Dziga Vertov V: Kino-Pravda No. 9–13, GCM Sacile 2004, narrated by Yuri Tsivian

Dziga Vertov: Kino-Pravda No. 9 (1922). Photo: Österreichisches Filmmuseum. The Kino-Pravda series is online on the Österreichisches Filmmuseum website.

DZIGA VERTOV V
Moderator, live translator, narrator and explicador: Yuri Tsivian
Grand piano: Neil Brand
Cinema Ruffo, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 11 Oct 2004
Prog. 5 (75’)

KINO-PRAVDA, NO. 9–11, 13 (Goskino, USSR 1922)
35 mm, (20 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 9 275 m., 12’
    AA: Österreichisches Filmmuseum: Issue Daten: August 25, 1922. Video Duration: 13 min 46 sec. Congress of the "Living Church" / Opening of the racing season / Demonstration of an American movie camera / Operation of mobile projection units.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 10 321 m., 14’
    AA: Österreichisches Filmmuseum: Issue Daten: Early September 1922. Video Duration: 15 min 38 sec. International Youth Day and demonstrations / All-Russian Olympiad / Streetcar collision / Construction of automobiles in a Petrograd factory

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 11 373 m., 16’
    AA: Issue Daten: October 5, 1922. Video Duration: 18 min 19 sec. All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions / Delegations and diplomats / Renaming of a confectionery factory / Unloading supplies / Komsomol Day / Red Army maneuvers.

KINO-PRAVDA NO. 13 VCHERA, SEGODNIA, ZAVTRA. KINOPOEMA, POSVIASHCHENNAIA OKTIABRSKIM TOZRZHESTVAM / OKTIABRSKAIA KINO-PRAVDA [IERI, OGGI, DOMANI: CINEPOEMA DEDICATO A LENIN / KINOPRAVDA DI OTTOBRE; YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW. A FILM POEM DEDICATED TO THE OCTOBER CELEBRATIONS / OCTOBER KINO-PRAVDA]
Sc/montage: Dziga Vertov; intertitles: Aleksandr Rodchenko; 743 m, 33’
    AA: 3. reel missing. Issue Daten: November 1922. Video Duration: 36 min 32 sec. Fifth anniversary of the October Revolution

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Vertov was a fast learner. Much as he said he despised fiction movies, he learned quite a bit from them. As was fashionable among young intellectuals in the early 1920s, Vertov found Russian and German films slow and portentous, but did admit that unpretentious American action movies were worth studying. In his first essay, "We: Variant of a Manifesto", published in August 1922, he wrote: "To the American adventure film with its showy dynamism and to the dramatizations of the American Pinkertons, the kinocs say thanks for the rapid shot changes and the close-up. Good… but disorderly, not based on a precise study of movement." (As translated in Annette Michelson, ed., Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 1984, p. 6.)"

"Keep this passage in mind as you watch Kino-Pravda No. 9, which came out in August 1922. Take a random half-minute sequence. The opening of the racing season in Moscow: people in cars and buses are heading for the Moscow Hippodrome. A routine bus ride — but what makes it interesting is that Vertov renders it in 10 shots: the conductor selling tickets (1.6 metres); the driver starting the engine (0.8 metres); the engine running (1.3 metres); a passenger’s hand holding onto the railing (0.5 metres); the driver’s foot pressing the accelerator (0.5 metres); and so on. Ten shots in half a minute, an average of 3 seconds per shot. The main thing is that there is no dramatic or narrative necessity to cut that fast. Pure experiment: speed for speed’s sake."

"In the new Russia, speed was a religion. Want to know how fast a mobile projection unit can be deployed in a Moscow square? A live experiment is staged to establish this — find the filmed record in issue 9 of Kino-Pravda. We see someone phoning the Photo-Kino Committee. Title: "Give a film show in Strastnaia Square." The request is transmitted to the mobile projection unit: "Take peredvizhkino no. 4 and depart for Strastnaia Square. Start the show at 9." Peredvizhkino (or "ambulkino," if we try to translate this Soviet acronym for mobile film-showing equipment) is taken out of the depot and hooked up to a horse-drawn cab. As the cabman reaches Strastnaia, the countdown begins. To the amazement of passers-by, a screen is stretched across the square, and the equipment is unloaded and set up. "Peredvizhkino can be deployed for a show in 8 minutes," the title announces. Don’t ask who on earth would ever need a movie show set up in 8 minutes. Speed for speed’s sake!"
 
