Kino-Pravda No. 18: A Movie-Camera Race Over 299 Metres and 14 Minutes and 50 Seconds in the Direction of Soviet Reality
About Kino-Pravda No. 18: A Movie-Camera Race Over 299 Metres and 14 Minutes and 50 Seconds in the Direction of Soviet Reality
The reel starts on found footage climbing the Eiffel Tower, a passage the titles dedicate to Gustave Eiffel, who had died in 1923. A shot from a plane's undercarriage follows, and an intertitle says the movie camera has landed in the USSR. A racing car takes the Petrograd–Moscow race. In the crowd the camera picks out the peasant Vasilii Siriakov, in from Yaroslavl, and stays with him on a tram and into a Goskino workshop, where a workers' collective "Octobrizes" a baby and names him Vladimir.
Cast & crew
More about Kino-Pravda No. 18: A Movie-Camera Race Over 299 Metres and 14 Minutes and 50 Seconds in the Direction of Soviet Reality
The Austrian Film Museum gives the premiere as February 25, 1924. The title itself states the original length: 299 metres, 14 minutes 50 seconds. The museum's copy runs 13 minutes 51 seconds. Vertov called this kind of reel a probeg kinoapparata, a movie-camera race. Yuri Tsivian notes that the Paris material is found footage, not a trip Vertov shot there.
Themes
Making
Tsivian describes the reel as a relay: tower ascent, then airplane, then racing car, each camera movement handed to the next.
Technique
Found footage, a plane, and a racing car are joined so the camera seems to change vehicles without a real journey.
Preservation
The Austrian Film Museum's copy runs 13 minutes 51 seconds, short of the 14 minutes 50 seconds named in the title.
Notes
- Siriakov is shown watching the tram conductor and driver, then the city through his own errands.
- Octobrized" here means a naming ritual in a workers' collective instead of a church christening. Tsivian says the practice did not last.
- The name Vladimir is shown coming out of a worker's mouth in an extreme close-up.
- A shadow of the man with the camera keeps returning between the workers and the machine tools.
- Mikhail Kalinin is listed in the cast on some catalogues of this issue.
Scenes
- The camera climbs the Eiffel Tower's girders.
- Workers pass the newborn from a Communist to a Komsomol member to a Pioneer.
Also available
- Austrian Film Museum (vertov.filmmuseum.at)
Quotes
The movie camera lands in the territory of the USSR.
