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More than 40 films of Russian avant-garde artist Dziga Vertov are revived in cinema series

UCLA Film and Television Archive

Through March 31
Billy Wilder Theater, $10

By Ruiling Erica Zhang

Feb. 10, 2012 1:01 a.m.

In a scene from the 1924 silent film “Kino-Eye,” a slice of beef from the marketplace flies back into the cow. The audience sees the cow’s skin come back on the bone and a knife cut across the cow’s throat in reverse, bringing the cow back to life, back to the stockyard and then finally to the countryside from where it came.

It’s more than just special effects. For Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov in the period following the Russian Revolution, it’s a Marxist critique of capitalism.

Beginning this Saturday, the UCLA Film and Television Archive will present “Kino-Eye: The Revolutionary Cinema of Dziga Vertov” at the Billy Wilder Theater. There will be 11 screenings of more than 40 films and newsreels.

The Vertov retrospective, previously curated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, includes his most well-known 1929 film “Man with a Movie Camera” in a 35mm print, newly restored by the Austrian Film Museum.

Vertov was a radical in his rejection of the conventional narrative film, according to Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. His innovative use of cinematic techniques includes rapid cutting, fast-forwarding, reverse action, animation and foreshortening.

He was so radical in fact that Soviet authorities began to censor him before the end of the 1920s, said Horak, who will be introducing some of the screenings.

At the time, all Soviet films had to be approved by the state, Horak said. Almost all of Vertov’s films were commissioned by the Soviet government.

“So they gave him approval,” Horak said. “It’s just that what he told them he was doing and what he ended up doing were two different things.”

Vertov was opposed to fictional storytelling and used documentaries to reflect people’s lives and to reveal the truth. It was a truth that only the kino-eye, the perfect mechanical eye of cinema, could capture, according to Paul Malcolm, programmer at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

In “Man with a Movie Camera,” the audience not only experiences a day in the life of a city in Soviet Russia, but they also see shots of the film being filmed and edited ““ the audience watching the film and the projector itself.

“(Vertov) actually used a stop-motion animation of a movie camera, so it’s moving like it’s its own little creature,” said Margarita Nafpaktitis, librarian for Slavic and East European studies. “That’s really how he felt about machines. … The camera could show you truth in a way that no other medium could and definitely in a way that a man cannot do by himself.”

Nafpaktitis will be introducing the “Kino-Week” and “Kino-Pravda” newsreel series at their screenings.

“(Vertov) was about capturing all of these individual facts ““ the factory worker, the cinema-goer and connecting them in a way that the audience could see the relationship between these things, which is a very Marxist relationship,” Malcolm said.

Associated with the early 20th century art movements of constructivism and futurism, Vertov was invested in the intersections between art, technology and society.

According to Malcolm, Vertov had a vision in his manifesto in which everyone has a camera, goes out to film life in the world and brings it all back to create a montage to reveal something about ourselves through the cinema.

“I was reading this passage: “˜a necessary and sufficient overview of the world every few hours’ ““ well if that’s not YouTube, I don’t know what is,” Malcolm said.

Vertov was against huge studios and massive sets, using lightweight equipment and only a one- or two-person crew. His style of filming was later adopted by socially conscious film movements such as the French new wave and Italian neo-realism.

While criticized at the time for straying from the role of a nonfiction filmmaker, his methods of constructing truth using cinematic techniques have paved the way for today’s documentary filmmakers, Malcolm said.

“The films themselves are not only extraordinary historical documents of this tremendously chaotic, exciting, convulsive period of history,” Malcolm said. “It’s not a narrative you’re following. It’s this incredibly electric visual imagery.”

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