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| Dziga Vertov. Photo: IDFA. |
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| Dziga Vertov: История гражданской войны / Istoriya grazhdanskoi voiny / History of the Civil War (RU 1921). Photo: Modern Times. |
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| Dziga Vertov: История гражданской войны / Istoriya grazhdanskoi voiny / History of the Civil War (RU 1921). Photo: Noise Film & TV press kit. |
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| Dziga Vertov: История гражданской войны / Istoriya grazhdanskoi voiny / History of the Civil War (RU 1921). Photo: Toronto International Film Festival. |
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| Dziga Vertov: История гражданской войны / Istoriya grazhdanskoi voiny / History of the Civil War (RU 1921). Members of the Hurricane anarchist group before being sent to Butyrka. Photo: Noise Film & TV press kit. |
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| Dziga Vertov: История гражданской войны / Istoriya grazhdanskoi voiny / History of the Civil War (RU 1921). Leo Trotsky in Tatar headwear. Photo: Toute la mémoire du Monde. |
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| Dziga Vertov: История гражданской войны / Istoriya grazhdanskoi voiny / History of the Civil War (RU 1921). Larissa Reissner. Photo: Bernard Eisenschitz: "Actualité(s) de Dziga Vertov", Cahiers du Cinéma, mars 2023, pp. 68–69. |
История гражданской войны / Istoria grajdanskoï voïny / Histoire de la guerre civile
Dziga Vertov
Russie / 1921
Restauration par Nikolaï Izvolov à partir d'une description du film faite par Grigory Boltyansky conservée aux Archives d'État de la littérature et de l'art (Moscou) et d'éléments du matériel d'origine 35 mm conservés dans différentes archives.
Only one print was struck in 1921.
Screened at the 3rd World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), Moscow, 22 June–12 July 1921 for some 600 participants and visitors of an outdoors screening.
The sole print was apparently recycled by Vertov himself.
Reconstruction by Nikolai Izvolov in 2021. International distribution: Grinberg Brothers.
World premiere of the reconstruction: at the Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski, IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), 20 Nov 2021
Featuring:
Leon Trotsky,
Nikolai Kazadanov,
Nezhdanov,
Konstantin Mekhonoshin,
Innokenty Kozhevnikov,
Philip Mironov,
Semyon Budyonny,
Bulatki,
Ivar Smilga,
Yan Poluyan,
Nestor Makhno,
Viktor Kin,
Poznansky,
Oplotsin,
Mikhaikov,
Lev,
Vasili Chapayev,
Matvei Zakharov,
Opasov,
Alexander Kolchak,
Dmitri Poluyan,
Sergei Kirov,
Kliment Voroshilov,
Mikhail Kalinin,
Timofei Mikhailov,
Grigori Zinoviev,
Yakov Sverdlov,
Sergo Ordzhonikidze,
Mikhail Tukhachevsky,
Grigori Petrovski,
Fyodor Raskolnikov,
Larissa Reissner.
Russian intertitles and English subtitles on the DCP. E-subtitles in French by Paul Bolcheton.
Séance présentée par Bernard Eisenschitz
Viewed at the Festival Toute la mémoire du monde 2023, la Cinémathèque française, Salle Georges Franju, vendredi 10 mars 2023, 18h30 20h00 (94 min)
Accompagnement musical par Gabriel Cazes (piano) et Nicolas Giraud (basse, percussion, trompette)
Compositeur, pianiste multi-instrumentiste, Gabriel Cazes compose depuis 2010 des musiques accompagnant des pièces jouées dans les plus grands théâtres européens, le Burgtheater (Vienne), le National Theater (Oslo) ou la Volksbühne (Berlin).
Musicien multi-instrumentiste, compositeur et producteur, trompettiste, Nicolas Giraud joue de 1995 à 2020 dans le groupe du batteur Tony Allen, accompagne Claude Nougaro, Roberto Alagna, Johnny Hallyday... Il est également producteur de musique pour les comédies musicales : La Folle Histoire du Petit Chaperon rouge et Mission Merlin.
Tous deux forment ensemble le duo Grand Rodéo.
" En pleine guerre civile russe, Vertov filme des figures emblématiques du gouvernement et de l'Armée rouge, ainsi que la violence et le chaos qui règnent dans le pays. " (Toute la Mémoire du Monde, 2023)
Nikolaï Izvolov (Toute la Mémoire du Monde, 2023): " Histoire de la guerre civile est le deuxième long métrage de Dziga Vertov. Comme son premier, L'Anniversaire de la Révolution (1918), il a été considéré comme perdu pendant 100 ans, et n'était essentiellement connu des historiens du cinéma qu'à travers les mémoires de Vertov. Pour Vertov, ce film constituait une dernière étape avant le cycle de ses célèbres actualités Kino-Pravda (1922-1924) : on peut déjà y déceler ses futures figures stylistiques, et ses traits d'auteur uniques. Œuvre de commande réalisée pour le troisième congrès de l'Internationale communiste à Moscou, en juin 1921, le film n'était très probablement pas destiné à une large diffusion en salles, et il n'en existait qu'une seule copie, ce qui a rendu difficile sa conservation dans sa forme originale. Le travail de recherche et la restauration ont duré près de deux ans. La première projection publique a eu lieu en novembre 2021 au Festival international du film documentaire à Amsterdam. La structure du film est assez inhabituelle. Contrairement à la construction chronologique et plutôt simple de L'Anniversaire de la Révolution, elle est non linéaire, regroupant les événements de trois années par ordre chronologique et thématique. Le montage est relativement complexe : au beau milieu des actualités, Vertov insère ses propres œuvres, souvent expérimentales, réalisées en 1919, comme The Mironov Process. En émergeant de l'oubli, Histoire de la guerre civile apportera sans aucun doute de nouveaux éclairages aux historiens du XXe siècle, ainsi qu'aux théoriciens du cinéma et aux biographes de Dziga Vertov. "
Nikolaï Izvolov (Toute la Mémoire du Monde, 2023)
IDFA 2021: " In 2018, IDFA screened Dziga Vertov’s long-lost documentary Anniversary of the Revolution (1918). But there was yet another lost masterpiece by this pioneer of Soviet cinema. In 1921, Vertov edited The History of the Civil War, in which he told the story of the years when the Bolsheviks struggled to defeat domestic opposition to the revolution."
