THE FILMS OF DZIGA VERTOV
Filmmaker DZIGA VERTOV
These words, written in 1923 (only a year after Robert Flaherty’s NANOOK OF THE NORTH was released) reflect the Soviet pioneer’s developing approach to cinema as an art form that shuns traditional or Western narrative in favor of images from real life. They lay the foundation for what would become the crux of Vertov’s revolutionary, anti-bourgeois aesthetic wherein the camera is an extension of the human eye, capturing “the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe.” Over the next decade-and-a-half, Vertov would devote his life to the construction and organization of these raw images, his apotheosis being the landmark 1929 film THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA. In it, he comes closest to realizing his theory of ‘Kino-Eye,’ creating a new, more ambitious and more significant picture than what the eye initially perceives.
GME distributes DVD editions of the following Dziga Vertov films:
DZIGA VERTOV: THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA AND OTHER NEWLY-RESTORED WORKS
Dziga Vertov (USSR)
"I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only the machine can see it. I am now free of human immobility. I am in perpetual motion. I approach things, I move away from them. I slip under them, into them. I move toward the muzzle of a race horse. I move quickly through crowds, I advance ahead of the soldiers in an assault, I take off with airplanes, I fall on my back ad get up at the same time that the body falls and gets up. This is what I am, a machine that runs in chaotic maneuvers, recording movements one after the other, assembling them in a patchwork.”
ENTUZIAZM (SIMFONIJA DONBASSA)
Dziga Vertov (USSR)
Dziga Vertov's ENTUZIAZM is considered a masterpiece of early sound film and of Soviet avant-garde cinema. Dealing with the Five Year Plan of the late 1920s, it was praised by artists like Charlie Chaplin, was subsequently forgotten, and rediscovered by the avant-garde movement of the 1960s.
A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD (ŠESTAJA ČAST' MIRA) / THE ELEVENTH YEAR (ODINNADCATYJ)
Dziga Vertov (USSR)
"A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD is more than a film, than what we have got used understanding by the word 'film.' Whether it is a newsreel, a comedy, or artistic hit film, A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD is somewhere beyond the boundaries of these definitions; it is already the next stage after the concept of 'cinema' itself.”
THREE SONGS OF LENIN (TRI PESNI O LENINE)
Dziga Vertov (USSR)
Next to the classic MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, Vertov’s "film poem" to the founder of the Soviet Union, THREE SONGS OF LENIN (TRI PESNI O LENINE), is the most universally acclaimed and enduringly popular of all his Dziga Vertov's films. This 2-disc set presents the earliest surviving versions of THREE SONGS OF LENIN, the 1938 silent and sound reissues of the film's original 1934 sound and 1935 silent releases, previously unavailable on video.