Kumu Documentary: The Eleventh Year
Location: Kumu auditorium
Dir Dziga Vertov
Cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman
Ukraine 1928, 59 min
Silent film, with added music by Andrii Kozhukhar
Introduction by Eva Näripea
The Eleventh Year is the first of three avant-garde films made by Dziga Vertov and his brother, the cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, in Ukraine at the VUFKU Kyiv Film Studio.
Dedicated to the success of the first five years of development in Donbas, the film tells the story of the accelerated industrial modernisation of eastern Ukraine, which resulted in the transformation of an agricultural country into an industrial one. The Eleventh Year is Vertov’s first experiment in implementing his programme of developing a specific film language, separate from the language of theatre and literature, in which the camera directly captured the raw material of life. This film language was fully implemented by Vertov in his next Ukrainian film, Man With a Film Camera (1929).
The sound background for the film has been specially created by Andrii Kozhukhar.
Andrii Kozhukhar is an electronic music producer from Nova Kakhovka, Ukraine, and a part of the southern Ukrainian experimental/industrial scene, best known under the moniker Kojoohar. His music spans various post-industrial genres, from ambient and synthpop to power electronics and noise, and has been released by such labels as Quasi Pop (Ukraine), Ant-Zen (Germany) and Repartiseraren (Sweden). Andrii occasionally performs live but mainly focuses on studio work and collaborative projects with other artists, primarily Kadaitcha.
The music presented (Akhluth) is a joint work with another Ukrainian artist, Mykola Yosypenko. It manifests soft dark ambiance, seasoned with occasional field recordings, over-driven feedback and smeared kraut rhythms.
The screening is a part of the public programme of the exhibition Fururomarennia. Ukraine and Avant-Garde in the Kumu Art Museum, which provides insight into the radical attempts and dreams of modernisation of Ukrainian art, culture and society in the 1920s and 1930s.
