Three Songs About Lenin | |
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Directed by | Dziga Vertov |
Written by | Dziga Vertov |
Cinematography | Mark Magidson Bentsion Monastyrsky Dmitri Surensky |
Distributed by | Amkino Corporation (USA, 1934) |
Release date |
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Running time | 57 minutes |
Country | Soviet Union |
Language | Silent film |
Three Songs About Lenin (Russian : Три песни о Ленине) is a 1934 documentary sound film by Ukrainian-Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. It is based on three admiring songs sung by anonymous people in Soviet Russia about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It is made up of 3 episodes and is 57 minutes long.
In 1969 it was re-edited by Elizaveta Svilova, Ilya Kopalin and Serafima Pumpyanskaya as part of the 1970 Lenin centenary. [1]
The film opens with some texts on Lenin, and then continue with three episodes. The first episode opens with the music from the second movement of Beethoven's piano sonata Pathétique, adapted for orchestra. It then moves to the first song My face was in a gloomy prison. The first episode lasts about 19 minutes. The second episode opens with the third movement (funeral march) of Chopin's piano sonata in b-flat minor, adapted for orchestra. In the middle section of the second song, Vertov uses Wagner's Siegfried's Funeral March in Götterdämmerung , the last installment of Der Ring des Nibelungen . The third song In a big city made of stone, where Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers is used.
This film was restored and released in home media (BD and DVD) by Flicker Alley and Eureka. [2] [3]
Dziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
The cinema of the Soviet Union includes films produced by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, albeit they were all regulated by the central government in Moscow. Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldavia. At the same time, the nation's film industry, which was fully nationalized throughout most of the country's history, was guided by philosophies and laws propounded by the monopoly Soviet Communist Party which introduced a new view on the cinema, socialist realism, which was different from the one before or after the existence of the Soviet Union.
Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Kaufman also appears as the eponymous Man of the film.
Kino-Pravda was a series of 23 newsreels by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman launched in June 1922. Vertov referred to the twenty-three issues of Kino-Pravda as the first work by him where his future cinematic methods can be observed.
The Cinematic Orchestra is a British nu jazz and downtempo music group created in 1999 by Jason Swinscoe and later involving his music collaborator Dominic Smith. The group is signed to independent record label Ninja Tune.
Alexander Nikolayevich Tcherepnin was a Russian-born composer and pianist.
Ludwig van Beethoven composed his Piano Sonata No. 12 in A♭ major, Op. 26, in 1800–1801, around the same time as he completed his First Symphony. He dedicated the sonata to Prince Karl von Lichnowsky, who had been his patron since 1792.
Mikhail Abelevich Kaufman was a Soviet and Russian cinematographer and photographer. He was the younger brother of filmmaker Dziga Vertov and the older brother of cinematographer Boris Kaufman.
Man with a Movie Camera is a 2003 soundtrack album by The Cinematic Orchestra, released on 26 May 2003 on Ninja Tune. The album contains re-workings and thematic reprises of some of the music from the band's previous album, 2002's Every Day, including the track "Man with a Movie Camera" and an instrumental version of "All Things to All Men" entitled "All Things".
The Kinoks were a collective of Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s, consisting of Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
The Parvo was a 35mm motion picture camera developed in France by André Debrie. The patent was registered in 1908 by his father, Joseph Dules Debrie. The camera was relatively compact for its time. It was hand-cranked, as were its predecessors. To aid the camera operator in cranking at the correct speed, the camera had a built in tachometer.
A Sixth Part of the World, sometimes referred to as The Sixth Part of the World, is a 1926 silent film directed by Dziga Vertov and produced by Kultkino. Through the travelogue format, it depicted the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and detailed the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land. Focusing on cultural and economic diversity, the film is in fact a call for unification in order to build a "complete socialist society".
Man with a Movie Camera is an ambient soundtrack by Biosphere for Dziga Vertov's 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, commissioned by the Tromsø International Film Festival in 1996. This soundtrack was released later in 2001 as a bonus disc of Substrata 2 with two bonus tracks from the Japanese version of Substrata.
Yelizaveta Ignatevna Svilova was a Russian filmmaker and film editor. She is perhaps best known for making films with her husband Dziga Vertov and her brother-in-law Mikhail Kaufman. She is also known for her documentaries about World War II and for appearing in and editing Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
Boris Yevseyevich Gusman was a Soviet author, screenplay writer, theater director, and columnist for Pravda. As deputy director for the Bolshoi Theatre and later director of the Soviet Radio Committee Arts Division, Gusman played an important role in promoting Sergei Prokofiev's music in the USSR and internationally. Gusman was arrested during the Great Purges of the late 1930s, and died in a labor camp in 1944. His son Israel Borisovich Gusman would later become a prominent musical conductor.
Ilya Petrovich Kopalin was a Soviet film director remembered for his documentaries. His most famous footage is that of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference and that of Yuri Gagarin's space flight.
In Spring is a 1929 Soviet silent experimental documentary directed by Mikhail Kaufman. It was the first independent work of the cinematographer, made in accordance with the ideas of the avant-garde manifesto Kinoks and was Kaufman's directorial debut.
Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas, also referred to as Donbas Symphony or The Symphony of the Donbas Basin, is a 1931 sound film directed by Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. The film was the director's first sound film and also the first of the Soviet production company Ukrainfilm. The film's score is considered experimental and avant-garde because of its incorporation of factory, industrial, and other machine sounds; human speech plays only a small role in the film's sounds.
Kino-Eye is a film technique developed in Soviet Union by Dziga Vertov. It was also the name of the movement and group that was defined by this technique. Kino-Eye was Vertov's means of capturing what he believed to be "inaccessible to the human eye"; that is, Kino-Eye films would not attempt to imitate how the human eye saw things. Rather, by assembling film fragments and editing them together in a form of montage, Kino-Eye hoped to activate a new type of perception by creating "a new filmic, i.e., media shaped, reality and a message or an illusion of a message - a semantic field." Distinct from narrative entertainment cinema forms or otherwise "acted" films, Kino-Eye sought to capture "life unawares" and edit it together in such a way that it would form a new, previously unseen truth.