I have been exploring Tatlin’s
tower, originally inspired by a
shot in Theodore Ushev’s film
Tower Bawher
https://www.nfb.ca/film/tower_bawher/
cuit in quickly at 3.30 - 335, there
are themes in Ushev’s work of
construction, and buildings,
achitectural forms, and the theme
of ‘forward time’ found in Soviet
ideals of the 5-year plans. The
paper I was reading at the Henry
Moore Institute compared
Tatlin’s (unrealised) Tower with a
similarly unrealised work by Rodin
designed in 1900, also created to
celebrate ideals of labour and
construction. The author of the paper,
Philip Ursprung, describes
Rodin’s use of space, physical
placements and time, moving around
a work, in a sculptural sense, this,
is also described in Eisenstein’s
essays in the 1930’s. Links between
films and architecture, and motion in
space, physical spaces, and physical
spaces in film. Montages, cutting,
and using wipes and transitions to
cut up and displace, audiences and
characters. Hito Steyerl describes
this process in Duty Free Art
Tatlin’s Tower:
Photo from Tatlin’s Tower: Monuments to
Revolution, by Norbert Lynton, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 2009.
Henry Moore Sculpture Library.
