When I was at Dovzhenko, somebody came into
the office I was working in, with this fantastic
camera. It’s like the one Dziga Vertov
used in Man With a Movie Camera, Tania,
who I was working with, said it still works.
I was watching Ukrainian early films, Vertov’s
brother - Michail Kaufman made a
beautiful visual, lyrical poem, a visual,
film poem, called In Spring, filmed and
shot in Kyiv, the work is beautiful, I
love a Man With The Movie Camera too, the
idea of the city, fragments, understanding
space on film, it reminds me of
Finisterre, 24 hours in London, the film by
St. Etienne. And then, in 1929, suddenly,
Kaufman was making Soviet Propoganda, I
watched a film about pro-collectivisation.
I’m still torn, the work has such lyricism
it’s beautiful, artistically, really powerful,
and the vision too, it’wonderful. And then
the reality. The film goes too over-the-
top-suddenly, somebody who works in the
archive told me, the studios were taken
over by Moscow, and suddenly, the executives
changed, and quickly, and very easily, the
ethos and the focus of the studios output changed
too.
