Kino-Eye/Three Songs About Lenin

The first "song" is the saga of how the revolution liberated a woman from the oppression and ignorance of Islam. A powerful topic that not many people would dare to tackle today. She goes from being imprisoned in her veil to a free woman, attending school, driving a tractor and learning to shoot a gun.

But as we know, communism was no utopia either.

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I really looked forward to seeing Vertov's early films, shot in 1923-24. Before that, film stock wasn't readily accessible to filmmakers in the Soviet union.

Vertov developed Kuleshov's theory of montage in those early years and put them to good use in the films featured on this DVD. The 6 Kino-eye shorts was a pioneering venture into the Soviet experience. Vertov sought to bring witness to how the word of communism was spread throughout the countryside and in the cities. If this meant tampering a bit with the footage he shot, well - so be it!

The protagonists of the first three films are "the Young pioneers", a group of young teens who help out wherever they can. They help widows harvesting the crop and old people with shopping and cleaning. They also urge people to buy their meat and veggies at the Communist food market and not at private grocers.(We also follow the meat backwards from the counter to the cow, would you believe!)

The do-gooders still find time to collect the children in the village and explain what communism is all about and request that they join the Communist party.

Later, there are intercut scenes from everyday life, work and leisure. Great stuff. Enthusiasm runs through the footage, this is a young man using the camera as his gun, shooting at will, and getting some marvellous treasure from his effort.

Historically, you can't even begin to measure the value of Kino eye. These people are real, this stuff happened. It's a closed chapter in history, and will probably never be repeated. Propaganda, sure, but also a work of art.

Also on this DVD, we get the film "Three songs for Lenin" (1934) What a world of difference 10 years made for Vertov. This nearly unwatchable mish-mash of ugly close-ups, rabble-rousing, and Stalin-style knee-jerking should not be shown. In theory constructed like a three-part symphony, it's a hopeless jumble of badly edited scenes. The first part, about a Moslem girl who doesn't have to cover her face anymore is the most lifeless documentary I've ever seen. The second part introduces the life and death-cult of Lenin, and history has not been kind to it. It's teary-eyed communist symbolism, with endless scenes of mourners standing around Lenin's body. Endless..The last part looks like it was made with someone putting a gun to Vertov's head. You can almost imagine the Moscow processes lurking just out of sight.

5 stars for the Kino-eye films, the Lenin film is an atrocity that Vertov should have been able to avoid making. But then, maybe he didn't have a choice. Or maybe his enthusiasm had run to ground in the bureaucratic and political hell that Soviet had become in the 1930ies.

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