Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas ( Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa ) ( The Symphony of the Don Basin )

Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas (DVD) (*)

~~$48.99~~ $42.97

Original Title: Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa
Alternate Title: The Symphony of the Don Basin
Language Selections:
English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )
English ( Subtitles )
German ( Subtitles )
Russian ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )

Product Origin/Format:
Germany ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
208 min

Aspect Ratio:
Fullscreen

Special Features:
2-DVD Set
Interactive Menu
Scene Access
Black & White
Remastered

Movie filmed in 1931 and produced in:
Soviet Union ( Russia, Eastern Europe )

Directed By:
Dziga Vertov

Written By:
Dziga Vertov

Actors:
Dziga Vertov

Synopsis:

Dziga Vertov's Entuziazm is considered a masterpiece of early sound film and of Soviet avant-garde cinema. Dealing with the Five Year Plan of the late 1920s, it was praised by artists like Charlie Chaplin, was subsequently forgotten, and rediscovered by the avant-garde movement of the 1960s. This edition presents the film, for the first time on DVD, in two versions: the print preserved in the former Soviet Union's Gosfilmofond as well as Peter Kubelka's fascinating restoration which - by re-syncing the image and sound - allows the viewer to experience what Vertov considered the new language of sound cinema. In Restoring Entuziazm, Peter Kubelka - filmmaker and co-founder of the Austrian Film Museum - demonstrates the principles of his restoration work und discusses Vertov's concepts of cinema. The Extras section presents two more rare documents from the Austrian Film Museum's Vertov collection.

Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas, Vertov's paean to the Soviet first Five-Year Plan for economic development (1928-32), clearly has a "three-movement" form. Beginning with an overture on the elimination of all the old detritus impeding full socialist construction (particularly religion and alcoholism), the film moves into a middle section that passes through many of the stages of heavy industrial production to culminate in a final movement, where the products of industrialization flow back to the USSR (most notably to the countryside) and are celebrated. The film is classicly Vertovian in its reflection upon its own constructed nature. Like Man with a Movie Camera, Enthusiasm seems to begin twice: the music we hear (and watch) being heard in the film's first shot is later repeated, with the woman auditor replaced by a male conductor in a radio studio. The production, transmission, organization and audition of sound enter our own conscious reception of the film. Thus Enthisiasm is a three-levelled film, with the audience's auditory experience, the film as a sound-image construct, and the documentary character of the film's basic materials all co-present and woven together as part of a reflexive texture remarkable at this early date in the history of sound film, and inspirational for many later experimenters, including Peter Kubelka and Richard Serra.

Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa) - UdSSR 1930 - Directed by: Dziga Vertov - Photographed by: Boris Cejtlin, K. Kualev - Edited by: Elisaveta Svilova - Music by: Nikolai Timofeev - Sound by: Pjotr Shtro - Produced by: Ukrainfilm - Premiere: April 2, 1931
Entuziazm (restored version) 1930 (1972), 65'
Entuziazm (unrestored) 1930, 65'
Peter Kubelka: Restoring Entuziazm 2005, 65'
Vertov filmed in person 1920-30, 1'
Vertov Exhibition Vienna 1974, 12'

This product was added to our catalog on Wednesday 22 June, 2011.

Customers who bought this product also purchased

Cousin, cousine (1975) (DVD)	American Dreams: Lost and Found / Landscape Suicide - 2-DVD Set (DVD)	House of Pleasure (1952) (Blu-Ray)
The Joyless Street / The Other Eye - 2-DVD Set (DVD)	The Story of the Fox (DVD)	Fragments of Kubelka - 2-DVD Set (DVD)