“Anniversary of the Revolution” is a Russian non-fiction silent film of 1918 , edited by director Dziga Vertov from chronicles on the first anniversary of the October Revolution and which became his debut film [2] . The film was long considered lost and was restored to its original form only in 2018 by film expert Nikolai Izvolov .
| Anniversary of the revolution | |
|---|---|
| Genre | documentary |
| Producer | Dziga Vertov |
| Duration | 119 min [1] |
| Year | 1918 |
| IMDb | ID 0010180 |
A special premiere of the film took place on November 20, 2018 at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) [3] .
Content
Story
The film is an assembly of newsreels from the film magazines “Free Russia”, “ Cinema Week ”, etc. [2] The scenes of the film depict the history of the change of order in Russia from February 1917 to November 1918: this is the February revolution , the organization of the Provisional Government , the State meeting in Moscow in August 1917, the October Revolution in Petrograd, the events of October of that year in Moscow , the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly , the Brest Peace , the outbreak of the Civil War , the capture of Kazan , the trip of Leon Trotsky along the Volga, the first labor communes. Part of the film, entitled “The Brain of Soviet Russia,” is a gallery of state leaders of the time. One of the episodes of the film shows Vasily Chapaev [2] .
Creation History
The film was created by Dziga Vertov, when he was 22 years old and he worked only six months in the cinema, in the film magazine "Kinonedelya". According to Nikolai Izvolov, the picture was created "in record time, in the context of the outbreak of the Civil War, film hunger, lack of normal funding" [2] .
A message about the film appeared in the Moscow newspaper Kommunar on November 3, 1918 [4] [5] :
The cinematic committee of the People's Commissariat of Education is actively preparing for the upcoming October celebrations. The committee releases a grandiose picture "Anniversary of the Revolution." The picture captures all the main moments of the Russian revolution, the uprising of workers in Petrograd, demonstrations, rallies, portraits of freedom fighters, their funeral both on the Champ de Mars in Petrograd and in Moscow. Among other paintings, it should be noted the painting "Enemies of the Soviet Government and the fight against them."
The film was released in November 1918. While ordinary films at that time were printed in only 3-5 copies, “Anniversary of the Revolution” was published in a circulation of as many as 40 copies [4] . During the Civil War, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee literary train instructed and screened the film throughout the country. Then, however, the film was handed over to the warehouse and disbanded into separate commercials, and was subsequently considered lost. The reason that the film ceased to exist in its original form, apparently, was, among other things, the presence in it of a large number of episodes with Trotsky [2] , which became an undesirable figure in the USSR already in the late 1920s.
In particular, the film expert Viktor Listov tried to recreate the film in the late 1960s, but at that time a detailed description of the film was not yet found. In 2017, Svetlana Ishevskaya discovered a movie poster in the Mayakovsky Foundation in the Russian State Archives of Arts [6] . The poster provided all the inscriptions from the film, which gave an accurate idea of the number and sequence of fragments [2] . Nikolai Izvolov managed to find all the fragments in the archives, combine them and digitize them, as well as conduct “post-production”. The work was carried out with the assistance of the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents (RGAKFD). According to Izvolov, in the end, the film was able to identify "98 percent" [2] .
Reviews
| External Images | |
|---|---|
| Note by V. Listov “The Birth of the Cinema-Eye” (1970) | |
Vertov himself spoke of his film as follows: “On the first anniversary of the October Revolution, I passed my first production exam in a full-length film” [4] [5] .
Victor Listov called Vertov’s film “a kind of cinema encyclopedia, a set of unique frames telling about the“ morning of the Soviets ”” [4] .
According to Nikolai Izvolov , Vertov, "without expecting it ... he became a pioneer in the genre of the" editing film "- a film that is made from the chronicle" [2] . Similarly, IDFA organizers call “The Anniversary of the Revolution” “possibly the first feature-length documentary film ever made ” [3] .
Notes
- ↑ social_facebook_01
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Daria Borisova. “The anniversary of the Revolution” was collected in pieces: The debut picture of Dziga Vertov was restored (10.29.2018)
- ↑ 1 2 Dziga Vertov's Anniversary of the Revolution to premiere at IDFA 2018 (September 24, 2018)
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 V. Sheets. The first film of Dzigi Vertov // Prometheus. Historical and biographical almanac. Volume 7. M.: Young Guard, 1969. S. 129.
- ↑ 1 2 Svilova, 1976 , p. five.
- ↑ f. 336 op. 7 units hr 82. "Anniversary of the revolution." A list of scenes from the chronicles of the film committee of the People's Commissariat for Education .
Literature
- Dziga Vertov in the memoirs of contemporaries / Compiled by E. I. Svilov , A. L. Vinogradov. - M .: Art, 1976. - 280 p.
- The history of Soviet cinema in four volumes / Editors I. N. Vladimirtseva, A. M. Sandler. - M .: Art , 1969. - T. 1. - S. 53–55.
- V. Listov. The first film of Dzigi Vertov // Prometheus. Historical and biographical almanac . Volume 7. M.: Young Guard, 1969. S. 127-136.
Links
- Anniversary of the Revolution ( IDFA movie trailer )
- IDFA Movie Information
- “Anniversary of the Revolution” was collected in pieces // NG , 10.29.2018
- Nikolai Izvolov on Restoring Dziga Vertov's 'The Anniversary of the Revolution' // Variety , 11/15/2018