On WNYC this morning, Sara Fishko trained her typical I’m-lyrical-yet-significant gaze on Slavko Vorkapich, the Serbian experimental filmmaker who became the leading montage editor inearly Hollywood. He sought to create, not just a story, but “pure cinema,” a rhythmic experience of light and sound. The frenetic “flying newspaper headline/oblique tight shot of typewriter keys” style he created became a ubiquitous cliche. Later on, as the head of USC’s film school and through wildly popular lectures in the sixties, he turned a generation of filmmakers, cinematographers, and artists into his pure cinema groupies.
If WPS1 ever streams an archive tape of a Vorkapich lecture at MoMA, I’ll let you know. In the mean time, Fishko’s report, disguised as a tone poem, is on the WNYC site.
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the making of, by greg allen