Kino-Pravda Nos. 9–11, 13 (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Film Poem Dedicated to the October Celebrations)

Certain that he could improve upon the American adventure film, “with its showy dynamism,(…)rapid shot changes, and the close-up,” Vertov used quicksilver montage to celebrate the speed and efficiency of modern machines and man in the New Russia. In breathless images we see the opening of the racing season in Moscow; the All-Russia Olympiad, which offered Vertov a chance to experiment with what he called “a precise study of movement”; and the lightning-fast deployment of a mobile film projection unit in a Moscow square. Kino-Pravda 13 is famous for Aleksandr Rodchenko's Constructivist intertitles, a masterpiece of graphic design, and the images themselves are also astonishing: the funerals of revolutionary heroes from 1917–1922, some excerpted from Kino-Week, that Vertov strung together to create what Yuri Tsivian calls “some kind of simultaneous, over-arching funeral in which the whole country is participating.

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