Smartphone – The Triumph of Eisenstein
Marcin Giżycki
mgizycki@hotmail.comPolish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7525-0205
Abstract
Smartphones have become so popular that almost every event gets recorded. Even such an unexpected occurrence as the explosion in Beirut, which turned nearly half of the city into rubble, was caught on several smartphones. Most of these videos have one characteristic in common – they are vertical. This fact has been ridiculed by filmmakers and satirists many times. Despite this, the popularity of vertical films does not seem to diminish. They even find more and more defenders, also within academic circles. In this article the author sums up these voices and reminds that the landscape orientation of the moving image was not always the rule before Edison nor in the realm of video art and expanded cinema, and that one of the precursors of the vertical screen was Sergei Eisenstein.
Keywords:
Sergei Eisenstein, Zoe Beloff, vertical video, video art, expanded cinemaReferences
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Authors
Marcin Giżyckimgizycki@hotmail.com
Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7525-0205
Film and art historian, critic, filmmaker. Professor at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw (Poland). Senior Lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence (USA). Artistic Director of “Animator” – International Animated Film Festival in Poznań (Poland). Former editor-in-chief of Animafilm – the ASIFA quarterly. He has published eight books and around 400 articles on film and art in Polish and foreign publications. He has also made a number of documentary, live action, experimental, and animated films in Poland and the USA. In 2016 he received the Award for the Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies at “Animafest”, the World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb (Croatia).
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Copyright (c) 2020 Marcin Giżycki
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In issues from 105-106 (2019) to 119 (2022) all articles were published under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. During this period the authors granted a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in „Kwartalnik Filmowy”, retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.
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