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| Kino-Pravda No. 14. January 29, 1923. 13 min 47 sec. IV. Congress of the Comintern / Congress of the Profintern. Photo and caption: Österreichisches Filmmuseum. Mobile intertitle installation: Aleksandr Rodchenko. |
DZIGA VERTOV VI
Moderator, live translator, narrator and explicador: Yuri Tsivian
Grand piano: David Drazin
Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 11 Oct 2004
Prog. 6 (c. 84’)
KINO-PRAVDA NO. 14 (Goskino, USSR 1922)
Experiment in newsreel by Dziga Vertov; intertitles: Aleksandr Rodchenko; ph: Vasilii Bystrov; ed: Elizaveta Svilova; 35 mm, 283 m., 12’ (20 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "We begin with Kino-Pravda No. 14, which I want to announce as a barker might a fairground show: Make sure you are not late, or you will miss Aleksandr Rodchenko’s mobile installations, the likes of which you have never seen, either in film history or in the history of art! Their purpose is as unusual as their look: these installations were made to hold 3-dimensional intertitles, which are read as they roll. Imagine a wooden construction which looks like a crude kitchen stool, but cannot be used as one since its legs are facing in all different directions. This construction is suspended in mid-air by seemingly invisible means and revolves around a vertical axis; as it does so, it displays words and phrases written on its different facets."
"Why did Vertov want intertitles for this film to rotate in space? It turns out that these mobile Constructivist affairs (anything but round) were meant to evoke a globe: as the first of them makes a complete turn the phrase that emerges is "On one side…" What exactly is "on one side" becomes clear in the next shot. It displays another — different — wooden construction, which rotates the same way, only now a word, not a phrase, is revealed to us, letter by letter: A- turn — ME — turn — RI — turn — C … — and when the circle is complete, the first A returns. We are then shown the Land of Capital, its skyscrapers and restaurants, seas of bowler hats. When Vertov wants us to return to what is going on at the same time in Russia, another rotating structure (this one resembling a wooden ancestor of modern radar) unfurls the phrase "On the other side…" Little wonder that the credits for Kino-Pravda No. 14 proudly call this film "Dziga Vertov’s experiment in newsreel", and name Rodchenko as the maker of its intertitles." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)
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| Kino-Pravda No. 15. Spring (?) 1923. 22 min 4 sec. Against war / Against Gods / Education / Agitation / Sports and gymnastics / Danger of war. Photo and caption: Österreichisches Filmmuseum. |
KINO-PRAVDA NO. 15 (Goskino, USSR 1923)
Experiment in newsreel by Dziga Vertov; intertitles processed by the cameraman Boris Frantsisson; moving intertitles: Ivan Beliakov, Mikhail Kaufman; 35 mm, 450 m., 20’ (20 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "The winter of 1922-23 was the high point of Vertov’s experiments with titling. Another of Rodchenko’s mobile constructions stars in Kino-Pravda No. 15 — this time reminiscent not of a globe, but of a hammer (the emblem of the Proletariat), which slowly rises to hit — what? Religion, of course. The inscription borne by this Constructivist "mobile" reads "With the hammer of knowledge." But (distinct from the previous issue of Kino-Pravda) the emphasis here is not on titles moving in real space, but on ones animated by photographic means. The credits specify: "Intertitles processed by the cameraman Boris Frantsisson. Moving intertitles: Ivan Beliakov and Mikhail Kaufman." A sham searchlight shines on a phrase, "On guard", from the pitch-dark night, and a giant "?" detaches itself from the background and slowly heads towards us. But the most astonishing process sequence in this film is the one featuring agitation artillery. Across a scene showing an artillery mortar in the middle of a wintry landscape preparing to fire (probably filmed during army manoeuvres), a large inscription appears, saying "Agit-shells". Fire! And a firework of newspapers is shown dispersing in the air. A political cliché given life by a film trick." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)
AA: The Soviet Union was by now officially established. Against the Church. The projection was a bit fast at 20 fps.
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| Kino-Pravda No. 16. May 1923 (Premiere: May 21, 1923). 26 min 24 sec. Arts and crafts exhibition / Actions against hunger / Eisenstein's "Dnevnik Glumova" / Young Pioneers / May 1, parades. Photo and caption: Österreichisches Filmmuseum. Featured: Sergei Eisenstein: Glumov's Diary. |
KINO-PRAVDA NO. 16
(VESENNIAIA KINO-PRAVDA. VIDOVAIA LIRICHESKAIA KHRONIKA.) / [(KINO-PRAVDA PRIMAVERILE: CRONACA LIRICA DI PANORAMI) /(SPRING KINO-PRAVDA. A LYRICAL VIEW NEWSREEL.)] (Goskino, USSR 1923)
Dir: Dziga Vertov; 35 mm, 541 m., 24’ (20 fps), Österreichisches Filmmuseum.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Tricks and politics — Vertov’s two passions — make strange bedfellows. A review of Kino-Pravda No. 16 (also known as Spring Kino-Pravda), signed by "Z" (some zealot of funerals and parades), published by Pravda on 25 May 1923, accused Vertov of a lack of decorum: "Kino-Pravda, having filmed the May Day parade and the funeral of Vorovsky, considers that it has done its duty, and fecklessly captures on expensive film stock models demonstrating fashions in Petrovka street, or some acrobatic exercises by Proletkult students, to which there is absolutely no need to give broad popularity. The … defect of the issues of Kino-Pravda is a motivation that is insufficiently serious (an attraction to tricks at all costs).""
