Moving posters: Man With a Movie Camera

Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera was produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU. It presents urban life in Ukraine and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. The film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, deployed or developed, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, animations, and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles (WKPD).

Art for the people?

Vladimir Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned in 1920, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower (it was a third taller at 1,300 feet high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds (the first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day). High prices prevented Tatlin from executing the plan, and no building such as this was erected in his day.

40th secession exhibition poster, 1912

by Richard Harlfinger

what's unique about this design is the expressionist "S" enguls the lettering blocks within its rhythm. the letters are hand-drawn the design overwhelms any individual expressive quality. the weight of the negative space is expertly calibrated to strike a compact pulsing balance. this is both about abstraction and geometry. the organic motifs of the nouveau era have been left behind. the search for a universal language of form had begun.