Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton

Music for silent films
Keyboard, voice, percussion and more!

Schedule of Shows

  • Kino-Pravda, nos. 1–8. 1922. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. The 23 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: the complicity of the Russian Orthodox Church in the terrible famine of 1922; and the sensationalism of Russia’s first Show Trial, in which the Bolshevists brought 47 Socialist-Revolutionary leaders, their bitter rivals, to court while crowds gathered in Red Square to await the inevitable verdict. Silent. Approx. 71 min. At the Museum of Modern Art.
  • Kino-Glaz (Zhizn Vrasplokh) (Kino-Eye (Life Off-Guard)). 1924. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. Vertov’s aspirations, and pretense, of improvising and catching life unawares—a gambit he described as “a single movie camera feeling its way, …[and capturing] simple little pieces of life, filmed as they are and not acted out”—is belied by the conceptually rigorous structure of this groundbreaking film, which divides Russian society into Manichean extremes of beneficence and criminality. The “New” Russia is exemplified by the Young Leninists of the Pioneer units, who rally behind the cause of communal living and co-operative exchange. The “Old” life is represented by drunken peasant women, lunatics, dope fiends, black marketers, and worst of all, private merchants who sacrifice the collective good for their own profit. Silent. Approx. 70 min.
  • Vertov Filmed in Person. 1922/1923/post-1930. USSR. Edited by Elizaveta Svilova. A compilation of outtakes and excerpts from films in which Vertov appears. Kino-Pravda issues 8 and 17 are among the sources. Approx. 1 min.
  • Vertov Interviews. Post-1935. USSR. 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. Approx. 1 min.
  • Kinonedelja (Kino-Week) nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, 21–25. 1918. Russia. Directed by Dziga Vertov. The 43 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; the wildly triumphant “Anniversary Chariot” circling the streets of Moscow in commemoration of the centenary of Karl Marx’s birth; scenic views of the White Nights in Moscow; and the unveilings of statues dedicated to such revolutionary heroes as Danton and Bakunin, commissioned as part of Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda. Silent. Approx. 72 min.
  • Kinonedelja (Kino-Week) nos. 31–35. 1919. Russia. Directed by Dziga Vertov. 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. As Yuri Tsivian writes, “[the protesters seem] ready to invade Germany to help Communists there….In those days, many believed that what was going on in Russia was the beginning of the last war on earth—the World Revolution predicted by Karl Marx.” Silent. Approx. 62 min.
  • Kino-Pravda [excerpts]. 1930s. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. These highlights from the first nine issues of Kino-Pravda are a part of film history itself: according to historian Jay Leyda, they were compiled by The Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library in the 1930s, and pieced together with English titles in the manner of Russian Constructivism. Silent. Approx. 16 min.
  • Kino-Pravda nos. 9–11, 13 (“Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”: A Film Poem Dedicated to the October Celebrations). 1922. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. Intertitles of Kino-Pravda 13: Aleksander Rodchenko. Certain that he could improve upon the American adventure film, “with its showy dynamism,[…]rapid shot changes, and the close-up,” Vertov used quicksilver montage to celebrate the speed and efficiency of modern machines and man in the New Russia. 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 1917–1922, 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.” Silent. Approx. 90 min.
  • Kino-Pravda nos. 18, 20–22. 1924–25. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. No. 18 is boastfully subtitled “A Movie Camera Race over 299 Metres and 14 Minutes and 50 Seconds in the Direction of Soviet Reality”—a key example of Vertov’s delirious attempt to defy constraints of space-time travel, to be everywhere at once, through “impossible,” visionary linkages of different geographic locations, moving West to East, from Paris to Moscow, with dramatic tracking shots and cameras positioned underneath descending airplanes, amid racing cars, on trams, all culminating in the momentous “Octobrization” of a baby at a worker’s collective (a Communist attempt to supplant the ritual of baptism). No. 20, “Pioneer Pravda,” is a follow-up to Kino-Eye, with Young Pioneer boys like “Little Smoked Sprat” and “The Gypsy Kid” communing with wolves, snakes, and elephants at a zoo, but the film is most remarkable for its stunningly edited railway journey sequence. No. 21 is a “Film Poem about Lenin,” commemorating the first anniversary of his death, and, in a Hegelian-Marxist dialectical triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, narrating his achievements (from his assassination attempt to the Red Terror policy to images of Soviet Russia’s progress under Bolshevism), his declining health and death (famously illustrated by Vertov and Rodchenko’s animated titling and their astonishing funeral sequence), and his triumphant legacy (cleverly represented by animated images of swelling crowds of workers morphing into newsreel shots of the Communist Party standing strong and proud). No. 22, the “Peasant Kino-Pravda,” was made as part of the smychka campaign to unite workers and peasants, and to demonstrate that “Lenin is Alive in the Heart of the Peasant” and in the hearts of oppressed Asians and Africans. Silent. Approx. 90 min.
