In autumn 1932, a year and a half after the release of Vertov’s Enthusiasm, Shub filmed a documentary with direct sound, K.Sh.E. – Komsomol – Shef Elektrifikatsii, to celebrate the major achievement of the first five-year-plan, as well as the possibilities of sound cinema. She edited industrial sounds, music and speech in various languages and accents – Russian, Armenian, American, Ukrainian. The Prologue, which echoes Vertov, exhibits the tools of cinema in “a moment of sound filming in Moscow”: a theremin, a large blimped camera, an orchestra, the image of the soundtrack on the film strip. Film is followed by broadcasting, in which English, German and French speakers praise the fiveyear- plan, which had been completed in only four years.
In an electric lightbulb factory in Leningrad, worker Kira Paramonova talks about her comrades and assembly- line work. In a big hall, turbines (whose name plates indicate that they are American-made) are assembled for the Dneprostroi construction site. We see and hear the machines, and workers at rest and at work. Tribute is paid to the American technicians. Through a desert landscape scattered with ruins, the film moves to the Dzoraget dam in Armenia. Speeches are made in Armenian and Russian. Novelist Marietta Shaginian (filmed in a studio) praises the dam. An American family rests on the bank of Dnieper, listening to music on their portable record- player. Finally, it’s the inauguration of the giant Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (October 1932). In the presence of Mikhail Kalinin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, officials give speeches, including Colonel Cooper who was responsible for numerous dams in the US. The last sequence in a machine hall shows sparks flowing between the slip rings, a promise of what the future will bring.

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz