"The nineteenth Kino-Pravda you shall see today. The others can't be shown; they're already worn beyond recognition."
Dziga Vertov "On Kino-Pravda", 1924
(From: "Kino-Eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov")
"The nineteenth Kino-Pravda you shall see today. The others can't be shown; they're already worn beyond recognition."
The extensive presentation of Dziga Vertov's works at the Austrian Film Museum in 2006, which included the screenings of the newsreels Kinonedelja and Kino-Pravda, was a special event. It was the second presentation of its kind worldwide – the films are extraordinarily hard to come by.
The first comparable event took place in October 2004 as part of the "Giornate del cinema muto" in Sacile. The festival retrospective
of Dziga Vertov's silent film oeuvre was organized by Yuri Tsivian in cooperation with Aleksandr Deriabin and the archives
RGAKFD (Krasnogorsk) and the Austrian Film Museum. The following texts by Yuri Tsivian are taken from the catalog of the festival
in Sacile.
"Kino-Pravda is made with footage just as a house is made with bricks. With bricks one can make an oven, a Kremlin wall, and many other things. One can build various film-objects from footage. Just as good bricks are needed for a house, good film footage is needed to organize a film-object.
Hence the serious approach to newsreel – to that factory of film footage in which life, passing through the camera lens, does not vanish forever, leaving no trace, but does, on the contrary, leave a trace, precise and inimitable.
The moment and the manner in which we admit life into the lens and the way in which we fix the trace that remains determine the technical quality; they also determine the social and historical value of the footage and subsequently the quality of the whole object."
Dziga Vertov "On Kino-Pravda", 1924
(From: "Kino-Eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov")
(From: "Kino-Eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov")
About Kino-Pravda: An Introduction by Yuri Tsivian
Of all the rarely seen Vertov films, Kino-Pravda (1922–25) is the rarest of all. Everyone (starting with Vertov himself) mentions Kino-Pravda as the playground for Vertov's boldest experiments in film form, but how many of us have actually seen any of its 23 issues
– apart from special issue 21, devoted to Lenin's death? To show the whole 3-year run of the Kino-Pravda newsreel (all but one survive, though some in fragments) was – I am sure – one of the Giornate's history-changing
decisions. I doubt if it had ever been done before – or could have be done, without the involvement of RGAKFD and the
Österreichisches Filmmuseum, which hold two of the world's major collections of Vertov's films. It's quite a marathon, it
is true, but the reward for running is given not at the finish line, but in the process: to see Kino-Pravda issue-by-issue is like watching a time-lapse movie showing the growth of Soviet avant-garde cinema (born in 1922, not in
1924 as we are normally told).
Like many a Left-wing artist of the 1920s, Vertov thought that revolutions in art are somehow linked with revolutions in
politics. His Kino-Pravda was about both. In Russian, pravda means "truth", but the Pravda part of the film's title alludes not to pravda the truth but to Pravda the paper – the Communist Party's principal daily newspaper (illegal before, official after 1917). Vertov was never a Party
member, but one could hardly find a more stalwart partisan of the Party than he. It may sound strange to hear a full champion
of the party in power call himself a revolutionary – but then the Soviet Twenties was a strange time. The October Revolution
did not end in October, Party leaders kept saying, true revolutions only begin with the takeover of power. All this sounds
like doubletalk, and doubletalk it may have been, but if you believed it you felt doubly empowered: you could be a political
orthodox while remaining politically – and artistically – Left.
From: Yuri Tsivian, Catalogue "Le Giornate del Cinema Muto", Sacile/Pordenone 2004
> Tsivian on Kino-Pravda No. 1–9 | 10–14 | 15–19 | 20–23
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