By Mikhail Doronenko, in Moscow
The documentary film, The Anniversary of the Revolution, by Dziga Vertov, has at last been restored and is now freely available on line. The film was first released on November 7, 1918 and it provides a comprehensive chronicle of the Russian Revolution from February through to November 1917 and then into 1918.
It includes footage of the organisation of the Provisional Government, state meetings in Moscow, the October Revolution, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the start of the Civil War, the storm of Kazan, Trotsky’s trip to the Volga region and the first labour communes. Part of the film, entitled the brain of Soviet Russia, presents a gallery of leaders of the new Soviet state.
Classic documentary film
Dziga Vertov was a major figure in the history of cinematography. The avant–garde director had a big influence on the development of film due to his pioneering methods of shooting films. His experimental documentary films Kino-eye (1924), Man with a movie camera (1929) Enthusiasm (The Symphony of the Donbass) (1930) are classics of documentary film. These films are studied in cinema courses by future directors and cameramen.
The Anniversary of the Revolution was Dziga Vertov’s first film. It came out in 1918 and was shown widely throughout the country during the years of the Civil War. But quickly the copies of the film then in existence became unusable and for many years the film was considered lost. However, isolated fragments of the footage survived. Film scholar Svetlana Ishevskaya found an advert produced by the Ministry of Enlightenment with a detailed list of the film’s contents in the archive of Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Out of the fragments found in archives that matched this list she restored the film to its original form in 2017, together with film expert Nikolai Izvolin.
Film ‘disappeared’ in the 1920s
Nikolai Izvolin explained how The Anniversary of the Revolution disappeared in the 1920s. “I suspect”, he said, “that it was because of numerous episodes with Trotsky. This film was produced to mark the first anniversary of Soviet power, for 7 November 1918. As such it incorporates the first stage of the Civil War, notably Trotsky’s trips to towns on the Volga on the front line. At the end of the 1920s Trotsky became a persona non-grata in the USSR and Vertov’s film virtually disappeared from circulation.
“More precisely, it was moved to storage and “taken apart” into separate scenes. The Anniversary of the Revolution was a compilation of chronicle subjects shot previously from the film news Free Russia, Kino-week and others. That’s why parts of the film could be shown as stand-alone short films and were known to a wide audience previously. But we did not realise that they were part of Dziga Vertov’s two-hour film”
The premiere of the restored film took place at an international film festival in Amsterdam, in November 2018 and has only now been put online for the general public. Now we can watch one of the most significant works of Soviet film created by the Russian Revolution.
Clicking on this link will take you to the film, which is available to rent for only £1.63, but is also available to buy and download for £3.27. It would make an excellent introduction to an on-line discussion: streaming Vertov’s film and discussing it afterwards.
May 20, 2020