"But — we could object by the wisdom of hindsight — there is no telling what history will choose to remember. No doubt in May 1923 the recent killing of Vaslav Vorovsky (the Soviet delegate to the Lausanne Conference) by Maurice Conradi (a Russian émigré of Swiss descent, victimized earlier by the Soviet regime) made any other event look trifling, but had Vertov not included what his critic dismissed as "acrobatic exercises by Proletkult students" in the 16th issue of Kino-Pravda Sergei Eisenstein’s first film, Dnevnik Glumova (Glumov’s Diary), would have been lost. Glumov’s Diary was not a movie in the proper sense; it was never meant to be shown in movie theatres, just projected during a stage production. Eisenstein — then a Proletkult theatre director — wanted an on-stage movie show to be part of his eccentric production Mudrets (Wise Man), but as yet had neither the experience nor resources to film on his own. In 1923 the legendary feud between Eisenstein and Vertov (for more about which, see my book Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties) had not started. Eisenstein and Vertov (both associates of Left Front of the Arts) hit it off quite well, so Eisenstein asked Vertov, who agreed, to help with stock, camera, and cinematographer. It was to justify these expenses that Vertov included this footage in Kino-Pravda No. 16, under the heading The Spring Smiles of Proletkult. Of course, to a regular filmgoer not familiar with Eisenstein’s theatre production, Glumov’s Diary made little sense. No wonder Vertov’s Spring Smiles made serious people like "Z" angry." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)
AA: Famine, harvest, peasant children. Fast at 20 fps.
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| Kino-Pravda No. 17. Mid/End of August (?) 1923. 16 min 12 sec. Hunger and harvest / The alliance between city and country / First All-Russian Agricultural and Craft Exhibition: On the way to the exhibition, construction work and preparations, exhibits, map of the exhibition, visitors. Photo and caption: Österreichisches Filmmuseum. |
KINO-PRAVDA NO. 17 (Goskino, USSR 1923)
Experiment in newsreel by the kinoc Dziga Vertov; intertitles & general plan of the exhibition prod. by the kinoc Ivan Beliakov; ph: Mikhail Kaufman; ed: Elizaveta Svilova; 35 mm, 332 m., 14’ (20 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Kino-Pravda No. 17 credits Elizaveta Svilova as editor, and her work deserves it. Not one reviewer praised Vertov’s Kino-Pravda for its "American montage" — here Svilova out-Americans the Americans. The sequence in which peasant women are shown binding sheaves contains shots less than a second long — some are as short as one-third of a second. Vertov and Svilova were especially fond of applyingfast editing to work processes, as if by so doing they were helping people to work faster. Note also the pleasure Mikhail Kaufman’s camera takes in making house-building scaffoldings look a little like giant Constructivist installations."
"The centerpiece of this issue is the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, with the alliance of workers and peasants as its central theme. Throughout the 1920s the word "alliance" (smychka — a specially coined one-word slogan) was used to refer to the partnership between two classes: the peasants and the workers, in whose name "the dictatorship of the proletariat" was declared. This term implied that the peasant majority was not oppressed under the proletarian hegemony, but was its lesser (non-hegemonic) partner. The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow was part of the smychka campaign: the happy countryside’s visit to the welcoming city. Kino-Pravda No. 17 is edited accordingly, cross-cutting shots of the countryside and shots taken in the city, and ending with workers and peasants reading the newspaper Smychka." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)
SEGODNIA / [OGGI / TODAY] (Goskino, USSR 1923)
Dir: Dziga Vertov; ph: Mikhail Kaufman; des: Ivan Beliakov, Boris Volkov; frammento/fragment, 35 mm, 15 m., 40" (20 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
Questa mappa è il primo approccio all’animazione di Vertov. / This map is Vertov’s first attempt at animation.
SOVETSKIE IGRUSHKI / [GIOCATTOLI SOVIETICI / SOVIET TOYS] (Goskino [Kultkino], USSR 1924)
Author/Leader: Dziga Vertov; ph: Aleksandr Dorn; anim. des: Ivan Beliakov, Aleksandr Ivanov; 35 mm, 350 m., 13’ (24 fps), Gosfilmofond.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "At different times Vertov, too, felt like inventing a new emblem to illustrate this concept. The simplest was a handshake with the word Smychka superimposed over it (seen in Kino-Pravda No. 21, which will be shown in a later program). A more entertaining one can be found in Soviet Toys, the one-reel animation film directed by Vertov and drawn by Ivan Beliakov and Aleksandr Ivanov. Here the alliance between workers and peasants is represented by a bizarre Siamese figure with four feet (two of which are wearing shoes made of bast fiber), two arms, and two faces (looking, Janus-like, in two opposite directions). This two-in-one master of Soviet land is shown admonishing his (their?) class enemy: the fat gluttonous bourgeoisie, whose main occupation is eating, drinking, and vomiting. Vomiting is represented by a railway (with a cute little train) shooting out of the mouth of the bourgeois, followed by the inscription: "He’s gone to Riga." As Natalia Noussinova correctly observed, this image is a visual pun: in older times this phrase — "to go to Riga" — was used by some Russians to refer to this side-effect of gluttony and drinking. There is just one thing I must add to this unappetizing observation: the only reason why such a phrase was coined, was a phonetic similarity between the Russian word "rygat" — to vomit — and the name of a city known, in fact, to be one of the cleanest, greenest, most beautiful towns of the former Russian empire!" – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)
AA: Apparently the only print, edited by Svilova. High contrast, thick framelines, often double framelines.
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