Born Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman, but best known by his pseudonym, Russian filmmaker and film theorist Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) holds a major place in the history of cinema. His films, which were intended as bold aesthetic experiments in documenting contemporary life, have influenced generations of avant-garde and documentary filmmakers and are as revelatory today as when they first premiered. Vertov rejected traditional dramatic styles of filmmaking, embracing new forms of production instead. At the core of his cinema is an impulse to link aesthetic form to revolutionary transformation, which we see in his newsreels and features alike.
This is the largest series of Vertov’s films ever mounted by the Pacific Film Archive. The retrospective stretches over three months, aligning with a course on Dziga Vertov taught by UC Berkeley professor Anne Nesbet, who will introduce several public screenings. We are also pleased to welcome Adelheid Heftberger, curator of the Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum, who will offer two guest introductions. The retrospective continues through December, so please consult the website for complete listings.
Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator
This series is modeled on the recent retrospective curated by professor Yuri Tsivian of the University of Chicago, and Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The majority of 35mm prints presented at PFA have been generously loaned by the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna. Film notes are by Joshua Siegel, adapted from texts by Yuri Tsivian from the 23rd Pordenone Silent Film Festival catalogue. We are indebted to the staff of MoMA and the Austrian Film Museum for the collegial assistance and also wish to acknowledge the generous support of UC Berkeley’s Department of Film and Media and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
GET MORE
Find expanded program notes and selected clips on our website, bampfa.berkeley.edu
Wednesday / 9.21.11
7:30
A Sixth Part of the World
A Kino-Eye Race around the USSR. Export and Import by the State Trading Organization of the U.S.S.R.
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R., 1926)
Live Music Judith Rosenberg on Piano
Imperial Russians used the slogan “A Sixth Part of the World” to evoke their vast empire. The bombastic phrase was then adopted after World War I by a “newer,” “more efficient,” and “happier” Soviet empire, and it came in handy when Gostorg, a hugely profitable State trading trust, commissioned Vertov to make a promotional film about their nationwide operations and worldwide circulation of export goods such as furs, cotton, and grain. Vertov spent untold sums dispatching film crews to the farthest reaches of the Soviet territory. He created not an advertisement for Gostorg, but instead a Walt Whitmanesque ode to the vastness and diversity of his country.
Written by Vertov. Photographed by Mikhail Kaufman et al. (74 mins, 18 fps, Silent with Russian intertitles and live English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Preceded by: Kino-Pravda No. 19 (Dziga Vertov, U.S.S.R., 1924). No 19 contrasts cold and hot, winter and summer, Russia’s arctic regions and Russia’s southern sea. (18 mins, 18 fps, Silent with Russian intertitles and live English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum).
Total running time: 92 mins
Friday / 9.23.11
7:00
Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R., 1930)
In Person Adelheid Heftberger
Adelheid Heftberger is curator of the Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.
(Entuziazm). Vertov’s first sound film, a masterpiece of Russian avant-garde cinema, is a paean to coal and steel workers and the supremacy of Soviet industrial production. Vertov’s rousing “symphony” of man and machine, made in celebration of the Five Year Plan of the late 1920s, has inspired countless filmmakers throughout the century, from Charlie Chaplin and Joris Ivens to Richard Serra, Harun Farocki, Wang Bing, and Lucy Raven—filmmakers who have sought to recapture the film’s dynamic rhythms even as they critique or parody its heroic idealism. The print we will screen was restored by filmmaker/archivist Peter Kubelka at the Austrian Film Museum in the 1970s.
Written by Vertov. Photographed by Zeitlin. (67 mins, In Russian with English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Sunday / 9.25.11
2:00
Kino-Pravda, Nos. 1–8
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R., 1922)
Live Music Judith Rosenberg on Piano
In Person Adelheid Heftberger
The twenty-three issues of Kino-Pravda that Vertov made between 1922 and 1925 are among his most radical cinematic experiments. All but one issue survive (though some in fragments), and this retrospective offers a rare chance to follow the entire three-year cycle of newsreels. The reward for doing so, as Yuri Tsivian writes, is to witness “a time-lapse movie showing the growth of Soviet avant-garde cinema (born in 1922, not in 1924 as we are normally told).” In the first eight Kino-Pravdas, Vertov begins to play with then-novel film techniques, including dialectical editing (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), to transform “facts” into political statements.
Written by Vertov. (78 mins, 18 fps, Silent with Russian intertitles and live English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Tuesday / 9.27.11
7:00
Kino-Week Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 21–25
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R., 1918)
Live Music Judith Rosenberg on Piano
In Person Anne Nesbet
Anne Nesbet is associate professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film and Media at UC Berkeley.
