Dziga Vertov’s THREE SONGS OF LENIN, Presented by Alex Ross, Screening at MoMA through July 18th
/“One of the greatest and most beautiful films I have ever seen”
- H. G. Wells
Alex Ross, longtime New Yorker music critic and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, introduces Dziga Vertov’s THREE SONGS OF LENIN (1934/38), commemorating the publication of his revelatory new book “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music” (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2020). Ross reconsiders the German composer Richard Wagner’s mythic hold over European and American culture in the late-19th and 20th centuries. Devoting a chapter to the unbridled use of Wagner’s music, or Wagnerian music, throughout the history of cinema (“from BIRTH OF A NATION to APOCALYPSE NOW”), Ross observes that “on the soundtrack of Vertov’s THREE SONGS OF LENIN, we hear the halting drumbeats and upward slithering figures that introduce Siegfried’s Funeral Music, which was indeed played at Lenin’s memorial…. With the music’s transition from tragic minor to heroic major, we see hopeful signs reading ‘The revolution lives on’ and ’Lenin is our immortality.’”
Gartenberg Media distributes this and other titles by Dziga Vertov, on both DVD and as DSL licenses, along with many other important Soviet Film releases by Edition Filmmuseum, Vienna (who provided this screening for the Museum of Modern Art). In addition, films by directors James Benning, Josef von Sternberg, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Martina Kudláček, among others, are also represented by GME’s offerings from Edition Filmmuseum, Vienna.
