Director: Dziga Vertov
Year: 1928
Run-time: 52 min
Source: Youtube
"In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people" - Dziga Vertov
In 1928, Stalin's Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization began. The plan ended in chaos four years later with massive famine - an estimated 3.3 to 7.5 million dead. This makes The Eleventh Year, a stark and strange propaganda film presumably commissioned to sell the program to Ukraine by showcasing innovations in machinery, one of the eeriest and most haunting films on this list, even without the industrial techno soundtrack added in a version that I found on Youtube.
Vertov is well-known among cinephiles, and his film Man With a Movie Camera made it into the top ten of the most recent Sight and Sound poll, but information on this particular film is hard to come by. There are some incredibly bizarre images in it, feeling like a darker version of Brazil - in particular, a peasant woman standing on a mining conveyor belt, walking among the emerging rocks while striking them with a sledgehammer, or a pack of miners crowded onto a frighteningly rickety elevator.
This is the dehumanizing image of communism that became something of a cliche in the west. I can't figure out without more research what exactly Vertov was getting at here, but it does feel like for him, there was an unusual fascination with the "unerring ways of electricity".
Year: 1928
Run-time: 52 min
Source: Youtube
"In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people" - Dziga Vertov
In 1928, Stalin's Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization began. The plan ended in chaos four years later with massive famine - an estimated 3.3 to 7.5 million dead. This makes The Eleventh Year, a stark and strange propaganda film presumably commissioned to sell the program to Ukraine by showcasing innovations in machinery, one of the eeriest and most haunting films on this list, even without the industrial techno soundtrack added in a version that I found on Youtube.
Vertov is well-known among cinephiles, and his film Man With a Movie Camera made it into the top ten of the most recent Sight and Sound poll, but information on this particular film is hard to come by. There are some incredibly bizarre images in it, feeling like a darker version of Brazil - in particular, a peasant woman standing on a mining conveyor belt, walking among the emerging rocks while striking them with a sledgehammer, or a pack of miners crowded onto a frighteningly rickety elevator.
This is the dehumanizing image of communism that became something of a cliche in the west. I can't figure out without more research what exactly Vertov was getting at here, but it does feel like for him, there was an unusual fascination with the "unerring ways of electricity".
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