The extensive presentation of Dziga Vertov's works at the Austrian Film Museum in 2006, including the screenings of the newsreels Kinonedelja and Kino-Pravda, has been a special event. It was the world's second presentation of its kind - the films are extraordinarily hard to come
by. The first comparable demonstration took place in October 2004 as part of the "Giornate del cinema muto" in Sacile. There,
the retrospective on Dziga Vertov's silent film oevre 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.
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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