Esfir Shub and Dziga Vertov Films Screen at BAM in November

STILL: ESFIR SHUB’S THE FALL OF THE ROMANOV DYNASTY (1927). SOURCE: BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC.

Two Soviet films (THE FALL OF THE ROMANOV DYNASTY and THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA) that GME distributes to the North American university market are playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November.

Showing first is Esfir Shub’s 1927 film THE FALL OF THE ROMANOV DYNASTY, which will screen on Saturday, November 4th, 2023, at 3pm, in Jessica Green’s program Let the Record Show: Archived Cinema. As delineated in Green’s program notes:

Brilliantly crafted from pre-existing materials, these professionally made archival films illuminate new sides of old stories—and of cinematic storytelling itself. Pulling from intimate moments and international headlines, the documentaries, fiction film work, essay films, and one-of-a-kind experiments in Let the Record Show explore how moving image remixes of the past can pierce our collective consciousness and inspire our contemporary expressions of creativity.

Esfir Shub was the Soviet Union’s most renowned women editor and director. THE FALL OF THE ROMANOV DYNASTY recounts the collapse of the Russian monarchy that led to the Russian revolution. Her film is culled from pre-Soviet Russian newsreels (including material gathered from Europe and America). THE FALL OF THE ROMANOV DYNASTY is currently available from GME in the DVD boxset LANDMARKS OF EARLY SOVIET FILM.

STILL: DZIGA VERTOV’S THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929). SOURCE: BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC.

Later, on November 11th and November 15th, Dziga Vertov’s 1929 city symphony film THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA plays in Yasmina Price’s program “Be realistic, demand the impossible!” Cinema, Surrealism, Marxism. As noted in Price’s program notes:

Throwing food, throwing bombs, throwing tantrums, throwing parties, throwing Molotov cocktails. Although neither Marxism nor Surrealism are taken as dogma, they inform the collisions of experimental aesthetics and radical politics in this series of anarchic pastiche, newsreel documentation, and militant poetics.

Vertov’s most famous film, THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, reflects the filmmaker’s developing approach to cinema as an art form that deconstructs traditional narrative structure. Vertov’s revolutionary, anti-bourgeois aesthetic was informed by the notion that the camera is an extension of the human eye. He ultimately devoted his life to the construction and organization of raw images, and in THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, he comes closest to realizing his theory of ‘Kino-Eye’: the creation of a new, more ambitious, and more significant picture than what the eye initially perceives.

THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA is currently available from GME in the 4-disc Blu-Ray collection DZIGA VERTOV: ‘THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA’ AND OTHER NEWLY RESTORED WORKS.