  • Kino-Pravda nos. 14–17. 1922–23. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. This program features some of Vertov and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s most ingenious experiments in graphic design. For Kino-Pravda No. 14, Vertov wanted to contrast the Land of Capitalism, with its gleaming skyscrapers and fetish for luxury, with life “on the other side,” and so Rodchenko devised a wooden mobile installation that could rotate like a globe, making three-dimensional intertitles appear to float in space. 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),which Vertov helped create and which was meant to be projected during one of Eisenstein’s Proletkult stage productions. 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 at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow, part of the government’s smychka (“alliance”) campaign to bring about “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Silent.
  • Segodnia (Today). 1923. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov.
  • Sovetskie Igrushki (Soviet Toys). 1924. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. Vertov’s first animated films, drawn by Ivan Beliakov and Aleksandr Ivanov. The latter celebrates the smychka alliance of workers and peasants through the humorous depiction of a piggish bourgeoisie who grotesquely drinks, eats, and vomits. Silent.
  • Padeniye Dinasti Romanovikh (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty). 1927. USSR. Directed and edited by Esfir Shub. A devastating chronicle of Tsarist Russia from the eve of World War I until its brutal demise in the revolutions of February and October 1917,The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty comprises hundreds of films that Esfir Shub unearthed and rescued from damp cellars and other neglected corners of the Soviet Union, including newsreels and home movies taken by the Tsar’s own cameramen. Using the film splice as a cudgel, Shub contrasts the Imperial Family in opulent ballrooms, regal processions, and garden tea parties with the backbreaking toil of the masses, a bitter satire that makes the Revolution seem both historically inevitable and triumphant. One of the great pleasures of this Vertov retrospective is rediscovering the work of certain largely forgotten women filmmakers of the Soviet avant-garde, including Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov’s editor and wife, and Shub, who pioneered “found footage” cinema and was instrumental in the development of dialectical montage, collaborating with Sergei Eisenstein on the shooting scripts ofStrike and Potemkin. Silent. 101 min.
  • Kino-Pravda No. 23 (Radio Pravda). 1925. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. Though only a third of this final issue of Kino-Pravda seems to survive, we are nonetheless treated to Aleksandr Bushkin’s time-lapse animation and his brilliant sequence in which, as Yuri Tsivian describes, “a cross-section of a photographically correct izba(Russian peasant’s log hut) is penetrated by schematically charted radio waves”—a testament to the magical properties and propagandistic uses of radio in reaching out to Russia’s distant peasantry. Unedited print. Approx. 23 min.
  • Shagai, Sovet! (Stride, Soviet! (The Moscow Soviet in the Present, Past, and Future)). 1926. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. As head of Kultkino, Goskino’s documentary section, Vertov was commissioned to make an election-year campaign film on behalf of the sitting Mossovet (Moscow Municipal Soviet). Never one to follow orders, he failed to include any images of Mossovet officials at work, or any evidence of their achievements, and the film was thus denounced by the Presidium Committee of the Moscow Soviet and largely boycotted by movie theaters. Their loss is our gain, however, because we can see Vertov’s 1922 manifesto “WE” put into practice: “For his inability to control his movements,” Vertov wrote, “WE temporarily exclude man as a subject for film. Our path leads through a poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man.” Automobiles, engines, factory tools are literally brought to life—“the hearts of the machines are beating”—and operate in perfect synchronicity toward the advancement of the New Russia. Silent. Approx. 70 min.

Recordings and Live Performances

FARMHOUSE WINDOW PRODUCTIONS
41 Horseshoe Lane
Lakeville CT 06039
Tel: (860) 435-4687
Fax: (928) 752-3417
info@silent-film-music.com

Copyright © Donald Sosin and Farmhouse Window Productions.