Storming the Winter Palace voice-over text written and performed by Al Razutis in Storming the Winter Palace.
Text of Part 1 voice-over over selected image clips from OKTOBER (by Sergei Eisenstein), run backwards: -- please NOTE: if end of line features no punctuation, the line is an incomplete sentence; if beginning of line features capitalization, the line begins a sentence or phrase; if no capitalization or punctuation, the line is an isolated phrase. Intertitles are indicated in quotations within brackets; no subtitles are listed here.
(Voice-Over):
"To make strange is to unsettle
(INTERTITLE: "FORMALIST-MATERIALIST CINEMA')
to unsettle is to undermine
(INTERTITLE: "HISTORICAL FICTION")
habit and authority. The function of poetic language is the perpetuation of a permanent revolution, and destruction of the state of mind, state of language, state of dogma.
The inventors of the collage-montage techniques understood.
The function of poetic language is the perpetuation of a permanent revolution, and destruction of the state of mind, state of language
It is an error to equate poetic speech with emotive speech.
It is an error to separate form from content.
It is an error to purge poetry for the realism of the state apparatus.
Formalism is the birthplace of film studies, of semiotics, of analysis - post-Aristotelian, post metaphysical, post art.
that they performed operations
on the pictorial or poetic signifying practice, post Aristotelian, post metaphysical
It is an error to separate form from content
that ranged from the most subtle and minute interference in the linguistic and representational functions
The inventors of the collage-montage techniques understood.
that they performed operations
on the pictorial or poetic signifying practices
Formalism is the birthplace of film studies, of semiotics, of analysis
that ranged from the most subtle and minute interference in the linguistic and represtantational functions
in the most explicit and programmatic propaganda activities
It is an error to purge poetry for the realism of the state apparatus.
To make strange is to unsettle, to unsettle is to undermine habit and authority
The function of poetic language is the perpetuation of a permanent revolution, and destruction of the state of mind, state of language, state of dogma.
The inventors of the collage-montage techniques understood
it is an error to equate poetic speech with emotive speech.
It is an error to separate form from content.
It is an error to purge poetry for the realism of the state apparatus.
that they performed operations
on the pictorial and signifying practices
and destruction of the state of mind, state of language, state of political dogma.
The function of poetic language is the perpetuation of a permanent revolution,
post Aristotelian, post metaphysical,
post art.
It is an error to equate poetic speech with emotive speech.
It is an error to separate form from content.
of a permanent revolution
in the most explicit propaganda activities.
The inventors of the collage-montage techniques understood
The function of poetic language is the perpetuation
and destruction
state of language, state of political dogma
to the most explicit
it is an error
that ranged from the most subtle minute interference in the linguistic
post Aristotelian, post metaphysical,
post art
and representational functions
to purge poetry, for the realism of the state apparatus."
(INTERTITLE: "You are all under arrest!")
Part 2: (Potempkin)
"The allegorical mind arbitrarily selects from the vast and disordered material
(INTERTITLE: 'A TENTATIVE FILM SYNTAX" )
(Battleship Potempkin sequence)
The result is never predictable
(Odessa stairs sequence)
perceptual change denies singularity, denies hierarchy and a bourgeois world
(more odessa viewers, bourgoisie, the baby stroller, the masacre.)
cinematography is first and foremost montage
(intercut guns and crowds poempkin)
montage: confiscation, superimposition, and fragmentation
(voice over continues intermittently)
art is always conflict because
cinema is the creation illusion and propaganda
from the collision of the two given factors arises the concept
(long silent period while frames from Odessa steps)
a dialectical approach to film form, step by step
(more Odessa steps)
permanent revolution "
(more steps)
Part 3: Saccadic camera movements with texture screens - sequences from Oktober)
"Cinema is also the art of imagining movement of things in space"
(From Benjamin Buchloh as altered and rephrased by Al Razutis)
"Dialectical montage emphasizes the manufactured signifier and its mute existence, releases at the same time the hidden determinations of the work and the conditions of its perception, ranging from the framing and the presentational devices and the institutional framework, to the conventions of meaning assigned normally within the system of art itself, or politics itself.
(pages from eisenstein's film form)
The dialectical potential of both montage and the Origins of Cinema found their historical fulfillment in the contradictions, that are exemplified in the increasing psychological interiorization of collage and montage techniques in surrealism, and their subsequent and still continuing exploitation in advertising and product propaganda,
(paul klee and saccadic drawing)
and on the other hand, in the histocically simultaneous development of revolutionary montage and agit-prop practices, practices which have almost completely disappeared from history, except in the isolated pursuits of the contemporary avant garde."
(credit: A. Razutis 1984 )