View source for Kino-Pravda

{{Short description|Series of newsreels that captured early Soviet-era daily life}}
{{Italic title}}
[[File:1925. Kino-Pravda 23.webm|thumb|''Kino-Pravda No.23'' (1925)]]
'''''Kino-Pravda''''' ({{langx|ru|Кино-Правда|translation=Film Truth}}) was a series of 23 [[newsreel]]s by [[Dziga Vertov]], [[Elizaveta Svilova]], and [[Mikhail Kaufman]] launched in June 1922. Vertov referred to the twenty-three issues of ''Kino-Pravda'' as the first work by him where his future cinematic methods can be observed.<ref name="leyda">{{Cite book|url=https://archive.org/stream/kinohistoryofrus00jayl#page/161/mode/2up/|publisher=[[Allen & Unwin|George Allen & Unwin]]|author=Jay Leyda|author-link=Jay Leyda|title=Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film|year=1960|pages=161–162}}</ref>

==Overview==
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.<ref name="leyda" />

The episodes of ''Kino-Pravda'' usually did not include reenactments or stagings (one exception is the segment about the [[1922 Moscow Trial of Socialist Revolutionaries|trial of the Socialist 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 [[cinematography]] is simple, functional, and unelaborated. 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 Socialist Revolutionaries; one story shows starvation in the nascent [[Marxism|Marxist]] state. [[Propaganda|Propagandistic]] 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 intended an active relationship with his audience in the series &mdash; in the final segment he includes contact information &mdash; but by the fourteenth episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as "insane".<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P7l-JtrXdn8C&pg=PA112|publisher=[[Routledge]]|editor=Richard Taylor, [[Ian Christie (film scholar)|Ian Christie]]|title=The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents|year=1994|pages=112–114|isbn=9780415052986}}</ref>

The term "kino pravda", though it translates from [[Russian language|Russian]] as "film truth", is not to be confused with the [[cinéma vérité]] movement in [[documentary film]], which also translates as "film truth". Cinéma vérité was similarly marked by the intention of capturing reality "warts and all", but became popular in [[France]] in the 1960s.

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==External links==
{{commons category|Kino-Pravda}}
*{{cite web|url=https://vertov.filmmuseum.at/en/film_online/kino-pravda|title=Digitization of all 22 surviving issues of Kino-Pravda by the Austrian Film Museum}}
*{{youtube|q-UbfUefHqE|Kino-Pravda No.21 (1925)}}

{{Dziga Vertov}}


[[Category:1920s Soviet films]]
[[Category:1920s Russian-language films]]
[[Category:Russian-language documentary films]]
[[Category:Soviet black-and-white films]]
[[Category:Soviet documentary films]]
[[Category:Soviet silent films]]
[[Category:Newsreels]]
[[Category:Articles containing video clips]]

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