7:00 - MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
Dziga Vertov (1929) 68 mins G

Vertov’s most famous & iconic film is a joyous & spectacular constructivist celluloid poem utilising all of the techniques of experimental silent film at the director’s disposal: split-screen, superimposition, slow motion, freeze-frames, vertiginous montage. Its materialist, agit-political & reflexive preoccupations were a major influence on Godard & others post-1968, but Vertov’s extraordinary achievement remains one of the most contemporary & humanistically modernist portraits of the city ever put on film.

Preceded by

Chess Fever
Vsevolod Pudovkin (1925) 20 mins

Kino-Pravda
Dziga Vertov (1922) 13 mins Prints of shorts courtesy of NFSA.

8:55 AELITA
Yakov Protazanov (1924) 100 mins

Based on a novel by Alexei Tolstoy & released in the same year as Lev Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, this is a significant work of post-Civil War popular cinema born under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (1921-1928). Los, an engineer disillusioned with domestic life, flies to Mars with a Bolshevik solider & a private detective in order to aid a proletarian Martian revolt against the dictatorial King Tuskub. Los has a love affair with Aelita, Queen of Mars. Memorable for its striking constructivist sets & costumes designed by Alexandra Ekster & Issak Rabinovich.