Opium (Vitaly Zhemchuzhny, 1929)

Виталий Жемчужны: Опиум (1930). Poster design by the Stenberg brothers (Vladimir Stenberg, Georgi Stenberg), signature "2 Stenberg 2". Photo from: The Red Avantgarde Collection / Soviet Political Poster / The Sergo Grigorian Collection.

AA: I missed this screening due to an overlap with the Griffith Project: Double Trouble, but I include Yuri Tsivian's "blind date" program note to keep a full record of Sacile's Vertov Project in this blog.

DZIGA VERTOV XVII
Grand piano: studente SMI
Cinema Ruffo, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 15 Oct 2004

Prog. 17

OPIUM (Sovkino, USSR 1929)
Dir: Vitaly Zhemchuzhny; sc: Osip Brik; ph: A. Galperin, K. Rodendorf; 35 mm, 1650 m, 65’ (22 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Opium is a blind date. No one in the world has seen this film aside from Aleksandr Deriabin, who recommended it for this show. Aleksandr was also supposed to write this note, but he fell ill. I had to jump in, but please keep in mind that what you read is based on what I have read, and not on what I have seen."

"Like Stekliannyi Glaz [The Glass Eye], shown in the previous program, Opium was an attempt on the part of the LEF (Left Front of Arts) group to create their own school of documentary filmmaking. (The association fell apart in 1928, but some of its members continued on together.) Its scenario was written by writer and Formalist scholar Osip Brik, who had been the leader of the group, and the editor of the art journal Novyi LEF, which had recently ceased publication; the film’s director was also a LEF person."

"LEF documentaries had one trait in common: they were predominantly found-footage films edited to convey a clear ideological message. This film’s message could not be clearer: God does not exist. Its title is a one-word quotation from atheism’s favorite mantra: Religion is opium for the masses. The film realizes this metaphor visually, taking the viewer from poppy fields to the factories where opium balls are made, and then to opium dens where it is smoked. From there, it jumps to temples and minarets; religious rituals observed by Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Baptists, and pagan shamans are shown. (As I said, I have not yet seen this film, but I expect it to include footage of Lamaist rituals, used in Pudovkin’s 1929 Storm over Asia — a film also scripted by Osip Brik, the writer of Opium.) This is followed by shots showing fortune-tellers and their clients. Meanwhile, the police break up a protest demonstration, and send workers to jail. And so on."

"One of the reasons we wanted to include this film in our program is that it contains shots from The Unsealing of the Remains of Sergii of Radonezh (Vskrytie moschei Sergiia Radonezhskogo), presumably made by Vertov exactly ten years earlier." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)