(Kinonedelja) The forty-three issues of Kino-Week that were made between May 1918 and June 1919 (some of them directed and supervised by Vertov) are a priceless record of daily life during the civil war between the White and Red Armies, and at the brutal conclusion of the Great War between Russia and its former allies—violent upheaval that brought about famine, peasant mutinies, and the Soviet Government’s “Red Terror” policy. Included in this program from 1918 are images of Lenin and Trotsky reviewing the Red Army parade in Red Square and the wildly triumphant “Anniversary Chariot” circling the streets of Moscow in commemoration of the centenary of Karl Marx’s birth.
(72 mins, 16 fps, Silent with Russian and Norwegian intertitles presented with live English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Preceded by: Vertov Filmed in Person (Edited by Elizaveta Svilova, U.S.S.R., 1922–30). A compilation of outtakes and excerpts from films in which Vertov appears. Kino-Pravda issues 8 and 17 are among the sources. (1 min, 20 fps, Silent, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Vertov Interviews (U.S.S.R., post-1935). A compilation of documentary shots
featuring Vertov, possibly edited by Elizaveta Svilova, including an interview
that was probably conducted at the 1935 Moscow Film Festival. (1 min, 20 fps,
Silent, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Total running time: 74 mins
Tuesday / 10.11.11
7:00
Kino-Week Nos. 31–35
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R., 1919)
Live Music Judith Rosenberg on Piano
In Person Anne Nesbet
(Kinonedelja Nos. 31–35). In this program, dedicated to Kino-Week issues from 1919, we see workers forced by the Russian government to clear the streets and sidewalks of Moscow after a heavy snowfall, the funerals of field commanders, and a demonstration in Kiev protesting the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany.
(45 mins, 16 fps, Silent with Russian and Norwegian intertitles presented with live English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Followed by: The Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi, Dziga Vertov, U.S.S.R., 1928) Vertov, cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, and editor Elizaveta Svilova worked in perfect harmony to create this visually and rhythmically spectacular film. Made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the revolution—but only completed in “the eleventh year”—the film charts the excavation of a future river bed for the construction of a giant hydroelectric power station. (Written by Vertov. Photographed by Mikhail Kaufman. 52 mins, 20 fps, Silent with Russian intertitles and live English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Total running time: 97 mins
Tuesday /10.18.11
7:00
Kino-Pravda nos. 9–11, 13 (“Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”: A Film Poem
Dedicated to the October Celebrations)
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R., 1922)
Live Music Judith Rosenberg on Piano
In Person Anne Nesbet
In breathless images we see the opening of the racing season in Moscow; the All-Russia Olympiad, which offered Vertov a chance to experiment with what he called “a precise study of movement”; and the lightning-fast deployment of a mobile film projection unit in a Moscow square. Kino-Pravda 13 is famous for Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Constructivist intertitles, a masterpiece of graphic design, and the images themselves are also astonishing: the funerals of revolutionary heroes from 1917 to 1922, some excerpted from Kino-Week, that Vertov strung together to create what Yuri Tsivian calls “some kind of simultaneous, over-arching funeral in which the whole country is participating.”
(86 mins, 18 fps, Silent with Russian intertitles and live English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Tuesday / 10.25.11
7:00
Kino-Pravda Nos. 14–17
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R, 1922-23)
Live Music Judith Rosenberg on Piano
This program features some of Vertov and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s most ingenious experiments in graphic design, such as Kino-Pravda No. 14. For No. 15, Vertov enlisted cameraman Boris Frantsisson, and Ivan Beliakov and Mikhail Kaufman, to invent tricks of process photography, including a firework of newspapers bursting like “agit-shells,” and the Proletarian “hammer of knowledge” smashing out Religion. No. 16, the Spring Kino Pravda, is “A Lyrical View Newsreel” featuring rare glimpses of Sergei Eisenstein’s first film, Dnevnik Glumova (Glumov’s Diary). No. 17 showcases Elizaveta Svilova’s virtuoso rapid-fire editing and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman’s Constructivist aesthetic in depicting a harmonious gathering of workers and peasants.
Photographed by Vasilii Bystrov, Mikhail Kaufman. (79 mins, 18 fps, Silent with Russian intertitles and live English translation, B&W, 35mm, From the Austrian Film Museum)
Preceded by: Soviet Toys (Dziga Vertov, U.S.S.R., 1924.) One of Vertov’s first animated films, drawn by Ivan Beliakov and Aleksandr Ivanov, Soviet Toy celebrates the smychka alliance of workers and peasants through the humorous depiction of a piggish bourgeoisie who grotesquely drinks, eats, and vomits. (13 mins, 24 fps, Silent with Russian intertitles and live English translation, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)
Total running time: 92 mins
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
Location
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph
PFA Theater Box Office Hours
Opens one hour before the first showtime of the day
Theater Admission Prices
Single Feature
$5.50 BAM/PFA members
UC Berkeley students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff
Non-UC Berkeley students
Senior citizens (65 & over)
Disabled persons
Youth (17 & under)
Additional Feature
$4 All patrons
Film Program Information
(24-hour recording):
(510) 642-1124
