New book from Michael Craig “Blok, Meyerhold and The Fairground Booth”

Announcement of my new book “Blok Meyerhold and The Fairground Booth which was published a few weeks ago. The book is now available on Amazon. Blok wrote the play The Fairground Booth in 1906 in the wake of the 1905 revolution which was seen as a precursor to the 1917 October revolution. As Blok himself said it seemed he “dragged it up out of the police department of his soul”. The play itself was received with a mixture of derision and delight when it was first performed by Blok and Meyerhold in 1906.
Blok and Meyerhold’s production of the The Fairground Booth was one of those seminal plays which changed the whole direction and context of theatre in Russia. Meyerhold’s subsequent innovations had an impact not simply on the course of Russian theatre but also to a large extent influenced the direction in which other directors developed their ideas and work. The Fairground Booth was a prototype for the explosion of theatrical innovations spearheaded by Meyerhold but it also inspired such directors as Tairov and Vakhtangov.
This book is not intended as an interpretation of the play as such but is written with the aim of creating a context in which this enigmatic and often overlooked play can be understood and enjoyed.

Over the next few months I will be adding material to this blog as a suppliment to the book. Many of the themes in the book such as the theatre within a theatre and Blok’s other plays and their significance for theatre will be addressed as part of a continuing flow of information  connected with this book. If you wish to purchase the book more details can be found here or by clicking on the thumbnail on the righthand  side of the blog.

Biomechanics – Project – Book and Film

As I come to the end of The Russian Theatre Film Series book already new horizons opening up. Yesterday completed the artwork for the cover, so all that remains is to proof read the book one more time and check everything over for layouts and other things. I have been tantalizingly speaking to a publisher but still feel I should work at my own pace and within my own resources although it is always worth exploring all the publishing outlets which might be available.

Already there are ideas percolating through with regard to The Fairground Booth book and beyond. As always it is too early to write about this as the ideas themselves are appearing more as clues to developing work. One idea is to do another book about the theatre but only biomechanics. To make it more as an illustrated book with pictures but also text. The black and white tones will make I believe a very good visual impact. Working on this tonight – fleshing out a broad plan and outline with possible subjects to be included.
 The book should concentrate on visuals but also have text. It will be like a kind of graphic novel or one could say a graphic non fiction book – is that a new genre? – a hybrid book.

Last week we were out during the Maslenitza  celebrations in Moscow. At first I didn’t even want to go out that day but eventually we decided that we just have to get out of the apartment and walk around. Then once we arrived at the square in Moscow were the celebrations were taking place at he statue of Yuri Dolgoruky I didn’t really want to film anything. It didn’t seem as if there was anything interesting going on and that all the masks and costumed  people were not there. but I got the camera out in any case and began. Then things started to happen. The crowds were moving, there was traditional folk singing and high spirits and there was a guy in an old costume with a hood which began to add to the atmosphere. he made faces at the audience and looked like something from the middle ages – somehow intimidating. Then the masks began appearing and I was filming in full swing. The atmosphere was that of a shrovetide celebration and had an air of authenticity which I was able to enhance and emphasize within an initial edit. One of the masks reminded me of the 4 masks which adorn the Theatre Satyra building in Moscow and combining these images would prove effective. By accident I found a photograph of the building taken at night. I had filmed the building during the day and it was quite bland so I did not use the footage in any of the films I had made earlier. At night however the masks are lit from above and below and the effect is very striking. I will go back hopefully in the next few days to film this building from various angles.

Mixing Genres

One of the good things about making a documentary film or an arts documentary film now is that you have the freedom provided by all the previous films that have been made which provide one with a myriad of styles and examples which you can draw on – not so much to copy but to use as inspiration or guidance and for dispensing with any boundaries. This does not mean a free form film but encourages a fluidity between genres , a mixing of styles which can work. So that the difference between The Fairground Booth and a feature film or a documentary or an avant-garde film will be blurred.
Bearing this in mind, The Fairground Booth is proceeding in production and editing almost simultaneously and with editing and writing working in tandem. One or two posts have been completed and put up on the special site that is dedicated to The Fairground Booth project and is almost turning into a self sufficient blog. The latest blog post can be accessed here and refers to the role of neoplatonism in Blok’s work and in The Fairground Booth in particular. A whole section will be included in the book which will accompany the film and will be included as part of the Russian Theatre Film Series.  



 I have had some difficulties with a section of the book which deals with a comparison of The Fairground Booth with one of Shakespeare’s plays and which I will write about a little later. It comes as a result of reading Hoffman’s “Princess Brambilla” and some of Alexander Tairov’s comments about his production of the play in the early 1920s. Hoffman had a big influence on Russian theatre and the Russian Avant-garde as a whole.  

