This video is part of my lengthy
Mp:me project, first a
series of manifestas I initially wrote to commence my
Media Praxis blog (explaining my goals and values) that I then made into seven
bad videos. I used the seminal manifestos of
Dziga Vertov (writing about early documentary cinema) as my muse and guide. The words "morally dangerous and contagious" are Vertov's of course.
"Dziga Vertov's
Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is a stunning avant-garde, documentary meta-narrative which celebrates Soviet workers and filmmaking. The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn't just recording reality, he transforms it through the power of the camera's 'kino-glaz' (cinema eye). Vertov's rich imagery transcends the earth-bound limitations of our everyday ways of seeing.
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"The art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect."
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For example, from the "Manifesto of Futurism"
[cit]:
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
See more
manifestos.