Kino-Pravda No. 21: Lenin Kino-Pravda. A Film Poem About Lenin

A middle-aged man, named Ziv, finds it difficult to understand the today's society. The film illustrates his wild views and concerns, as his imagination flashes through various times in history.

Follows the legendary female pilots Raskova, Osipenko, and Grisodubova in their failed but magnificent attempt to make the first nonstop trans-Siberian flight. Using documentary reenactments, Vertov depicts the flight, the crash, the rescue, and the women’s heroic return to Moscow, where crowds shower them with flowers, and leaders with speeches.

From the start, Vertov made himself known as an irreconcilable enemy of 'acted films', which he regarded as a violation of truth. At the peak of WWII, however, such lofty artistic principles proved impractical.

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

A chronicle of the Russian Revolution of 1917, from the bourgeois democratic February Revolution to the great socialist October Revolution and the final triumph.

Promoting the joys of life in a Soviet village centering on the activities of the Young Pioneers. These children are constantly busy, pasting propaganda posters on walls, distributing hand bills, exhorting all to 'buy from the cooperative' as opposed to the Public Sector, promoting temperance, and helping poor widows. Experimental portions, projected in reverse, feature the un-slaughtering of a bull and the un-baking of bread.

Shot to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Dziga Vertov's eye focuses on the women and the role of motherhood, featuring images from across the Soviet Union, in particular the Far East.

Popular neighborhoods that are open-air prisons. Where beauty flirts with violence. The kingdom of the insubordinate children, veterans of the lead. A garden of amputated flowers, which with crutches on their backs, still grow and dance.

Three episodes comprise three songs sung by anonymous Soviet peoples about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

This film shows the leaders of organizations that emerged after the Russian Revolution. It is the fragment of ‘Anniversary of the Revolution’ made by Vertov in 1918.

Dziga Vertov-directed Soviet newsreel covering: Up the Eiffel Tower in Paris / Moscow / Auto race Petrograd – Moscow / Aspects of everyday Soviet life / Peasant from Jaroslavl' visiting Moscow / Ceremonial introduction of a newborn into a workers' collective

Dziga Vertov-directed Soviet newsreel covering: A bet is placed on the outcome of the Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries / The verdict / People in streetcars and on the street / A crashed aircraft / Reconstruction of streetcar line 13 / Peacetime use of tanks – airport construction work.

Dziga Vertov-directed Soviet newsreel covering: Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries / Rebuilding of the destroyed Siberian village of Taseevo / Railroad station Sljudjanka / Abandoned mica pits near Lake Baikal / Soči health resort / Chudjakovskij-Park / Beach near Tuapse / The loading of silk / Afghanistan, Kabul / Peacetime use of tanks / Mountain road / Chapel in the Caucasus.

Dziga Vertov-directed Soviet newsreel covering: A peasant buys a receiver at the radio shop / Instructions to attach an antenna / A broadcast-station is developed / A concert is broadcast. Though only a third of this final issue of Kino-Pravda seems to survive, there still exists Aleksandr Bushkin’s time-lapse animation and the sequence in which, as Yuri Tsivian describes, “a cross-section of a photographically correct izba (Russian peasant’s log hut) is penetrated by schematically charted radio waves”—a testament to the magical properties and propagandistic uses of radio in reaching out to Russia’s distant peasantry.

The first animated film made in the Soviet Union portrays a bloated caricature of a Capitalist devouring a massive heap of food and drink.

Dziga Vertov-directed Soviet newsreel covering: Connecting city and country, south and north, summer and winter, peasant women and worker women / Emancipation of women in the USSR