David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde screening in Moscow

I forgot to give an update on the screening of David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde which took place on the 7th April 2018 at the Museum of Chuseyev in Moscow as part of the Sogetsu Ikebana exhibition marking the 90th anniversary of the founding of the school by Sofu Teshigahara. There was a mad scramble to get the translation and subtitles in Russian finished before the screening. The text is quite philosophical and technical in places so that held up the translation a bit.  Most of it I was able to complete myself up to a point but then it all had to be checked and corrected and then put up over the original film. We managed to get something pretty much decent ready in time with one or two problems here and there but no one seemed to notice. 

As always a screening is nerve wracking experience and this was no exception. Also it is the first time I have screened one of my films in Russian to  a Russian audience. David Burliuk is unique because not only is he the “Father” of Russian futurism but he left Russia and spent 2 years in Japan up until 1922 before finally emigrating to America where he lived for the rest of his life with his family.

 
At the end of the film there was a long question and answer session about the film and about our journey to the island of Ogasawara, also known as the Bonin Islands,where we filmed. Burliuk spent several months on the islands during his stay in Japan. There is a book I wrote about our visit and the islands themselves – Journey to Ogasawara.

The film was warmly received  and there was strong interest in the other films in the series about the Russian Avant-garde as well as requests for an updated Russian translation of the book Journey to Ogasawara.

Biomechanics – Film released

The film Biomechanics is the latest in the series The Russian Theatre Film series. This film is a slight deviation from the documentary style films of Meyerhold Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde, Stanislavsky and the Russian Theatre and Vakhtangov and the Russian Theatre. It is a film without text, consisting only of the movements of the material which was shot for Meyerhold Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde.

Here  it has been extended and reworked to make a full 30 minute sequence of most of the experiments we worked on in a studio in Moscow with William Pease and Oksana Petrova performing the movements. The film itself is something of an experiment as were the performances  whereby we tried to find the essence of Meyerhold’s experiments in particular their graphic content.

As I have stated before this is not an instructional video about how to do biomechanics, it is not a reconstruction of Meyerhold’s acting techniques and a means for actors training. The film is more of an exploration to see what we could make of Biomechanics using the knowledge we had and improvising on some of the themes which Meyerhold’s experiments provided. It is in this spirit that the film is presented.

The whole film can be downloaded here.

Japan Philosophical Landscapes – Release

Have been working constantly on the old film Japan Philosophical Landscapes film. Have made a new version in a different format and finally I managed to get an edited version which works. Certainly it is good enough to put up on Amazon Video Direct which I think is the perfect platform for this film. I never thought it would work on DVD. However I have since revised that opinion and I might release a DVD version as well. The Amazon video direct spot is perfect as it can be viewed as part of the Amazon Prime service which doesn’t entail buying the film although the film earns money for the amount of hours it is viewed.  I have completed the closed captions. In many ways I have changed my attitude towards the film. I took it much too seriously and therefore feared criticism. Now I have an easier relationship to it and do not think of it as a real heavy laden piece of work but something much of an experiment – looser and adapted for the internet, concentrating more on the story rather  than the preciseness of the images. Some things have worked well, better than I expected. The film fits within the overall project Japan Philosophical landscapes which includes the film Tokyo Journey and David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde as well as the book Journey to Ogasawara. The film can be downloaded here: Japan Philosophical Landscapes

Tokyo Journey and Closed Captions on Amazon Video Direct

The short film Tokyo Journey is now available for download on Amazon Video Direct. View the clip here. Download it here. In due course a DVD will be available as well. Before it could become available on Amazon Video Direct it was necessary to provide Closed Captioning even though there is no dialogue in the film.

Closed captions is something that defeated me in getting my films ready and published on Amazon Video Direct. I use an Amazon company called Create Space to market my films on DVD and the Internet. Now DVDs are becoming more difficult to sell on the internet and downloaded films are becoming more important. In 2016 all my films (all eight of them) were migrated to The Amazon Direct Video Service so that they could only be downloaded and sold directly through Amazon. The criteria for publishing is quite specific and somewhat strict. One of the criteria are closed captions for the those whose hearing is impaired or are deaf. Closed captions are like sub titles. 

Closed captioning (CC) and subtitling are both processes of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information. Both are typically used as a transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs (either verbatim or in edited form), sometimes including descriptions of non-speech elements.

