Kino-Pravda No. 17
About Kino-Pravda No. 17
Peasant women bind sheaves in shots that last a fraction of a second. Scaffolding on a building site is filmed so the poles read as a construction. The reel then settles on the All-Russian Agricultural and Craft Exhibition, cutting country against city, and ends with workers and peasants reading the newspaper Smychka.
Cast & crew
More about Kino-Pravda No. 17
Dziga Vertov issued this number in August 1923. Elizaveta Svilova edited it. The Austrian Film Museum dates the surviving copy to mid or late August and times it at 16 minutes 12 seconds. The exhibition in the reel is the First All-Russian Agricultural and Craft Exhibition.
Themes
Background
The agricultural exhibition opened in Moscow in August 1923, during the New Economic Policy, and this issue was built around it.
Making
Tsivian says Vertov and Svilova liked to cut work processes so short that the editing itself seemed to speed the labor.
Reviews
Tsivian writes that reviewers had not praised Kino-Pravda for "American montage," and that on this issue Svilova's cutting goes past that pace.
Look
Mikhail Kaufman filmed the scaffolding and the exhibition grounds. Svilova cut the harvest work into shots under a second.
Preservation
The Austrian Film Museum holds a copy running 16 minutes 12 seconds.
Notes
- Yuri Tsivian, writing for the Austrian Film Museum, times some of the sheaf-binding shots at a third of a second.
- He notes that Mikhail Kaufman's camera treats the scaffolding like a Constructivist structure.
- The closing image is workers and peasants with the paper Smychka, the word for the worker-peasant alliance.
- The museum lists the sections as hunger and harvest, the city-country alliance, then the exhibition: the trip in, the building work, the exhibits, a map, and the visitors.
Scenes
- Women bind sheaves in flashes shorter than a second.
- The reel ends on readers of the newspaper Smychka.
Also available
- Austrian Film Museum (vertov.filmmuseum.at)
