Dziga Vertov

A series of newsreel films from Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman which document Russian Life in the early 1920s.Read More »

Dziga Vertov records the achievements, and some failures, of the Moscow soviet.Read More »

PLOT:
Vertov and his Kino group produced this lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbas who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the five year plan. Enthusiasm is most noteworthy for it’s creative use of the new sound medium. Vertov liberated the recording equipment from the studio and shot sound on location. He also used common everyday sounds and wove them into what can only be described as a symphony. In fact, after seeing the film Charlie Chaplin wrote: “Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician.”Read More »

PLOT:
Fired from Sovkino studio after A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov (and his brother-cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman and wife-assistant director Elizaveta Svilova) was soon hired by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration. The trio’s first assignment was a documentary celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution – more or less the same kind of ode-in-pictures as Stride, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World. But while the political theme of The Eleventh Year may be orthodox and plain, its photography and editing are daring and complex. In the eyes of a left-wing artist of the twenties, ten years of Socialism was a radical social experiment, and as such, deserved, nay, required to be presented in a radically experimental way.Read More »

Quote:
The legendary Dziga Vertov’s most personal and deeply felt film, as well as the touchstone of his brilliant career. Three Songs of Lenin reveals the Russian leader as seen through the eyes of the Russian people represented in three songs. The first, “In a Black Prison Was My Face,” concerns the life of a young Muslim woman. “We Loved Him” deals with the life and death of Lenin himself. The third song, “In the Great City of Stone” shows the accomplishments of his glorious rule.Read More »

Quote:
Between 1922 and 1925, a total of 23 issues of Dziga Vertov’s newsreel series Kino-Pravda (Kino-Truth) appeared (albeit irregularly and in very few copies). Vertov’s goal was to create a kind of “screen newspaper”; the title is a tribute to the newspaper Pravda founded by Lenin. Just like the Kinonedelja newsreel series (1918–19), the Kino-Pravda issues offer a fascinating insight into the early Soviet Union and demonstrate the rapid development of Vertov’s film language.

The 22 surviving issues (No. 12 is lost) have been digitized and subtitled in German and English by the Austrian Film Museum in 2017/18 and are now available online.Read More »

Quote:
Between 1922 and 1925, a total of 23 issues of Dziga Vertov’s newsreel series Kino-Pravda (Kino-Truth) appeared (albeit irregularly and in very few copies). Vertov’s goal was to create a kind of “screen newspaper”; the title is a tribute to the newspaper Pravda founded by Lenin. Just like the Kinonedelja newsreel series (1918–19), the Kino-Pravda issues offer a fascinating insight into the early Soviet Union and demonstrate the rapid development of Vertov’s film language.

The 22 surviving issues (No. 12 is lost) have been digitized and subtitled in German and English by the Austrian Film Museum in 2017/18 and are now available online.Read More »

Quote:
Between 1922 and 1925, a total of 23 issues of Dziga Vertov’s newsreel series Kino-Pravda (Kino-Truth) appeared (albeit irregularly and in very few copies). Vertov’s goal was to create a kind of “screen newspaper”; the title is a tribute to the newspaper Pravda founded by Lenin. Just like the Kinonedelja newsreel series (1918–19), the Kino-Pravda issues offer a fascinating insight into the early Soviet Union and demonstrate the rapid development of Vertov’s film language.

The 22 surviving issues (No. 12 is lost) have been digitized and subtitled in German and English by the Austrian Film Museum in 2017/18 and are now available online.Read More »

The film was shot in 1942 in Kazakhstan. Unfortunately the image and sound quality is not so good.
Read More »