Update 'content/syllabus/fifthsyllabustest.md'

content/syllabus/fifthsyllabustest.md

@@ -19,19 +19,19 @@ Before leaping into an analysis of Vertov’s chef-d’oeuvre, it is worth notin
 
 Though much of Man with a Movie Camera’s blatant sexual impulsiveness is not until much later on, an early sequence foreshadows it all quite palpably. A mere 10 minutes into the film we see a young woman rise from bed, put her stockings on, and turn away from the camera while removing her nightgown. In close-up, the camera studies her back as her hands reach around to fasten a brassiere. Cutting back to a wider shot, we see the woman standing only in her underclothes and stockings before she pulls on a slip. Vertov immediately cuts away to a close-up of the Movie Camera as a man’s hands hastily remove a short, wide-angle lens, and replace it with a markedly longer, telephoto one. This erection is quite pronounced, and indeed well warranted! Showing a woman dressing is more seemly and less lurid than showing a woman undressing, but is it any less sexy?
 
-### “Part 2” of *Man With a Movie Camera*
+## “Part 2” of *Man With a Movie Camera*
 This section covers roughly minutes 9-19 of the complete film:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeKKeiXTBos
 
 Nearly 21 minutes in, a sequence commences featuring the Camera Operator (presumably Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov’s younger brother and principal cameraman during this time) perched dangerously atop a moving car as he photographs the passengers in nearby horse-drawn carriages. The Cameraman furiously cranks his camera, propelling it into action, obsessively capturing the images before him. His gestures are explicitly masturbatory—the Camera is manically tugged upon (dziga, dziga, dziga…) as the operator hunches over his tool of capture, power, and domination. When a lady passenger mimics the crude crank-gesturing back at the Cameraman, is he embarrassed or intimidated? No, for he is in control! It is clear that Vertov’s technique is beyond mere voyeurism. There is nothing covert about his Cameraman’s imposition on his subjects. His camera has empowered him to subjugate them in a way. Vertov presents a series of images as still frames immediately following the precarious carriage sequence—these images of carriage passengers are held for several seconds each (including one frightfully unattractive portrait of the indignant gesturing woman), exemplifying the filmmaker’s power. Having tagged and dominated these subjects with his Kino-tool, their images have become his captives. It is now the filmmaker’s privilege to exhibit them as he fancies!
 
-### “Part 3” of *Man With a Movie Camera*
+## “Part 3” of *Man With a Movie Camera*
 This section covers roughly minutes 20-29 of the complete film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2RKlDFmui4
 
 Vertov’s ardent belief in the synthesis between humanity and technology pervaded every aspect of his work. “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” written in 1922, boldly proclaims: “Our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man,” [^3] precisely heralding the mechanical super-humanity he would present in Man with a Movie Camera, several years later. In Hard Core, Linda Williams’ seminal study of pornography, she describes A Country Stud Horse (1920), an early American stag film where a man stands at a mutoscope with his face pressed against the viewing interface to watch a striptease. [^4] Cutting directly to closeups of the stripper’s naked body, the film privileges the viewer with a sort of super-human sight, offering closer views than would be realistically available to the man at the mutoscope. The film repeatedly cuts back to reveal the male voyeur manually propelling the crank-powered mutoscope with one hand while masturbating with the other. This early example of human sexuality being bolstered by a cine-mechanical aid points directly toward Vertov’s vision of an improved human experience through technological innovation.
 
 Vertov’s goal to actually see the world better through cinema can be easily interpreted as a manifestation of what Michel Foucault calls scientia sexualis, humanity’s basic impulse to detail an increasingly scientific understanding of sexuality. [^5] “I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it,” writes Vertov in 1923. [^6] Though he does not actually delve into pornography in any way, his efforts convey the same will to knowledge/power that motivate our scientia sexualis—he maps the modern city with the same care and passion he devotes to the study of a woman dressing in the morning. His project assumes what Linda Williams defines as the principle of maximum visibility: a compulsive desire to show all, to find the best formal techniques and applications to explore one’s subject. [^7] Vertov certainly shares this fundamental compulsion that is so essential to hard-core narrative pornography—his desire to explore the mechanisms of modern city-living is the same impulse that motivates the pornographer to find the best way to represent genitalia, intercourse, and drives his impossible quest to depict actual consummation, the most life-affirming, yet visually elusive moment of all.
 
-### “Part 7” of *Man With a Movie Camera*
+## “Part 7” of *Man With a Movie Camera*
 This section covers roughly minutes 50-59 of the complete film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8HiRQjEhF4
 
 Beginning 25 minutes in, and continuing with much more prowess later on, we see the Camera appearing to act independently. Perched high above a busy city intersection, the camera pans (seemingly of its own accord) across the scene, glaring down upon its subjects. At 55 minutes, we see the Camera and Camera Operator superimposed upon the skyline of the city, towering above it, surveying the fiefdom that cowers beneath them. A few minutes later, depicted through the skilful application of stop-motion photography, the Camera (now appearing without its Operator) leaps from its case onto the tripod mount and begins to dance around. Clearly, the Camera itself is the film’s star, the truly principal figure. Despite this cheeky bit of animation, the viewer understands that the Camera is merely an appendage of its Operator; and yet, this tool is indispensable, as the Cock is to the Cocksman in pornography.
@@ -42,12 +42,12 @@ Vertov’s Camera casts its gaze upon every detail, from the most magnificent to
 
 Mark how the fevered pace of Vertov’s montage responds to the increased intensity of the hand-cranking Cameraman as the film builds toward this climax! The quick succession of shots is itself orgasmic, as charging trains intercut with floods of micro pedestrians gushing through the streets! Each image itself a blast of semen! Each exploding upon the last, raging toward sheer ecstasy and complete satisfaction! This climax, this ultimate act of sublimation is a pure celebration of cinema! Each shot an affirmation of life, each blast a little gob of humanity! Cinema itself is bursting, ejaculating the cities of Eastern Europe upon the crowd! Oh, the spoils of the filmmaker! The—oh, Oh—OH! OH FUCK! Oh.
 
-### “Part 8” of *Man With a Movie Camera*
+## “Part 8” of *Man With a Movie Camera*
 This section covers roughly minutes 60-68 of the complete film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sON2MxgFnE
 
 ***
 
-## Bibliography
+# Bibliography
 
 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
 
@@ -57,11 +57,11 @@ Tsivian, Yuri. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Germona: Le G
 
 Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
 
-## Filmography
+# Filmography
 
 *Man With A Movie Camera* (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
 
-## Footnotes
+# Footnotes
 
 [^1]: Tsivian, Yuri. Lines of Resistance (p.5-14). In his introduction, Tsivian provides a concise account of Vertov’s ideologies and prinicipal grievances, including his feuds with popular Marxist thinkers and publishers, as well as celebrated Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.