Kino-Pravda ("Film Truth") was a
newsreelA newsreel was a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs and entertainment for millions of moviegoers...
series by
Dziga VertovDziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories paved the way to Cinéma vérité style of documentary moviemaking....
, Elizaveta Svilova, and
Mikhail KaufmanMikhail Abramovich Kaufman was a Russian cinematographer and photographer. He was the older brother of notable filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Boris Kaufman....
.
Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of
kino-pravda, or
film-truth, through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized together, showed a deeper truth which could not be seen with the naked eye. In the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first.
The episodes of "Kino-Pravda" usually did not include reenactments or stagings (one exception is the segment about the trial of the Social Revolutionaries: the scenes of the selling of the newspapers on the streets and the people reading the papers in the trolley were both staged for the camera).
Kino-Pravda ("Film Truth") was a
newsreelA newsreel was a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs and entertainment for millions of moviegoers...
series by
Dziga VertovDziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories paved the way to Cinéma vérité style of documentary moviemaking....
, Elizaveta Svilova, and
Mikhail KaufmanMikhail Abramovich Kaufman was a Russian cinematographer and photographer. He was the older brother of notable filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Boris Kaufman....
.
Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of
kino-pravda, or
film-truth, through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized together, showed a deeper truth which could not be seen with the naked eye. In the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first.
The episodes of "Kino-Pravda" usually did not include reenactments or stagings (one exception is the segment about the trial of the Social Revolutionaries: the scenes of the selling of the newspapers on the streets and the people reading the papers in the trolley were both staged for the camera). The
cinematographyCinematography , is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for the cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...
is simple, functional, unelaborate — perhaps a result of Vertov's lack of interest in either "beauty" or "art". Twenty-three issues of the series were produced over a period of three years; each issue lasted about twenty minutes and usually covered three topics. The stories were typically descriptive, not narrative, and included vignettes and exposés, showing for instance the renovation of a trolley system, the organization of farmers into communes, and the trial of Social Revolutionaries; one story shows starvation in the nascent
MarxistMarxism is the political philosophy and economic worldview based upon a materialist interpretation of history, a Marxist analysis of capitalism, a theory of social change, and an atheist view of human liberation derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; three primary aspects of...
state.
PropagandisticRevolutionary propaganda means dissemination of revolutionary ideas.While the term propaganda bears a mostly negative connotation in modern English language, this did not exist in the early 20th century, when the word "propaganda" was first coined...
tendencies are also present, but with more subtlety, in the episode featuring the construction of an airport: one shot shows the former Czar's tanks helping prepare a foundation, with an intertitle reading "Tanks on the labor front".
Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series — in the final segment he includes contact information — but by the fourteenth episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as "insane".
The term
kino pravda, though it translates as "film truth", is not to be confused with the
cinéma véritéCinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics...
movement in
documentary filmDocumentary film is a broad category of visual expressions that is based on the attempt, in one fashion or another, to "document" reality. Although "documentary film" originally referred to movies shot on film stock, it has subsequently expanded to include video and digital productions that can...
, which also translates as "film truth". Cinéma vérité was similarly marked by the intention of capturing reality "warts and all", but became popular in
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
in the 1960s.