Admission: $2.50

Tonight's program consists of the following films only; a full lecture on these works will be held on Wednesday, April 11, at 4:00 in the UAM Theater.

Zvenigora
The first important film by the great Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko, whose best known work is the classic Earth (1930), Zvenigora is essentially an anthology of Ukrainian folk myths, centering around a grandfather figure who stands for the spirit of the Ukraine. The old man believes that there is treasure hidden in the mountains of Zvenigora. At the end the real treasure turns out to be not gold or silver - it is the people, their intelligence and ambition, their harnessing of the land's mineral wealth. The film is free-flowing, impressionistic, and extremely symbolic (even for Dovzhenko), an incredibly rich and wonderful experience.

• Directed by Alexander Dovzhenko. (1928, 73 mins, 35mm, silent, Russian intertitles with live English translation, Print from PFA Collection)

Forward Soviet! (Shagai, Soviet!)
“This ‘symphony of creative work' was commissioned by the Moscow Soviet. Although largely concerned with life in Moscow, it is ultimately a tableau of life in the U.S.S.R. during the reconstruction period. Vertov makes constant use of contrasting opposites: life then and now; life here and in other countries. The opening sequence has a discourse on the destruction caused by the Civil War and what had been done to repair the damage. The titles are never merely explicative but are an indispensable part of the visual sequence. Like illustrated alphabets and spelling books, or like words in a futurist collage, even the typography is an essential visual element. Each object or subject thus becomes a kind of ideogram or hieroglyph with as precise a significance as a drawing in a dictionary that illustrates the meaning of a word. The whole film is constructed and has a rhythm like a poem by Mayakovsky.

“One of the most striking sequences in this ‘two thousand meters of the Bolshevik country' (another title for the film) is the meeting in front of the Mos-Soviet. Here, Vertov's use of elements like the loudspeakers and the taxis becomes a kind of lyrical, Futuristic exaltation of the machine.”

-Georges Sadoul, “Dictionary of Films”

• Directed, Written and Edited by Dziga Vertov. Assistant: Yelizaveta Svilova. Photographed by Ivan Belyakov. Cine-Explorer: Ilya Kopalin. (1926, 60 mins, 35mm, silent, Russian intertitles with live English translation, Print from PFA Collection)

Schwechater
“Originally this film by Peter Kubelka was commissioned as a commercial for Schwechater Beer. Kubelka, believing that his cinema lies not in photography but in editing, photographed it with a camera that had no viewfinder, pointing the camera in the general direction of the actors to please the executives who were present during the shooting. He then edited the footage into what may be the most intense single minute of cinema in existence. A variety of metric principles were used in cutting between several different kinds of footage, in deciding on shot-lengths, in deciding when to use color and sound, but the film is so complex that these cannot be readily divined by the viewer. What one senses instead is an organization based on patterns of repetition and variation whose complexity approaches that of the patterns in nature - the movement of water in a stream or of leaves on a tree - that Kubelka studied in connection with this work.”

-Fred Camper

• A film by Peter Kubelka. (1957-58, 1 min, color, Distributed by Canyon Cinema)

Enthusiasm (Symphony of the Don Basin)
“A tale of the coal miners of the Don Basin after four years of the first Five Year Plan. ‘To grasp the feverish reality of life in the Don Basin, to convey as true to life as possible its atmosphere of the clash of hammers, of train whistles, of the songs of workers at rest - this was my aim' (Dziga Vertov). The opening sequence shows the remnants of the past, including churches transformed into clubs, then a procession, a meeting, the mills, factories, and mines. In the finale, a coal train meets a wheat train.

“Vertov made a vivid and unusual use of sound that was considerably ahead of its time. Natural sounds (machinery, voices, debates, songs, etc.) recorded in the mines and villages of the Don Basin were edited by Vertov as freely as he cut visuals, creating a kind of musique concrète. Chaplin was ecstatic over the film and wrote: ‘I would never have believed it possible to assemble mechanical noises to create such beauty. One of the most superb symphonies I have known. Dziga Vertov is a musician.'”

-Georges Sadoul, “Dictionary of Films”

• Directed and Written by Dziga Vertov. A Ukrain-Film Production. Photographed by Zeitlin. Music by N. Timofeyev. Edited by Svilova. Sound by P. Strom. (1931, 67 mins, Print Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)