Eccentrisim Turns 100
A redesigned and updated booklet to accompany to mark the centenary of the FEKS Manifesto. Originally produced in 1978 with the title FEKS, FORMALISM, FUTURISM: Eccentrism in Soviet Cinema to accompany the ground-breaking programme – ‘Russian Eccentrics’ – conceived by John Gillett as a showcase for many offbeat films from the Soviet silent era that he had discovered in archives around the world (at a time when there were no videos to view, or internet to browse). The season helped put a mixture of mainly Leningrad and Georgian filmmakers on the map, and made available for the first time a partial translation of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor [FEKS] Manifesto, together with contemporary and modern writing about this little-known group.
“Better to be a young pup than an old bird of paradise”
– Mark Twain
Bespoke publishing collaboration …
Ian Christie (British film scholar and Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London) wanted to put together an updated (and upgraded) edition of what was in its first incarnation a booklet to accompany the 1978 National Film Theatre ground-breaking programme – ‘Russian Eccentrics’, a showcase for many offbeat films from the Soviet silent era. The self-financed new edition was conceived to celebrate the centenary of the establishment of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS).
Ketchup worked closely with Christie, moulding a new design and landscape format to best present a translated facimile of the original FEKS 1922 Manifesto.