Dziga Vertov IV: Kino-Pravda No. 1–8, GCM Sacile 2004, narrated by Yuri Tsivian

Dziga Vertov: Kino-Pravda No. 5 (1922). Photo: Österreichisches Filmmuseum. The Kino-Pravda series is online on the Österreichisches Filmmuseum website.

DZIGA VERTOV IV
Moderator, live translator, narrator and explicador: Yuri Tsivian
Grand piano: John Sweeney
Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 11 Oct 2004

Prog. 4 (71’)

KINO-PRAVDA, NO. 1–8 (Goskino, USSR 1922)
35 mm (20 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 1 230 m., 10’
    AA: Famished children. Junkers airplane. Process S.R. (Socialist Revolutionary Party = SRs = Esers).

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 2 222 m., 10’
    AA: Fragments from power station.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 3 161 m., 7’
    AA: Eserov = S.R. Visual quality often good.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 4 164 m., 7’
    AA: Trial of the S.R. Car tyres. Bread barges. Caucasus, Sochi.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 5 170 m., 7’
    AA: Yakovenko – Siberia. Agricultural machines. Dr. Anapa machine. Children's sanatorium. Red derby.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 7 244 m., 11’
    AA: Box projector. Tram crash near Moscow river. Constructivist intertitles. Armored car plant. The assembly of the first motorcar. Acrobatic motorcycling. SR trial. Burnt by Kolchak. Lake Baikal. Forlorn Maika Mines. Kurort Sochi. Tulip tree, Agava. Persia: silk to Baku. Afghanistan: Kabul Caucasus: Red Lane. Betting on SR. Mikhail Kaufman.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 8 299 m., 13’.
    AA: SR, moving imagery, clock face, Vertov in tram: impatient reader. Plane crash in Moscow. Moscow tramline reconstructed.

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Of all the rarely seen Vertov films, Kino-Pravda (1922–25) is the rarest of all. Everyone (starting with Vertov himself) mentions Kino-Pravda as the playground for Vertov’s boldest experiments in film form, but how many of us have actually seen any of its 23 issues — apart from special issue 21, devoted to Lenin’s death? To show the whole 3-year run of the Kino-Pravda newsreel (all but one survive, though some in fragments) is — I am sure — one of the Giornate’s history-changing decisions. I doubt if it has ever been done before — or could be done, without the involvement of RGAKFD and the Österreichisches Filmmuseum, which hold two of the world’s major collections of Vertov’s films. It’s quite a marathon, it is true, but the reward for running is given not at the finish line, but in the process: to see Kino-Pravda issue-by-issue is like watching a time-lapse movie showing the growth of Soviet avant-garde cinema (born in 1922, not in 1924 as we are normally told)."

"Like many a Left-wing artist of the 1920s, Vertov thought that revolutions in art are somehow linked with revolutions in politics. His Kino-Pravda was about both. In Russian, pravda means "truth", but the Pravda part of the film’s title alludes not to pravda the truth but to Pravda the paper — the Communist Party’s principal daily newspaper (illegal before, official after 1917). Vertov was never a Party member, but one could hardly find a more stalwart partisan of the Party than he. It may sound strange to hear a full champion of the party in power call himself a revolutionary — but then the Soviet Twenties was a strange time. The October Revolution did not end in October, Party leaders kept saying, true revolutions only begin with the takeover of power. All this sounds like doubletalk, and doubletalk it may have been, but if you believed it you felt doubly empowered: you could be a political orthodox while remaining politically — and artistically — Left."

"That the newsreel Kino-Pravda, like the newspaper Pravda, was less about news and more about statements, made Vertov’s task interestingly difficult. He felt he needed to string facts into sequences, and make sequences read like statements — something he kept trying to achieve from the very first issue. Kino-Pravda No. 1 is a good example. It begins with heart-rending pictures of starving children (1922 saw dreadful famine in Russia). It is what Vertov’s theory calls a "fact". The starving-children sequence consists of 16 shots. Then Vertov moves on to another "fact" of Russia’s political life in 1922: the requisitioning of the valuables possessed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Another 15 shots show Soviet authorities plucking pearls and jewels from icons in the presence of depressed, unresisting clergy. Then a title patches the two subjects together: "Every pearl saves a child." And so on. The trick may not look terribly ingenious by today’s standards, but it must have been in 1922. Dialectical editing: thesis — antithesis — synthesis. Kino-Pravda not only shows — it explains!
1922 was the year of political Grand Guignol. The views of famine were devastating. The requisitioning of the Church’s holdings made some hearts sink, some beat faster. But the most thrilling political show that summer was the trial of the S.R.s (short for the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries). This was a public trial, the first of its kind in Russia, and quite unique in the sense that it was a court trial of a political party by a political party. Distinct from the Bolshevists, the Socialist-Revolutionaries did not call themselves the workers’ party: their point was that in a country like Russia, with a predominantly peasant population, the dictatorship of the proletariat entailed the tyranny of the minority. Another distinction between the two parties was in their ideas about the technology of revolution. The Bolshevists worked by means of strikes and agitation, while the S.R.s relied on individual terrorism (to their credit, the S.R.s never went for soft targets; their objectives were generals, ministers, and tsars). The S.R. party was crucial in the first, anti-monarchist revolution in February 1917, and had a majority in the interim government. When the Bolshevists overthrew this government in October 1917, the S.R.s had every right to consider that their show has been stolen. During the rule of the Bolshevists the S.R.s continued in the same vein. In 1918 one of them, the Socialist-Revolutionary Fania Kaplan, used her Browning to shoot Lenin, who survived but never fully recovered from his wound. There were other acts, some more successful, but the national and international reputation of the S.R. party was such that they could not be banned and disbanded as easily as, say, the Anarchists in 1918."

