Tag: films

Eisenstein’s Ivan : sensory thinking from Machiavelli to Disney

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Professor Joan Neuberger (University of Texas at Austin) gave the final CamCREES seminar of the 2015 Lent term.  She spoke about the film cycle Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible) and the particular influence Walt Disney and his work had on its director and screenwriter Sergei Eisenstein.  This post explores the University Library’s Eisenstein holdings, including a book of his drawings.

Sergei Eisenstein (the anglicised version of Eizenshtein is used here), the subject which started off the first seminar of the 2014 Michaelmas term, reappeared in more detailed focus as the subject of the last of the 2015 Lent term seminars.  This time, it was his work on Ivan Groznyi which was under examination.  Eisenstein, the screenwriter as well as director, planned three films on Ivan the Terrible.  Only the first two were ever produced, and only the first of these released in his lifetime.  Professor Neuberger talked about interpretations of Eisenstein’s Tsar Ivan before moving on to Disney’s influence on the films and the film-maker.

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Cover and internal page of Eisenstein’s screenplays for the first two Ivan Groznyi films (415.d.94.41)

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Spanish cinema resources at the University Library

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El cine sonoro en la II República (1929-1936), by Román Gubern. Classmark: 415.d.97.207

The 2014 Norman MacColl Symposium, organised by the Spanish and Portuguese Department of Cambridge University and convened by Prof. Brad Epps, was held on the 1st of November at Clare College under the title “Canon, contra-canon y cinefilia: Historias del cine español en un contexto internacional.”

The symposium encouraged debate around key trends and issues of Spanish cinema. The distinctive style of Spanish cinema, deeply rooted in the Spanish tradition of the sainete and the esperpento (the farce and the absurd), gradually evolved to become an open space where popular cinema grew alongside sophisticated styles inspired by Hollywood or Paris. Although Spain’s political isolation under Franco prevented film makers from fully absorbing European new waves, the death of Franco in 1975 saw a burst of creativity and experimentation that placed Spanish cinema back on the international arena. Continue reading “Spanish cinema resources at the University Library” →

Modeling Moscow : life, architecture, and the composite shot in Soviet films of the 1930s

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Professor Anne Nesbet opened the new academic year’s CamCREES seminar series with a wonderful talk on Moscow architecture and Soviet films.  In these bibliographical notes for the talk, we take the opportunity to look at books about the legendary Palace of the Soviets, the megalithic giant planned for central Moscow but never completed.

Frame diagram of the Lenin statue to stand at the top of the Palace of the Soviet (Atarov, Dvorets Sovetov; CCC.54.383)
Frame diagram of the Lenin statue to stand at the top of the Palace of the Soviets (Atarov, Dvorets Sovetov; CCC.54.383)

The 2014/15 set of CamCREES seminars started on 14 October with a fascinating talk by Professor Nesbet, in which she demonstrated that close readings of the “complicated composite shots” some 1930s Soviet films contained of Moscow’s architectural future could tell us “not only about the techniques used to construct such visions of the future, but also about cinema’s relationship to architectural history and architecture’s reciprocal interest in animation” (text taken from the talk’s abstract).  Professor Nesbet works in the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley.  Her 2007 book Savage junctures : Sergei Eisenstein and the shape of thinking is in the University Library’s South Front (415:3.c.200.1917).

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Dovzhenko/Manchevski : silence, speech, and the gaze

On By europeancollectionsIn Macedonian, Russian, Slavonic, UkrainianLeave a comment

The term’s third set of CamCREES notes cover the 18 February seminar at which three researchers, including two PhD students, discussed the renowned filmmakers Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Milcho Manchevski.  Using the example of the recently published Dovzhenko diaries discussed at the session, the notes also look at open-access and closed-access classification in the University Library.

The third CamCREES session of the Lent term started with a talk by Dr Elena Tchougounova-Paulson about her work on the papers of the great Soviet-era director, producer, and screenwriter Oleksandr Dovzhenko (Aleksandr in Russian).  His archive is collection 2081 in RGALI, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, where Dr Tchougounova-Paulson was a researcher.  Descriptions of the Dovzhenko collection, whose contents number over 2,500 items, can be read (in Russian) starting from the collection’s front page here on RGALI’s website.

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