"It must have been a great adventure for Vertov. He filmed street fights, attended military tribunals, and lay in trenches. Wherever he went he found devastation, damaged infrastructure, and bodies being collected on the streets. This is an unvarnished record of a country in chaos, marked by unstable alliances and brutal violence. So it’s understandable that the film’s producers decided not to release it at all."
"The History of the Civil War has only been screened once before, in 1921. Nikolai Izvolov used historical records to reconstruct the original silent film from archive material and commissioned a new soundtrack. " (IDFA 2021)
A film in 12 chapters:
1. The White Terror
2. The Suppression of Counter-Revolutionary Uprisings
3. The Disarming of Moscow Anarchists by Soviet Troops on 11-12 April 1918
4. Yaroslavl after the Officers’ Insurrection which lasted from 6 to 21 July 1918
5. The Suppression of the Astrakhan Uprising
6. The Period of Partisan Activity
7. Partisans on the Czechoslovak Front
8. The Kolchak Front
9. The Denikin Front
10. The Caucasus Front
11. The Wrangel Front
12. Crushing the Kronstadt Mutiny
(Source: IDFA press notes 2021).
AA: Another amazing resurrection of a lost early Dziga Vertov feature film by Nikolai Izvolov. Godovshchina revoliutsii / Anniversary of the Revolution (1918) was miraculously brought to daylight five years ago, and now we have the sequel.
Like its predecessor, this compilation film is a straight documentary record. Formally it is conventional, traditional, linear.
It is an official Communist propaganda film made for the 1921 Comintern World Congress. That said, both films differ remarkably from later accounts.
Made in the heat of the moment, the films convey raw immediacy. What we see are but fragments but they grow into an epic account of the war between the White and the Red Armies. The Reds have nothing to lose, and to their bewilderment, they happen to win.
Actual battle scenes are scarce as always in war documentaries (nothing is more dangerous than to film actual combat: the cameraman would also put his own troops in peril).
The White Army's scorched earth strategy is illustrated. The devastation of the sabotage is enormous. We see smoking ruins, destroyed factories, vehicles, cities, oil reserves, bridges, railway stations and munition depots. The world's second largest grain elevator goes up in flames. The attitude is: if we don't win, we destroy everything.
Following a special feature familiar from the previous film (and using some of the same footage), over 30 major figures of the Civil War are featured in portrait shots. I try to list them above.
Lenin is missing: unlike Trotsky, he did not like to be filmed. Trotsky is ubiquitous. In the first film, Stalin was conspicuously absent, and he was filmed for this second one, but the footage is lost.
Besides the prominence of Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, the cast of characters is an explanation in itself to the fact that the film disappeared and nobody was eager to resurrect it. Many / most? of the protagonists of the Civil War highlighted were executed in Stalin's Great Terror.
This movie also contains the only moving images of Larissa Reissner, the revolutionary who was Mandelstam's lover and Pasternak's muse, who named the female protagonist of Doctor Zhivago after her *. She was played in the film adaptation by Julie Christie and "Lara's Theme" ("Somewhere My Love") is devoted to her. Reissner died from typhoid in 1926, before Stalin's reign.
Mutinous anarchists smile nonchalantly while waiting for their transfer to Butyrka.
Alexander Kolchak cuts a stern figure in his portrait shot.
The film covers all fronts in one of the hugest civil wars in history: from the Pacific Ocean to the border of Czechoslovakia and beyond.
Three legendary white generals are covered in signature chapters: Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel.
We live in the moment but are reminded of history. The anniversary of the Paris Commune is celebrated. Regiments are given names of legendary Russian peasant rebels: Yemelyan Pugachev and Stenka Razin.
There is an understandable compilation quality in the movie. The visual definition ranges from high to low. Intertitles are hand-written.
In a film like this the past once again turns out to be a foreign country, to quote L. P. Hartley. They do things differently there. We see glimpses suggesting alternative futures to the tragedy that followed. We know much, but key mysteries remain.
The more I know, the more I know I don't know.
An inspired musical commentary by Gabriel Cazes (piano) and Nicolas Giraud (bass, percussions, trumpet). The sound of the trumpet struck a haunting note.
...
* Varlam Shalamov: Pasternak (1960)
Вы знали Рейснер, Борис Леонидович?
— Знал. Познакомился на чьем-то докладе, вечере. Вижу — стоит женщина удивительной красоты и что ни скажет — как рублем подарит. Все умно, все к месту. Обаяния Ларисы Михайловны, я думаю, никто не избег.
Когда она умерла, Радек попросил меня написать стихотворение о ней. Я написал «Иди же в глубь преданья, героиня».
— Оно не так начинается.
— Я знаю. Но суть — в этих строках. В память Ларисы Михайловны я дал имя своей героине из «Доктора Живаго».
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