Anniversary of the Revolution

The film tells the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was made for the first anniversary of the revolution. It opened in Soviet Russia on the seventh of November 1918. The director Dziga Vertov was twenty two at the time. Part of the material comes from his own newsreels. The account opens with the February events in Petrograd. It then moves to October and to the civil war. The film was openly made as propaganda. For years only a twelve minute stretch of it survived. The researcher Nikolai Izvolov found the whole film in an archive. The place he found it was the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive. The work was put back together in 2018. The restored version was shown in Amsterdam that same year. The screening was given with live music. The hundred and twenty two minute silent film is Vertov’s first feature. The Russian production was finished in 1918.