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SOVIET NEWSREELS No. 1 (1919 – 1922) * with switchable English subtitles *

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This disc brings together a collection of newsreels, which were shown in the early days of the USSR under the title "Kino Pravda" (as well as "Kino Nedelya" and "Kino Glaz"). Kino-Pravda ("Film Truth") was a newsreel series by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman.

Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of kino-pravda, or film-truth, through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized together, showed a deeper truth which could not be seen with the naked eye. In the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first. Episodes of "Kino-Pravda" usually did not include reenactments or stagings (one exception is the segment about the trial of the Social Revolutionaries: the scenes of the selling of the newspapers on the streets and the people reading the papers in the trolley were both staged for the camera). The cinematography is simple, functional, unelaborate — perhaps a result of Vertov's lack of interest in either "beauty" or "art". Twenty-three issues of the series were produced over a period of three years; each issue lasted about twenty minutes and usually covered three topics. The stories were typically descriptive, not narrative, and included vignettes and exposés, showing for instance the renovation of a trolley system, the organization of farmers into communes, and the trial of Social Revolutionaries; one story shows starvation in the nascent Marxist state. Propagandistic tendencies are also present, but with more subtlety, in the episode featuring the construction of an airport: one shot shows the former Czar's tanks helping prepare a foundation, with an intertitle reading "Tanks on the labor front".

Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series — in the final segment he includes contact information — but by the fourteenth episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as "insane".

KINO NEDELYA 31 - 35 (1919):

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya (the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia), which first came out in June 1918. While working for Kino-Nedelya he met his future wife, the film director and editor, Elizaveta Svilova, who at the time was working as an editor at Goskino. Vertov worked on the Kino-Nedelya series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin's agit-train during the ongoing Russian Civil War between Communists and counterrevolutionaries. Some of the cars on the agit-trains were equipped with actors for live performances or printing presses; Vertov's had equipment to shoot, develop, edit, and project film. The trains went to battlefronts on agitation-propaganda missions intended primarily to bolster the morale of the troops; they were also intended to stir up revolutionary fervor of the masses.

There are a number of different subjects shown in these five newsreels. Intertitles are usually very brief and of poor reading quality. We have added period music to the films.

SILENT WITH RUSSIAN INTERTITLES. APPROXIMATELY 41 MINUTES TOTAL.

KINO PRAVDA 1 (1922):

famine of 1921-1922, the confiscation of church property ( for the benefit of famine's victims), flight "Junkers" over Moscow ( for the benefit of famine's victims), demonstration against the foreign protectors in "Trial of the Right Socialist-Revolutionary Party"

SILENT FILM WITH RUSSIAN INTERTITLES AND SWITCHABLE ENGLISH SUBTITLES. APPROXIMATELY 10 MINUTES.

KINO PRAVDA 2 (1922):

Party leaders make statements; folk festival; trial of the right-wing Social Revolutionaries

SILENT FILM WITH RUSSIAN INTERTITLES AND SWITCHABLE ENGLISH SUBTITLES. APPROXIMATELY 10 MINUTES.

KINO PRAVDA 3 (1922):

trial of the Right SRs. we can see among prosecutors Pyatakov, Krylenko, Bukharin and another future victims of political trials of the 1930s

SILENT FILM WITH RUSSIAN INTERTITLES AND SWITCHABLE ENGLISH SUBTITLES. APPROXIMATELY 7 MINUTES

KINO PRAVDA 4 (1922):

trial of the Right SRs (continue), from Moscow to Sevastopol and back by airmobile, shipping bread to suffers from famine, health resort of the Caucasus

SILENT FILM WITH RUSSIAN INTERTITLES AND SWITCHABLE ENGLISH SUBTITLES. APPROXIMATELY 9 MINUTES

KINO PRAVDA 5 (1922):

Soviet peasantry, health resort of the Caucasus, horse race track

SILENT FILM WITH RUSSIAN INTERTITLES AND SWITCHABLE ENGLISH SUBTITLES. APPROXIMATELY 8 MINUTES.

ALL FILMS HAVE HAD MUSIC TRACKS ADDED TO THEM BY US. FILM QUALITY VARIES.

TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 86 MINUTES.

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