Another lost masterpiece by Dziga Vertov has been revived

There are many lost films in the history of world cinema. Until recently, among them were paintings by Dziga Vertov. Thanks to the talented film historian Nikolai Izvolov, masterpieces are gradually returning. It took two years to reconstruct Vertov’s History of the Civil War.

The name of Dziga Vertov is known all over the world. Filmmakers all over the world learn from his films and finds. “A Man with a Movie Camera”, the first documentary sound film in the USSR “Symphony of Donbass”, one of the first Soviet animated films “Soviet Toys” – all these are classics, analyzed in detail. Vertov pioneered the use of slow-motion, backwards time-lapse photography, hidden camera techniques, and life by surprise. He was young and fearless, filmed himself during a jump from a height, lay down under the wheels of a speeding train for a unique shot. .

“History of the Civil War” was created by Dziga Vertov 100 years ago. The film was shown at the 3rd Congress of the Comintern, and then it disappeared and was considered lost all these years. Vertov himself did not know anything about his fate. And he recorded the key events and the main participants in the civil war in Russia in 1918-1922.

Three years ago, Nikolai Izvolov restored Vertov’s lost 1918 film Anniversary of the Revolution. He returned it to the world, one might say, thanks to an accidental discovery – a document containing intertitles that were pasted between frames, and then looked through dozens of paintings from 1917-1918 in the archive and found fragments of Vertov. Inspired by the success, he hoped that he would be able to restore the “History of the Civil War”. But everything turned out to be more difficult.

“The problem is that The Anniversary of the Revolution had several dozen copies,” says Nikolai Izvolov. – And the “History of the Civil War” was apparently made in one copy. I have been looking for literary sources for a long time that would allow me to create a plan that I can rely on when restoring the film. He managed to find something in the Krasnogorsk archive, the office of Soviet cinema in VGIK. The difficulty lay in the fact that Vertov was very young, he was just over twenty years old, one might say, an errand boy, as Nikolai Izvolov says. Dziga was engaged in office work, organizing filming, showing films to children on a film train. There was no particular reason to keep his work. Not a classic. In addition, the first archive of film and photo documents appeared only in 1926. And by that time Vertov managed to make eight films.

“They were stored in the warehouses of film studios,” says Nikolai Izvolov. – And when other directors needed to get some piece with Lenin or Trotsky, they cut it out of old films and inserted it into new ones. And Dziga Vertov himself did the same. There was no copyright.” By the end of the 1920s, the “History of the Civil War” was dismantled as unnecessary.

It is curious that Nikolai Izvolov found something valuable on the website of the Austrian Film Museum. It turns out that Alexandra Kollontai, being the USSR ambassador to the Scandinavian countries, took with her part of the Soviet chronicle. Thanks to this, rarities have been preserved in the archives of the Swedish radio and in Denmark. In our time, they were published in Vienna. But not every specialist would be able to recognize the treasures. To do this, you must have the intellect and intuition of Nikolai Izvolov. He saw the material he was looking for in one of their videos with the emblem of the Danish archive, contacted his colleagues and received the necessary fragment.

But gaps remain. The restored version of the “History of the Civil War” does not contain the episodes “The Battle of Tsaritsyn” with the participation of the young Stalin, “Entry of the Red Army into Odessa and the Crimea” with the participation of Frunze. But miracles happen. Perhaps these fragments will be found.

Vertov had five or six operators. This is not enough to cover the entire war. For example, there is no material about the assassination attempt on Lenin. But there were also surprises. The cameraman Novitsky, who worked with Vertov, came to the attention of the anarchist mutiny on Malaya Dmitrovka, and only because he lived nearby. I went out into the street, saw something interesting, returned home with a camera and captured valuable evidence of the era.

One of the first frames of the “History of the Civil War” – soldiers lying on the side of the road. There are two of them. Overcoats thrown over the shoulder. They watch the rumbles in the distance. Something explodes, there is smoke. And you feel incredible tenderness for these people who have fallen into the moloch of war. They are like grains of sand – at any moment they can turn into ashes.

Glory in honor of those who died at the revolutionary post is heard – and dozens of coffins fill the screen. We respond to white terror with red terror. Trotsky speaks from the podium. A flying machine-gun detachment, a tribunal, insurgent detachments of Makhno, commonly called the father. What kind of dad is he? Young and curly, one might say, a dashing handsome man.

Columns of refugees go for their poor belongings. Liberated citizens are called to free and joyful labor. Azerbaijani infantry is coming, Baku is being liberated. The child in the windings marvels at what is happening. But there are few children and women in the frame. War is a man’s business. The devastated land, the blockade of Berdyansk, the burned-out pier… Terrible and everyday pictures of the war. Always some give others to the slaughter in the name of ghostly goals.

Admiral Kolchak looks sternly from the screen. We often do not know how many persons involved in those events look like, just as the masses of people did not know them at one time, since the newspapers were not published.

During rest hours, the fighters cut their hair and shave in the middle of the marketplace. Not a moment of solitude, always in the world, in the open air. Camels are harnessed to carts instead of horses. Cities flash by – Kazan, Perm, Kyiv, Kerch. Sending new parts. Captured White Guards, Muslim detachment. Smiling Kirov. Crossing the Dnieper. Linkorn of Petropavlovsk. Warriors in white coats, so as not to stand out on the ice. Mass grave at the cathedral. Orderlies are working on the streets, removing corpses. A young woman stares at all this indifferently. One soldier look into the camera, as if looking into eternity.

Words are not needed. The footage speaks eloquently about everything. Previously, silent tapes were accompanied by the voice of a literate person, able to read the captions for the illiterate. The restored version has music playing all the time. It creates an anxiety that doesn’t let go. Everything is too hot and topical, and this is a real shock. Dziga Vertov is now more alive than all the living.