The Brain of Soviet Russia

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.

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.

Through the travelogue format, 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, it is in fact a call for unification in order to build a 'complete socialist society'.

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.

Commissioned as both a documentary and an information film for the citizens of Moscow prior to municipal elections, a tableau of Soviet life and achievements in the period of reconstruction following the Civil War of 1917-1921.

A presentation of the hard labour of countrymen in industrial production to strengthen the USSR economy and turning their country into a world power.

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: IV. Congress of the Comintern / Congress of the Profintern.

Dziga Vertov-directed Soviet newsreel covering: Starving children / Requisitioning of valuables possessed by the Russian Orthodox Church / Fundraising flights in support of the hungry / Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries.

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.

Dziga Vertov-directed Soviet newsreel. The first themed issue of Kino-Pravda, devoted to the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1922.

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