"I trust the reason for my excursion into historical fact becomes obvious: it sets the scene for what will become a recurrent heading in the first 8 issues of Kino-Pravda, "The S.R. Trial", one of Russia’s top news events of the year. In June 1922, 47 top Socialist-Revolutionaries were brought to court, and newspapers were busy covering the trial until August. Kino-Pravda also followed the ongoing story. Issue No. 1 shows a crowd picketing a railway station in Moscow, as a delegation of European Socialists headed by the Belgian Emile Vandervelde arrives to serve as international defenders of the S.R.s. Some members of the crowd carry banners saying "Cain! Cain! Where is your brother Karl?" To unravel this Biblical allusion, one needs to know that one ofthe arriving S.R. defenders was German Socialist politician Theodor Liebknecht, the brother of Karl Liebknecht, the German Communist leader murdered in 1919."

"We see various street manifestations and "punish-them" rallies — most definitely arranged by powers from above, for it is hard to believe that the crowd in Red Square shown in Kino-Pravda No. 3 would stand through that torrential rain without strict orders. But whether or not the crowds were composed of political extras, the general interest about the trial’s outcome must have been genuine. No one could have seriously doubted that such a political trial could end with anything but a conviction, but exactly what the verdict would be, and whether some would get away with it, kept public interest alive. Apparently, bets were made — at least that is what we learn from Kino-Pravda No. 8, which begins with two men quarrelling. One says, "They will surely be shot." The other doubts it. "Let’s bet on it!" says the intertitle. The scene changes. We are now in the courtroom. The judges are out deliberating. An insert: the face of a clock. A finger moves the clock’s hands to indicate the passage of time. In the street, people crowding around a kiosk are shown waiting for the newspaper with the verdict to arrive. A newsboy is shown running and shouting. A man leans out of the window of a running tram to pick up a newspaper from the boy. Our two bettors drive by in a car and get a copy… But I must be careful not to give away the verdict!"

"Needless to say, this issue of Kino-Pravda consists mostly of staged scenes. But who are the players? The man in the tram is Dziga Vertov. The man who bets "They will surely be shot" is Vertov’s brother, cameraman Mikhail Kaufman. Kaufman’s betting opponent is Ivan Beliakov, Vertov’s cinematographer and graphic artist. The man standing in line for a newspaper is Vertov’s friend, cameraman Aleksandr Lemberg. In other words, these are all Kinocs ("Kino-Eye men") — members of a group which, ironically, condemned any acting in movies. One good thing about Vertov is that he never felt enslaved by his own dogmas."

"There are touches of experimentation in the first 8 issues of Kino-Pravda, which only grow bolder in subsequent issues (note, for instance, the somewhat awkward POV trick with a girl swimmer, or the trick with the tank driver’s close-up). Perhaps the most interesting of these are Vertov’s games with the film’s title. Kino-Pravda No. 5 begins with a view of a man whose face is hidden behind the newspaper he is reading. The title of this sham newspaper is "Kino-Pravda No. 5. July 7, 1922". In other words, the man reading the paper represents us, the spectators, and the paper he is reading stands for the film we are watching. In the next issue, Kino-Pravda No. 6, Vertov tries out another trick, the likes of which he will try again, 7 years later, in Man with a Movie Camera. It begins with a close-up of a box, on which we read the words "Kino-Pravda No. 6. July 14, 1922". A man comes and opens the box, which turns out to contain a reel of film. The man threads the film — the very film we are watching — into a projector, and the newsreel Kino-Pravda No. 6 begins. Take a careful look at the projectionist at work. I could not believe my eyes — but he seems to be smoking as he opens the box and takes out the nitrate film! Verily, Vertov’s time was not for the nervous." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)