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The critic Viktor Shklovsky once described the durability of certain poetic images as a kind of immortality, for it’s as if they were never created, but constantly being found, in new but recognizable forms. The poetic image of the Japanese superhero Ultraman is now in its 56th year of rediscovery, with over a half-century of revival and reconfiguring amounting to a vast constellation of TV series, one-off specials, films, manga and video games. This enormous store of moving images is a testament to not only the popularity of Ultraman the character, but to several generations of artists, of many stripes, who’ve sculpted this franchise in an ever-changing flow of new styles and ideas. Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno make their own addition with Shin Ultraman (2022), the second film in their series of reimagined classic tokusatsu (special effects) films. It follows Shin Godzilla (2016), a restoration of the Godzilla film...

Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1930s film gives a fascinating account of a medieval-style society about the supposed blessings of the Ussr’s modernising impact

In 1930, just as Luis Buñuel was releasing his classic L’Age d’Or, the Georgian director Mikhail Kalatozov gave us the 55-minute silent movie Salt for Svanetia, an equally rich, strange and mysterious work of ethno-fantasy and social-surrealist reverie. It is theoretically a documentary about the blessings which Soviet modernisation brought to the remote community of Ushguli in the Svanetia province of north-west Georgia; it contains a people governed by tribal traditions going back to the middle ages. Working with editor and formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, and inspired by a magazine article by the writer Sergei Tretyakov, Kalatozov appears to have been initially undecided whether his film set in Svanetia would be fact or fiction. He settled – ostensibly – on the former.

The fundamental idea is that...

"The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’—to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and the length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." —Victor Shklovsky

It’s weird, innit, how CGI can make you feel like they added a couple of wings to Grandma’s Ole Sensorium and it can also, regrettably, make you feel like bad Photoshop is spitting on your soul, and narrowing it down. And what is stranger still, you can have both these experiences in the same movie. It’s the luck of the draw; sometimes your perception can be so unprolonged, and your subjectivity so enlisted, so complicit in what you are seeing, that you feel as faked as the thing you’re watching.

Soviet state-run cinema was fast, furious and fun before the dead hand of Stalin called time on experimentation and entertainment

A fast and furious chase, full of physical gags and gangsters, with jokes at the expense of American imperialism. A hallucinatory horror, where ordinary objects take on a life of their own, scripted by a literary theorist. A bed-hopping love triangle, simmering in a cramped flat. A big-budget science fiction spectacular, full of futuristic sets and bizarre, revealing costumes. A workers' strike, depicted via special effects and pratfalls. A film about film-making itself, with no plot, no words, no narrative, which is somehow the most thrilling film you'll ever see. A film about collective farming with full-frontal nudity and inscrutable, poetic metaphors. A film about mutinous sailors that manages to accidentally invent the action film as we know it.

This is Soviet cinema in the 1920s. An almost entirely state-run cinema,...

“Nor is there any ‘figurative’ and ‘nonfigurative’ art… A person, an object, a circle are all ‘figures’; they react on us more or less intensely.” —Pablo Picasso, 1935

“Eikhenbaum says that the main difference of revolutionary life from ordinary life is that now everything is felt. Life has become art.” —Viktor Shklovsky, 1923

I.

"I have untied the knots of wisdom and set free the consciousness of color." — Kasimir Malevich, 1916

At any moment we watch Man with a Movie Camera with the collapsed consciousness of our eyes in a theater, of the traveling cameramen kinocs’ Kino-Eye, of the person in-scene whose embodied perspective the Kino-Eye channels, and of the thing that’s being looked at and looks back. Vertov follows the collective consciousness of a city becoming conscious of itself as the “You” intertitles of One Sixth of the World—pointing towards particulars of social labor on-screen and a general social mass...

Sex-obsessed newts, a vampire vine, slime moulds – nature films of the interwar wars focused not on big beasts in exotic places but on the world around us. Robert Macfarlane hails a golden age of natural history documentary.

In the summer of 1903, the hottest ticket in London was for the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, where a minute-long silent film called Cheese Mites was showing to packed houses. The film was the work of an amateur naturalist called Francis Martin Duncan, who had hit on the idea of pointing a motion-picture camera down a microscope. Cheese Mites, the result of his experiments in micro-cinematography, was a miniature B-movie masterpiece. An Edwardian gentleman sits at a table, browsing his newspaper through a reading glass while lunching on bread and cheese. He idly turns his glass upon his cheese and – horror! – discovers it to be seething with dozens of "great uncanny crabs...