What would it look like if Ken Russell had been a Soviet filmmaker? One clue can be found in the spy flick The Billion Dollar Brain, starring Michael Caine. The cheeky English auteur succeeded in making an espionage caper in which the Russians are the heroes and the Americans the villains, and indulged his love of Eisenstein with a version of the battle on the ice from Alexander Nevsky.
Another clue can be found in Pervorossiyanye (a.k.a. Russian Pioneers, 1968) by Aleksandr Ivanov and Yevgeni Shiffers. The Great Leap Forward here is the blending of dialectical montage with a pop art influence derived from Antonioni. The filmmakers even paint their landscapes, and actors, for maximum graphic effect. The anamorphic lens has a tendency to warp and abstract backgrounds in close shots, creating smeared and elongated blurs of light out of everything. Here this is taken to the next logical step,...
Another clue can be found in Pervorossiyanye (a.k.a. Russian Pioneers, 1968) by Aleksandr Ivanov and Yevgeni Shiffers. The Great Leap Forward here is the blending of dialectical montage with a pop art influence derived from Antonioni. The filmmakers even paint their landscapes, and actors, for maximum graphic effect. The anamorphic lens has a tendency to warp and abstract backgrounds in close shots, creating smeared and elongated blurs of light out of everything. Here this is taken to the next logical step,...
- 4/15/2014
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
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