film as blog
I’ve been hanging out with our friend Nancy Kates who finished a film this year called Brother Outsider – the life of Bayard Rustin. This is a brilliant film documenting Rustin, the openly gay African-american activist and advisor to Martin Luther King, who was more or less written out of history. Nancy and I spent quality time playing with baby chicks and watching Chris Marker’s 1992 conceptualist film The Last Bolshevik. Marker is basically the closest thing you can get to a ‘blog filmmaker.’ The film is a beautiful reminiscence on the dead Russian filmmaker, Alexandreovich Medvedkin and his role in the Agit Prop trains that once traveled across Russia filming the proletariat, processing the films in special mobile darkrooms and screening them back to the very people that were in them. Agit prop trains were so advanced and (anasynchrostic) for the premodern historical moment (circa 1918) in which they were used, that I still can’t quite wrap my head around them. Dziga Vertov was heavily involved in these Agit Prop trains also and kinetic montages of trains featured prominently in his films.
Agit prop trains! The museum of the moving image in london which as now been closed had an exhibit of a carrige of an Agit Prop train with a actor dressed as a worker who came aboad showed Eisenstien films and exhorted us to join the Red Army (actually I wanted to make propaganda films!)