Viktor LISTOV. Documentaries in the epoch of dialogues and absence of species.

Reflections over improper tend of development of documentaries, since the modes of fixing with the aid of cinema lag behind possibilities of world reflection with other ways and means. Mass-media history is being seen as a road from a healthy informational hunger (a book) towards unhealthy engrossing (TV, cinema, video).

 

Nikolai IZVOLOV. Alexandre Medvedkin and traditions of Russian cinema. Notes on working out of the poetics.

«We have probably were too fast in bringing our train into a blind alley». From correspondence between Alexandre Medvedkin and Chris Marker.

«Emergency Rescue». The fate of Medvedkin’s animation.

All Medvedkin. Filmography.

A cinema-train. Catalogue of films.

A set of stuff, devoted to the classic Soviet film-maker, includes an article on his creation, letters written by him and his French friend and follower Chris Marker in the 60s; an official document of 1949, putting an end to Medvedkin’s attempt  at working in animation, and a complete catalogue of his documentaries and feature films (with a unique experience of a cinema-train).

 

Oleg ARONSON. Vague time. Montage and documentality of cinema.

Specifics of montage in documentaries. The author argues, that due to cutting, oriented at spectacle, documentality becomes a pure abstraction.

 

Eisenstein as a documentalist. Republications.

Straight contacts of Sergei Eisenstein with documentaries are minimal. Anyhow there is a line in his creation, bound up with «documentalism», which actualised itself  not on film, but on paper, which is specified by the sketches—WAR, ALMA-ATA and TEN YEARS LATER, written in 1941–42. Here his gift for poignant observation and mastership in using of everyday details as imagery are noticible.

«Notes to an Abkhasian docement». Letters of S.Eisenstein to E.Shub.

Letters (one from May 1928 written on vacation in Gagry, another mailed from Mexico on December 1930) are important documents, vitally contributing to the portrayal and biography of Eisenstein.

 

Hans-Joachim SCHLEGEL. Transcendency of authenticity. On documentaries by Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexandre Sokurov.

The German film historian and theoretician when speaking about Tarkovsky’s influence upon creation of a number of East and Central European film-makers, including Alexandre Sokurov, argues, that Sokurov’s conception of the documental and authentical develops the central Tarkovsky’s idea of the moulding time.

 

«Maybe, You are … one of the letters of the cinema ABC». Artavazd Peleshian speaking with Alexandre Sokurov and Hans-Joachim Schlegel, Stuttgart, 1995.

Conversation taken place in Spring 1955 during Stuttgart’s International Symposium «Subversive camera». The participants strive to define cinematic and theoretical innovations of the maker of «We», «Seasons», «Our century», etc.

 

Alexandre Deryabin. «The fruit is ripen, and should be taken…» The sources of Vertov’s masterpiece.

From the history of birth of «A man with a camera». Newly founds.

Ziegfrid  Krakauer. «A man with a camera». Review of 1929.

«Opposite of revolutionare». A letter from Hans Richter to Dziga Vertov about International Congress of independent cinema in La Sarraz, 1929.

A set of stuff, devoted to «A man with a camera», includes script plans of the intended reels, which became the source of the Vertov’s masterpiece of 1929; an essay of a noted German film historian, and a letter from the German friend and colleague to the Soviet film-maker.

 

A.KONOPLEVA-SHUB. Alexei Mikhailovich Gan.

 «…My ilness is of another mode». Letters from Alexei Gan to Esfir Shub.

A letter from Esfir Shub to Alexei Gan

Materials on Alexei Gan include memoirs of Esfir Shub’s daughter about her step-father, and Gan’s letters to Esfir Shub, disclosing their differences concerning development of domestic cinema of the 20s and presenting hard attempts at self identification of one of the founders of Constuctivism under post-revolutionary regime. The last letter from Esfir Shub to Alexei Gan

Is also published.

 

Creative vacation—unintended farewell. Letters by Joris Ivens 1935–36

Letters of the well-known Dutch cinematographer sent to Moscow to his friend Hans Rodenberg, one of the heads of Mezhrabpomfilm stds, and Soviet cinema industry menagers B.Babitsky and B.Shumyatsky as an important page of his director’s biography contributing to the general panorama of the epoch in this country.

 

Nikolai PROZOROVSKY. Non-fiction. Chapters from Memoirs. Final instalment

The second part of the memoirs written in the mid80s by the veteran cameraman, who has worked from the 20s in features and then in chronicles and cultural films. First instalment see KZ N 48.