Quetzaltcóalt
WE: VARIANT OF A MANIFESTO
WE call ourselves kinoks-as opposed to “cinematographers,” a herd of junkmen doing rather well peddling their rags.
WE see no connection between true kinochestvo and the cunning and calculation of the profiteers.
WE consider the psychological Russo-German film-drama weighed down with apparitions and childhood memories-an absurdity.
To the American adventure film with its showy dynamism and to the dramatizations of the American Pinkertons the kinoks say thanks for the rapid shot changes and the close-ups. Good . . . but disorderly, not based on a precise study of movement. A cut above the psychological drama, but still lacking in foundation. A cliche. A copy of a copy.
WE proclaim the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous.
-Keep away from them!
-Keep your eyes off them!
-They’re mortally dangerous!
– Contagious!
WE affirm the future of cinema art by denying its present.
“Cinematography” must die so that the art of cinema may live.
WE call for its death to be hastened.
WE protest against that mixing of the arts which many call synthesis. The mixture of bad colors, even those ideally selected from the spectrum, produces not white, but mud.
Synthesis should come at the summit of each art’s achievement and not before .
WE are cleansing kinochestvo of foreign matter- of music , literature, and theater; we seek our own rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of things.
WE invite you:
-toflee-
the sweet embraces of the romance,
the poison of the psychological novel,
the clutches of the theater of adultery;
to turn your back on music,
-toflee-
Out into the open, into four-dimensions (three+ time), in search of our own material, our meter and rhythm.
The ” psychological” prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch; it interferes with his desire for kinship with the machine.
In an art of movement we have no reason to devote our particular attention to contemporary man.
The machine makes us ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if electricity’s unerring ways are more exciting to us than the disorderly haste of active men and the corrupting inertia of passive ones?
Saws dancing at a sawmill convey to us a joy more intimate and intelligible than that on human dance floors .
For his inability to control his movements, WE temporarily exclude man as a subject for film.
Our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man.
In revealing the machine’s soul, in causing the worker to love his workbench, the peasant his tractor, the engineer his engine-
WE introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor,
WE bring people into closer kinship with machines,
WE foster new people.
The new man, free of unwieldiness and clumsiness, will have the light, precise movements of machines, and he will be the gratifying subject of our films.
Openly recognizing the rhythm of machines, the delight of mechanical labor, the perception of the beauty of chemical processes, WE sing of earthquakes, we compose film epics of electric power plants and flame, we delight in the movements of comets and meteors and the gestures of searchlights that dazzle the stars.
Everyone who cares for his art seeks the essence of his own technique.
Cinema’s unstrung nerves need a rigorous system of precise movement.
The meter, tempo, and type of movement, as well as its precise location with respect to the axes of a shot’s coordinates and perhaps to the axes of universal coordinates (the three dimensions + the fourth- time), should be studied and taken into account by each creator in the field of cinema.
Radical necessity, precision, and speed are the three components of movement worth filming and screening.
The geometrical extract of movement through an exciting succession of images is what’s required of montage.
Kinochestvo is the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm of each object.
Intervals (the transitions from one movement to another) are the material, the elements of the art of movement and by no means the movements themselves. It is they (the intervals) which draw the movement to a kinetic resolution.
The organization of movement is the organization of its elements, or its intervals, into phrases.
In each phrase there is a rise, a high point, and a falling off (expressed in varying degrees) of movement.
A composition is made of phrases, just as a phrase is made of intervals of movement.
A kinok who has conceived a film epic or fragment should be able to jot it down with precision so as to give it life on the screen, should favorable technical conditions be present.
The most complete scenario cannot, of course, replace these notes, just as a libretto does not replace pantomime, just as literary accourits of Scriabin’s compositions do not convey any notion of his music.
To represent a dynamic study on a sheet of paper, we need graphic symbols of movement.
WE are in search of the film scale .
WE fall, we rise . . . together with the rhythm of movements- slowed and accelerated,
running from us, past us, toward us,
in a circle, or straight line, or ellipse,
to the right and left, with plus and minus signs;
movements bend, straighten, divide, break apart,
multiply, shooting noiselessly through space.
Cinema is, as well, the art of inventing movements of things in space in response to the demands of science; it embodies the inventor’s dream- be he scholar, artist, engineer, or carpenter; it is the realization by kinochestvo of that which cannot be realized in life.
Drawings in motion. Blueprints in motion . Plans for the future. The theory of relativity on the screen.
WE greet the ordered fantasy of movement.
Our eyes, spinning like propellers, take off into the future on the wings of hypothesis.
WE believe that the time is at hand when we shall be able to hurl into space the hurricanes of movement, reined in by our tactical lassoes.
Hurrah for dynamic geometry, the race of points, lines, planes, volumes.
Hurrah for the poetry of machines, propelled and driving; the poetry of levers, wheels, and wings of steel;
Dziga Vertov, 1922.
