A FESTIVAL OF REVOLUTIONARY FILM
Spark: a festival of revolutionary film Spark, the Russian Revolution Centenary Committee’s festival of revolutionary film, takes place at two of London’s most renowned independent cinemas: the Phoenix and the Rio. The festival takes its name from the Russian revolutionary newspaper Iskra (Spark). It features classics of early Soviet cinema by Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub. Warren Beatty’s Reds will also be shown as a unique and daring Hollywood film about the Revolution, released at the height of the Cold War.
Man With a Movie Camera (1929, dir. Dziga Vertov) film poster by Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg.
Front page: still from Mother (1926, dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin).
The role of film in the October Revolution Film’s potential as a tool to explain and win support for the Revolution was recognised early on by young communist filmmakers. They transformed film into a powerful medium of communication, applying Marxist theory to cinema in innovative ways. Eisenstein developed a theory of montage whereby images are juxtaposed, creating new meanings and stirring audience emotions. Rejecting dramatic fiction to document everyday experiences, Dziga Vertov directed the Kino Pravda newsreels, using special effects and experimental editing techniques. He accompanied the ‘agit-trains’ that journeyed across Russia to spread the ideas of the Bolshevik government. The trains carried projectors, showing films to the mostly illiterate peasantry. Soviet cinema’s legacy Soviet cinema has had a lasting impact internationally, influencing the theory and practice of film throughout the twentieth century and beyond. It has inspired filmmakers around the world including Orson Welles, the Italian Neo-Realists, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard and Francis Ford Coppola.
‘Of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema.’ Lenin
Still from October (1928, dir. Sergei Eisenstein).
Photo montage characteristic of the later work of El Lissitztky from the mould-breaking publication, USSR in Construction.
Aini Bapayeva, a Kirghiz Young Communist Leaguer and shock brigade herder. Access to health and education, as well as skilled work alongside traditional industries, transformed the opportunities available to women across the USSR.
The joys of cinema with movies for every kind of audience in dozens of languages. In 1930 the USSR produced no raw motion picture film of its own. By 1936 it held third place in the world for film production.
A FESTIVAL OF REVOLUTIONARY FILM Mother (1926, Vsevolod Pudovkin, 85 mins) 1pm, 24 September, Phoenix Cinema Based on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel, Pudovkin’s drama is set against the backdrop of the 1905 Russian Revolution. The film portrays the political awakening of a mother whose son is imprisoned for leading a strike at a local factory. After unwittingly betraying her son to the police, she takes up his cause and joins the workers demonstrating against the Tsarist authorities. Pudovkin, who began his career as an actor, and his wife Anna Zemtsova make cameo appearances. The End of St Petersburg (1927, Vsevolod Pudovkin, 106 mins) 2pm, 1 October, Rio Cinema Commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, Pudovkin’s film tells the story of a peasant who migrates to St Petersburg immediately before World War One to escape rural poverty. Desperate for work, he becomes a
strikebreaker and inadvertently causes a fellow worker from his village to be arrested. Ashamed, he pleads for the man’s release and is imprisoned after a scuffle. As a prisoner he is sent to fight for ‘Mother Russia’ in the trenches. Politicised by the experience of war he leads a mutiny and returns to St Petersburg a revolutionary. Reds (1981, Warren Beatty, 195 mins) 1.30pm, 8 October, Phoenix Cinema Beatty won an Oscar for his epic about the life and times of the American left-wing journalist John Reed. Beatty plays Reed, who travelled to Russia to chronicle the October Revolution, famously recording his experiences in the book Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed’s romance with fellow journalist and activist Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is the central motif. Beatty intersperses the historical drama with interviews in which ‘The Witnesses’ recount their memories of Reed and Bryant and the era that inspired them. Reds stands alone
as a bold and sympathetic Hollywood portrayal of revolutionaries, from the year Ronald Reagan became president and the Cold War entered a deep freeze. Organised jointly with the London Socialist Film Co-op Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein, 70 mins) 2pm, 15 October, Rio Cinema Set during the 1905 Revolution, Eisenstein’s drama is based on a historical Black Sea mutiny, which occurred after naval officers ordered their crew to eat borscht made with rotten meat. The film dramatises the mutiny and the popular uprising in Odessa, where the crew sailed after seizing control of the ship. Battleship Potemkin was censored by the British Board of Film Classification at the time of its release. It is now considered one of the greatest films of all time, with the ‘Odessa steps’ sequence ranking as one of the finest moments in cinema.
