Restoration of Lost Film Heritage on the Example of Dziga Vertov’s Film Anniversary of the Revolution

Abstract

In 2018, the author of this article discovered in the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive and restored Dziga Vertov’s debut film Anniversary of the Revolution (1918), which film historians had considered lost up until then. The event aroused great interest among the press, the festival audience, the student audience, and the academic community in both Vertov himself and the film. After numerous screenings of the film in Russia and abroad, a large number of interviews appeared which touched upon various aspects of Dziga Vertov’s life and work, film storage practices, archival research methods, the principles of film restoration, the ethics of the researcher’s intrusion into other people’s material, as well as the financial and technical sides of the matter. The questions in those interviews were often repeated. In this article, the author systematizes and summarizes the information in the answers to the questions, scattered across individual materials. Why did this film disappear at some point? Why was the film not stored complete? How was the restoration of the film going? What is this film, the first work of the world-famous documentary filmmaker? The value of the film is that it provides a new visual source for the study of Russian history, as well as makes an important contribution to the study of the history of Russian and world documentary filmmaking.

Keywords

• dziga vertov
• documentary films
• anniversary of the revolution
• history of cinema
• theory of cinema
• film archives
• soviet cinema