Filming the Revolution: Ukrainian Avant-garde Films 1929-1931

This film is an undeservedly forgotten avant-garde masterpiece by Mikhail Kaufman, the brother and collaborator of the great Dziga Vertov. Lost for decades in the Ukrainian archives, this bold film experiment was rediscovered only in 2015. The international premier of the restored film took place in London in 2017. The film is about the movement of the “twenty-five thousand” – workers sent out by the Communist Party in 1929 to encourage peasants to take active part in collectivization.

Mikhail Kaufman and Dziga Vertov parted ways after filming Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Kaufman used part of the footage they shot during the work on that film for his début movie In Spring (1929). An Unprecedented Campaign is his second work, created in an atmosphere of mounting reaction and film critics’ hostile attitudes towards the “aestheticization of machines” and the “non-fictionality” of the film.

Mikhail Kaufman
An Unprecedented Campaign (1930) – 71 min
Original with English subtitles

Introduction: Ivan Kozlenko

Ivan Kozlenko is Director of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv, the Ukrainian national cinemateque