"The new cult of speed and skill (two things considered lacking in "old" Russia) also explains why the bulk of Kino-Pravda No. 10 is taken up by the All-Russia Olympiad. Note the editing of the shots showing javelin-throwing and pole-vaulting. It appears to be experimenting with what Vertov’s writings call "a precise study of movement". Preparation — launch — flight — fall, one shot per each phase of the trajectory. Clarity and precision were as important as skill and speed. Vertov’s editing style here becomes athletic."

"Clarity and precision were also qualities cultivated by Constructivist art — the recently-born Soviet art movement which waved farewell to easel painting and welcomed engineering and design. Vertov was friends with the Constructivist artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, who agreed to design the titles for Vertov’s films. According to documents, their collaboration began with Kino-Pravda No. 7 (July 1922), but it is hard to confirm since only a fragment of issue 7 exists. But the proudly practical, deliberately uncomplicated, brick-like (or block-like, blochny) Constructivist lettering which we see in Kino-Pravda No. 10 (September 1922) is definitely by Rodchenko."

"Vertov never thought of his group or his films as Kino-Constructivist, but many did, including the Constructivist theorist and designer Aleksei Gan, whose review of Kino-Pravda No. 10 (in Kino-fot, 1922, No. 4) is worth quoting: "The 10th Kino-Pravda is valuable not only for the abundance of material; its value lies in the rhythm and tempo to which the film conforms, from the first shot to the last. The international festival of the union of youth, and assembling a car, and restoring a factory — in a word, people, machines, and the material environment — all this has been presented by means proper to cinema as such, without any touches of conventional film aesthetics. In it American montage is just a means for making it possible to construct sequences, shots, and individual scenes. The newsreel ceases to be illustrative material reflecting this or that place in our many-sided contemporary life, and becomes contemporary life as such, outside of territories, time, or individual significance. The whole tenth issue has screen-high intertitles. And here too Vertov has overcome the worn-out technique of horizontal writing. It is clear that words must be constructed on screen in a different way. I cannot call this attempt fully realized, but a word has been spoken. Now it will be shameful to write "in the old way”. I and all young filmmakers await the eleventh issue of Kino-Pravda.”"

"Kino-Pravda No. 11 is more like your regular newsreel, complete with delegations, diplomats, and speakers (be careful not to miss an astonishing close-up of a carafe of water sitting on the podium of one of the speakers, with the whole crowd of listeners and a nearby church reflected in it, upside down). Kino-Pravda No. 12 is the only issue that has not been found (although Aleksandr Deriabin assures me that he knows where to look for it, and knowing him, he knows)."

"Kino-Pravda No. 13 is a magnum opus. Originally 900 metres long, this issue was timed to be released for the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, and had a separate title: "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. A Film Poem Dedicated to the October Celebrations." A celebration like all celebrations: Trotsky, speeches, demonstrations— and suddenly, a jewel: an extreme close-up of someone’s mouth shouting "Hurray!” The reason why Vertov called this film A Film Poem becomes clear in the second — Yesterday — reel. Its purpose is a replay, in retrospect, of the 5 years that have elapsed between 1917 and 1922. Its material is found-footage, often from Vertov’s own earlier films, mostly from the Civil War years."

"A large part of this footage, as you may recall from the selection of Kino-Week newsreel shown earlier, was about burials of heroes. What Vertov does here is to take various funerals, which took place at different times in different towns, and piece them together so that the result looks like a single funeral — some kind of simultaneous, over-arching funeral in which the whole country is participating. This is how Aleksei Gan describes the effect in his 1922 review (Kino-Fot, no. 5, 10 December 1922, pp. 6–7): "The graves in Astrakhan, the spades burying the bodies of our fallen heroes in Kronstadt, the banners lowered at the moment of burial in Minsk. We take off our hats. The Muscovites do the same on the embankment of the Moscow River."

"And this is how Vertov theorized it in his 1923 manifesto "Kinocs: A Revolution” (as translated in Annette Michelson, ed., Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 1984, pp. 16–18): "You’re walking down a Chicago street in 1922, but I make you greet Comrade Volodarsky walking down a Petrograd street in 1918, and he returns your greeting. Another example: the coffins of national heroes are lowered into the grave (shot in Astrakhan in 1918); the grave is filled in (Kronstadt, 1921); cannon salute (Petrograd, 1920); memorial service, hats are removed (Moscow, 1922) — such things go together, even with thankless footage not specifically shot for this purpose (cf. Kino-Pravda No. 14) … Freed from the rule of 16–17 frames per second, free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to us.”" – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)