Kino-Pravda No. 19: A Movie-Camera Race Moscow – Arctic Ocean
About Kino-Pravda No. 19: A Movie-Camera Race Moscow – Arctic Ocean
The reel jumps between cold and heat, winter and summer, the Arctic and the Black Sea. Women type, milk a cow, and work a field. A woman speaks for the state. Lenin's wife and sister appear at his funeral and in earlier footage beside him. A train carries the camera, sometimes on the roof, and the last shots look up from under the wheels. An intertitle calls those frames four metres of the movie camera's memory.
Cast & crew
More about Kino-Pravda No. 19: A Movie-Camera Race Moscow – Arctic Ocean
Wikidata dates the issue May 9, 1924. The Austrian Film Museum lists it as May 1924 and times its copy at 17 minutes 22 seconds. Yuri Tsivian calls it one reel that tries to do too much at once. The titles address it to "Woman, peasant woman, worker woman." Elizaveta Svilova is shown cutting this same negative.
Themes
Background
Lenin had died in January 1924. This May issue uses funeral footage of his wife and sister alongside shots of them from when he was alive.
Making
The women-at-work shots are tied together by the train, with the camera often mounted on the carriage roof.
Reviews
Tsivian quotes Sergei Eisenstein's joke that Vertov's wish was to beat Nanook and Moana in a single stroke, aimed at this north-and-south reel.
Technique
Svilova is filmed editing the negative of the reel the viewer is watching.
Preservation
The Austrian Film Museum holds a copy running 17 minutes 22 seconds.
Notes
- An intertitle reads "The editing of the negative for Kino-Pravda No. 19" over Svilova at the bench.
- Another title counts "4 metres of movie-camera memory, as it falls under the wheels of the freight train.
- Tsivian says the under-the-train view recalls the British trick film How It Feels to Be Run Over.
- He also notes that Svilova at the editor's table returns, reversed, in Man with a Movie Camera, which was still unmade.
Scenes
- Svilova cuts the negative while the title names this issue.
- The last four metres look up as the freight-train wheels pass.
Influenced
- Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Also available
- Austrian Film Museum (vertov.filmmuseum.at)
Quotes
4 metres of movie-camera memory, as it falls under the wheels of the freight train.
