Russian Film: Kino-Glaz

TWO USSR FILMS of 1924 and 1925
(both in Russian intertitles with English electronic subtitles)

WHEN:  Monday, March 3

FIRST FILM STARTS AT:  7 pm

LIVE PIANO ACCOMPANIMENT by Martin Marks

AT:  HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
24 Quincy St.
Cambridge, Mass.

TICKETS:  $10 each

INFO:  hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/general_info.html 
            617-495-4700

7 pm:
KINO-EYE (Life Off Guard) (KINO-GLAZ)
USSR 1924, 35mm, b/w, silent, 70 min. at 20 fps.
director: Dziga Vertov
Kino-Eye is Vertov's first feature-length documentary made not of found footage but of purpose-filmed shots.
 
The strategy was announced in a newspaper shortly before the film's release: "... the Kino-Eye - the movie camera and two or three people - has gone off on a journey from the Pioneer camp, through the peasant courtyards, through the fields, through the markets and slums of the town, with an ambulance car to a dying man, from there to workers' sports grounds, and so on and so forth, peering into all the little corners of social life. It has looked at and captured life, which has not been changed by its presence, has not smoothed down its hair or taken up a pose, because it has not noticed it."
Print courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum.

STRIKE (STACHKA)
USSR 1925, 35mm, silent, b/w, 102 min. at 16 fps.
director: Sergei M. Eisenstein
with Grigori Aleksandrov, Yudif Glizer
Full of dazzling cinematic conventions, Eisenstein's first full-length film depicts the story of a 1912 strike by factory workers in Tsarist Russia and its brutal suppression by the authorities.

Eisenstein's dialectic montage is on full display, incorporating caricature, visual metaphor, and shock cutting.

Made with members of the Proletkult Theatre, Strike is an essential work of the Soviet Constructivist art movement of the 1920s.