A Ruski-filmmaker's contributions to Juvenile Filmmaking

There's an influence that Sergei Eisenstein poses on 'By Me and Mine' without the being of the creator and the hundred year gap in ideologies. As Eisenstein made films about communism, I make films about my specific brand of commune, their lives and the moments I could be there to capture. When the film is discussed, I'll draw on Eisenstein's words: when by me and mine is discussed, two of its features are commonly not noted: the organic unity of its composition as a whole and the pathos of the film.

Now the film itself was shot and edited in a week, some of its footage especially the montage at the end comes from a two-year long unhurried shoot. Documenting our lives. Taking the two characteristic features of the film, let us analyze by what means they were achieved, primarily in the field of composition. We shall study the first feature in the composition of the film as a whole. For the second, we shall take the episode of the Greyscale montage, where the pathos of the film reaches its climax, and then apply our conclusions to the whole.

We could examine the contribution of the organic unity and pathos made by my friends' performances (being themselves), the treatment of the edit, by the light and colour of the photography, by the natural backgrounds, by the mass scenes, etc. But here we shall confine ourselves to one particular problem, that of structure, and not attempt an exhaustive analysis of all the film's aspects.

A unified canon pierces not only the whole and each of its parts, but also each element that is called to participate in the work of composition. One and the same principle will feed any element, appearing in each in a qualitatively different form. Only in this case are we justifying in considering a work of art organic, the notion "organism" being used in the sense in which Engels spoke of it in his Dialectics of Nature: "The organism is certainly a higher unity."

This brings us to our first item of analysis - the organic unity of the composition in by me and mine. Outwardly, BMAM is a chronicle of events but it impresses the spectators as a drama. This film takes place in two planes: a telling of events within the week and a gradual pathos, a sort of death of something's existence. The secret of this effect lies in the plot which is built up in accordance with the laws of austere composition of tragedy in its three-chapter form. The events taken as three-concurrent tellings of unembellished facts, are so arranged as to form a consecutive whole, closely conforming to the requirements of the classic tragedy in a post-modern world. This age-honored structure of tragedy is further stressed by the subtitle each "act" is preceded by.

I WILL CONTINUE THIS LATER.