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A Sixth Part of the World

Directed by Dziga Vertov

Bed and Sofa

Directed by Abram Room
Live Piano Accompaniment by Donald Sosin
Screening on Film
$10 Special Event Tickets
  • A Sixth Part of the World (Shestaia Chast Mira)

    Directed by Dziga Vertov.
    USSR, 1926, 35mm, black & white, silent, 60 min.
    22 fps
    Russian intertitles with English subtitles.

Another commission, this one to promote Soviet products, a means to the modernization of the USSR. While the film drew criticism for its ample use of poetic intertitles, others praised not only its inventive approach to the rhythm between the lyrical text and image, but Vertov's creation of a cinema symphony whose extra-ordinarily daring and complex montage connects documentary footage from across the territories in a paean to its peoples and landscapes. For Vertov, it was "more than a film… already the next stage after the concept of 'cinema' itself." Revolutionary in its form and ideological content, A Sixth Part of the World was also, for the Kinoks, "the complete victory of facts" over Hollywood's factory of dreams

  • Bed and Sofa (Tretya Meschans-Kaya)

    Directed by Abram Room.
    With Nikolai Batalov, Vladmir Fogel.
    USSR, 1927, 35mm, black & white, silent, 80 min.
    20 fps
    Russian intertitles with English subtitles.

Bed and Sofa tells the simple story of a domestic ménage à trois – simple, that is, until the female member of the trio discovers she is pregnant. Once believed lost, the film was rediscovered in the 1970s and has since become regarded as a Russian masterpiece of the silent era, notable for its unusual frankness, for the extraordinary fluidity of its camera work in a confined set, and for the actors' natural performances.

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