This can be quite tricky but there is a way of doing it which can minimise the pain. Most non linear video editing programmed have a closed captioning facility. Go into the closed captioning facility and add the captions according to where the dialogue or text is located in the film. Once you have finished you render your film to which ever format you want and then save and export a srt. file which stored the textual data which can be used and matched by amazon when it is upload to your dashboard on Amazon Video Direct.

The editing programme I use is Vegas Video Pro. The process is as follows. Find the point in the timeline you wish to insert text into. Click on Insert and then command and the menu comes up. In the command box chose 608CC1. Then type your text in the comment box and press OK. Then repeat for all the other text you wish to insert as a closed caption. Rememeber also to change the Timecode format to Time and Frames.

To export the srt. film click on tools, scripting and chose export closed captioning for Youtube option

The process is different for Adobe Premier and other programmes but the priciples are similar.

The Russian Theatre Film Series – New book publication

This post first appeared on my blog but it is worth repeating to reach a different audience here. This book is the third by Michael Craig. The first being Journey to Ogasawara which was an account of the making of the film David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde and Encounters with the Russian Avant-garde.It’s difficult to find an appropriate description of the book “The Russian Theatre Film Series“. Essentially it is an account of an arts documentary series with all its pitfalls, successes, limitations and achievements. The three films which have so far been completed are “Meyerhold, Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde“, “Stanislavsky and the Russian Theatre” and “Vakhtangov and the Russian Theatre“. This book is part of the overall project – The Russian Theatre Film Series and is a milestone and a marker in this developing project

Also it is a commentary on what it means to make an independent arts documentary film series in a foreign country namely Russia. Not so much from the technical point of view although there is plenty of technical aspects covered but more from the point of view of a kind of interior process. It is an expedition into the phenomenology of film-making, what obstacles have to be overcome, both physical and technically but more importantly some of the lived experience of film-making. For some people making independent films is a way of life in the same way that for others theatre is a way of life or acting is a way of life or painting or whatever is a way of life. You can’t live without it or outside it. The fact that you have to spend a year or two of your life on each film means that it is a life decision. So it has an existential element and this quality of film-making is explored in the book. How the series came about, what were the thought processes involved in the development of the series, which influenced the series overall – who helped who didn’t, why things went wrong and why they went right. The book is a staging post on the way to further developments clearing the ground before moving forward to the next phase – a book about The Fairground Booth plus a film on this subject.

Publication of "Encounters with the Russian Avant-garde"

Finally we can announce the publication of the book Encounters with the Russian Avant-garde which is now available on Amazon for purchase or download. Encounters with the Russian Avant-garde complements the series of six films made by Michael Craig and Copernicus Films about the Russian Avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s. It is not only an account or explanation but also an introduction or to be more specific an “encounter” with this exciting phenomenon. The title reflects an active relationship: firstly through the experience of living in Moscow for many years, plus a direct encounter with the buildings, the architecture and the very territory in which much of the avant-garde arose and to some extent still exists. Encounter suggests something more casual, unexpected and unstructured but also a sense of living in the avant-garde and being part of it. After all it was the intention of the Russian Avant-garde to connect with the real lived world and to ‘take art out of the galleries and onto the streets and squares of Moscow’

As always when a large project gets finished there is the inevitable feeling of disappointment and wanting to fill that vacuum with another book or project or a film. There is plenty to do and plenty to be getting on with and really I should not rest on my laurels. However it will take a bit of time to change gears and shift into another project.

Copernicus Films, Michael Craig and The Fairground Booth

Since Copernicus Films finished Vakhtangov and the Russian Theatre development has been going ahead on the next part of the Russian Theatre Documentary Film series. A script for a new documentary about Blok and Meyerhold’s The Fairground Booth is in a process of writing and rewriting. As well as this film work is taking place with regard to a film version of the play itself. The set design has been ascertained and is being painstakingly designed. This is a big question and will require a great deal of attention but at least the process is underway. The next big question will be the costumes – the design and the over all look as well as how to find the actors who will play the various roles. its a long process and cannot be rushed. There are various other ancillary elements to this series which are also being developed in parallel to the project and hopefully will make up a significant component of The Russian Theatre documentary Film Series but all the work being done in this are is in its early stages. Therefore it seems premature to make any announcements. 

Its worth saying that this series will be made up of five films (possibly more with time – discussions are ongoing with interested parties). The films will include Meyerhold Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde, Stanislavsky and the Russian Theatre, Vakhtangov and the Russian Theatre (all three of which have been completed and released) plus Meyerhold, Blok and The Fairground Booth(documentary)  and The Fairground Booth (film). announcements will be made as each stage of the project progresses. For fuller and more regular updates check Michael Craig’s blog or here for more specific updates and related information.