases are identified on their covers only by their Russian titles
ENGINEERS PRITE’S PROJECT (Russia/1918) di Lev Kuleshov – Ruscico (Russia) -
THE GREAT CONSOLER (Russia/1933)di Lev Kuleshov – Ruscico (Russia)
OCTOBER (Russia/1927)di Sergey Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov – Ruscico (Russia)
and
(b) the Filmmuseum with Filmmuseum München and Goethe Institut Deutschland release of G.W. Pabst’s DIE FREUDLOSE GASSE (THE JOYLESS STREET), for the three documentaries about Pabst that are included."
On Quotation.
How Hyperkino is making its way into critical jargon where it mutated to HYPER-KINO. Tommaso Schulze in SPEX #321, June 2009 about Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds":
WAS ERLAUBEN TARANTINO? – DAS HYPER-KINO DES FILM-ZITATORS
FILMOVÁ A TELEVIZNÍ FAKULTA AKADEMIE MÚZICKÝCH UMĚNÍ V PRAZE > more...
FAMU vznikla v rámci AMU v Praze (filmový odbor) v letech 1946/47 jako pátá filmová škola na světě - po Moskvě, Belíně, Římu a Paříži. První uchazeči zde mohli studovat režii, dramaturgii a filmový obraz.
Dnes FAMU zahrnuje nasledující katedry a pracoviště:
