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| From the time he renounced painting in 1921 Rodchenko regarded himself as a versatile agent--a visual mechanic or constructor--able to work in virtually any medium. His diverse enthusiasms included filmmaking; he and his Constructivist colleagues associated the juxtapositions of photocollage with cinematic montage. Always prepared for experimental collaboration, he undertook such projects as designing intertitles for Dziga Vertov's newsreels of the early 1920s and choosing locations and camera angles for Boris Barnet's film of 1927, Moscow in October. And he designed posters for several films, including Vertov's Cine-Eye (1924) and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925). In the second half of the 1920s, Rodchenko also devoted considerable energy to designing sets and costumes for film and theater productions. Among the notable productions were The Journalist, a film of 1927 by Lev Kuleshov, for which Rodchenko conceived the set as an exemplar of modern functional design, and Mayakovsky's The Bedbug of 1929, for which Rodchenko designed futuristic costumes and sets for the second part of the play, which was set in 1979. |