Between 1922 and 1925, Dziga Vertov created the newsreel Kino-Pravda, which literally translates as ‘film-truth’, but is primarily a reference to Lenin’s daily newspaper “Pravda”. A screen newspaper or a cinema daily was exactly what Vertov had in mind. Yet, a total of 23 issues appeared irregularly and were not widely distributed. Vertov did take the production of Kino-Pravda seriously and used it to develop his ideas on film and film language. The first issues were still similar to previous newsreels in structure and style, but throughout the later issues, Kino-Pravda begins to show experimentation and the development of another idiom in the use of existing footage, composition and rhythm, as well as the constructivist design of the intertitles. Issue No.7, of which only a fragment has survived, does not yet exhibit much of these tendencies. It covers a wide variety of topics, ranging from political subjects such as the trial of a socialist revolutionary, to the communal efforts of rebuilding the burned-down Siberian town of Taseevo and the leveling of the Khodynka airfield, as well as images of summer recreation at the seaside in Tuapse and views of foreign places and cultures such as the marketplace and the mosque of Kabul. Twenty-two of the 23 issues of Kino-Pravda have been preserved – some only as fragments – and are accessible online through vertov.film-museum.at.

Janneke van Dalen