The cinema as a graphic art : on a theory of representation in the cinema (1959)

CREATIVE PROBLEMS OF THE ART OF THE CAMERA-MAN 2. The maximum exploitation of the forms of cheap prints, posters, wrappers, street publications, advertisements, type founts, labels. 3. The eccentric poster all see — all know ! Exploitation of pictorial methods for the purpose of agitation and propaganda. The latest inventions, novelties, fashions. 4. The stimulation of the genre of lightning-artists. Sketches, caricatures. . . . 5. Study of locomotives, motor-cars, steamships, motors, mechanisms. We shall not stop to elucidate the social roots of the early creative attitudes »f the F.E.K.S. group, as it is outside our subject. Sufficient to note the sharp nanifestation of these attitudes in the representational treatment of " Soldier's :oat " and, in part, of the film " C.B.D ". (Fig. 117). The truest estimate of Moskvin's creative tendencies is to be obtained by considering them in the light of the valuable struggle against vulgar cinematographic naturalism, the struggle for the cinema shot to achieve genuine artistic expressiveness, which the F.E.K.S. group waged in regard to cinematography or a number of years. In " Soldier's Coat " Moskvin worked with extraordinarily expressive and schematically representational methods ; these, though characterised by the utter >areness of extreme expressionism were, strictly speaking, a manifestation of the lame process of break with established naturalistic canons which is clearly revealed n the work of Golovnya and Tisse. But from the beginning Moskvin went his >wn way, deliberately eliminating from the shot all that might even distantly Fig. 117. — Shot from the film " Soldier's Coat" (Andrei Moskvin, cam.). 199