"The most important art"? Film and the Soviet avant-garde
Talk
Saturday 18 February 2017 11am - 12pm
The Reynolds Room, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts. Entrance via De Grey Court.
£16 including exhibition entry. £8 event only, £5 concessions only. Free for carers.
Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932
Ian Christie discusses the place of film as an art form after the revolution in Russia and the relationship between Soviet filmmakers and other artists of the time.
The status of film as an art form rose considerably after the revolution, with Lenin claiming that "of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important". This became a prescient statement: Sergei Eisenstein's seminal film Battleship Potemkin, filmed one year after Lenin’s death, gained international recognition in the late 1920s, a time when very little new Soviet art was known abroad. However, cinema's success created bitter divisions among artists seeking support from the generally conservative regime, and encouraged disdain among some of the leading avant-garde artists of the time.
In this talk, Ian Christie, Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London and advisor on film in the exhibition, reflects on the place of film in the first tumultuous decade of Soviet power and how filmmakers including Eisenstein and Vertov related to their artist contemporaries.
This event will be sign language interpreted.
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