October (1928, Sergei Eisenstein, 104 mins) 1.15pm, 22 October, Phoenix Cinema Eisenstein’s epic was commissioned for the jubilee of the October Revolution. The film dramatises the historical sequence of 1917, from the February Revolution that toppled the Tsar to the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Many of the dramatic scenes re-enacted by Eisenstein, such as the storming of the Winter Palace, have become iconic images of the Revolution. Reflecting Eisenstein’s Marxist principles, the film focuses primarily on ordinary people, his cast including many who had participated in the events of October 1917. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927, Esfir Shub, 66 mins), 2pm, 29 October, Rio Cinema Shub’s documentary, commissioned as a visual document of the October Revolution ten years on, was compiled from footage recovered during exhaustive archival research. Her film
charts the course of the Revolution from the prewar years through the carnage of the trenches to the fall of the Tsar and the climactic events of October 1917. Exemplifying Shub’s influential compilation and editing techniques, her study is a vivid record of Russian politics and society before 1917, as well as the year that would see the old order swept away forever. Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov, 68 mins) 1pm, 5 November, Phoenix Cinema The manifesto at the start of Vertov’s most famous documentary describes it as ‘an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events’. Vertov, his brother Mikhail Kaufman and wife Elizaveta Svilova, known collectively as the kinoks (‘cine-eyes’), rejected the narrative conventions of fictional cinema. In this visual study of everyday life in a Soviet city, the cameraman Kaufman records what is happening around him, and also appears on screen as a protagonist.
Svilova is likewise seen at work editing the film. Filmed in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, Vertov’s film presents the Soviet Union of the 1920s as a modern, industrious and creative society with everyday life transformed by technical innovation. Strike (1925, Sergei Eisenstein, 82 mins) 2pm, 12 November, Rio Cinema Eisenstein’s first fulllength feature film portrays a strike in Tsarist Russia. In the harsh and secretive prerevolutionary world, Bolsheviks agitate among the workers whilst police spies infiltrate their ranks as agents provocateurs. The strike is triggered by the suicide of a factory worker, falsely accused of theft by the manager. In the film, actors from the Proletkult Theatre perform alongside reallife Moscow factory workers in the crowd scenes. A milestone in cinema, Strike put Eisenstein’s pioneering montage theory into practice for the first time. Organised jointly with the London Socialist Film Co-op
THE CINEMAS
The Rio The Rio Cinema in Dalston is one of London’s oldest independent cinemas, having been founded in 1909 by Prussian immigrant Clara Ludski. In continual cinema use ever since, the Rio has always had a repertory based programme of independent and foreign language film. Its stunning art deco auditorium with stalls and circle seats over 400. In the 1970s it operated as part of the Tatler group and was a sister cinema to the Tatler Charing Cross Road which had a 100% Soviet film programme. The Rio remains a community run cinema and will launch a second screen this autumn. 107 Kingsland High St, London E8 2PB www.riocinema.org.uk 020 7241 9410
The Phoenix Built in 1910 and opened in 1912, the Phoenix is one of the oldest cinemas in the UK. Independent and not-for-profit, it has been operated by a charitable trust on behalf of the people of North London since 1985, after local residents joined forces to stop the sale of the cinema to property developers with the help of a grant from the GLC in one of its final acts. In 2000 the cinema received a Grade II listing, with English Heritage recognising the importance of the Phoenix’s original 1910 barrel-vaulted ceiling and the 1938 Mollo and Egan decorative wall panels. The Phoenix is committed to screening foreignlanguage and arthouse films and seeks to use its resources for the benefit of a wider population by encouraging the greatest possible access to film culture for for its diverse local communities. 52 High Rd, East Finchley, London N2 9PJ www.phoenixcinema.co.uk 020 8444 6789
Practising for a May Day demonstration 1936.
Still from The End of St Petersburg (1927, dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin).
Still from October (1928, dir. Sergei Eisenstein).
TICKETS
ÂŁ10/8 concession (standard rates apply for members of the London Socialist Film Co-op for jointly organised screenings) Available through host cinemas: www.riocinema.org.uk www.phoenixcinema.co.uk
Man With a Movie Camera (1929, dir. Dziga Vertov) film poster by Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg.
Russian Revolution Centenary Committee www.1917.org.uk E-mail: secretary@1917.org.uk @1917Centenary www.facebook.com/1917centenary
MARKING 100 YEARS SINCE THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
4 November 2017 10.00-18.00
The Russian Revolution Centenary Committee brings together labour movement, heritage and cultural organisations with the aim of informing debate about the Revolution’s continuing relevance to politics and society today.
TUC Congress House 23-28 Great Russell Street London WC1B 3LS
The Committee is organising an international conference in London this November featuring leading academics, politicians and trade unionists from Britain and around the world. Sessions include: • An Introduction to the Russian Revolution • The Impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain • Soviet Art and Film • The Russian Revolution and the Third World • Women and the Russian Revolution • The Russian Revolution’s Relevance in Today’s World
Tickets: £10/8 available at www.1917.org.uk Tel: 020 7253 1485 E-mail: secretary@1917.org.uk
Still from Battleship Potemkin (1925, dir. Sergei Eisenstein).
FESTIVAL ORGANISERS Organised by the Russian Revolution Centenary Committee with the support of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust with the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School, Platform Films, Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies and London Socialist Film Co-op. Brochure design and production: Phil Katz with Bella Rosa Katz.