A silent film was released after 100 years

Theater News Base: The silent film The History of the Civil War, directed by the famous Soviet documentary filmmaker Ziga Vertov, was screened for the first time in a hundred years in an Amsterdam cinema.

The screening was part of the current edition of the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, or IDFA, which is a hangout for professional documentarians and documentary film enthusiasts.

The documentary History of the Civil War (1921) was first seen in 1921 by 600 members of the Communist International and then disappeared, leaving only written versions of the film available all these years.

The film was discovered a few years ago and reconstructed by cinema historian Nikolai Izolov. Almost all the scenes in the film were reconstructed, except for some scenes related to Stalin, which for some reason were never found.

Another of Vertov’s films, Anniversary of the Revolution, suffered a similar fate, but was eventually found and remade in 2018 by Isolov. The film was also screened at the IDFA festival. According to Izolov, about 90% of the films of the silent cinema era are lost.

The History of Civil War is a documentary about the war between the Bolsheviks and the White Counter-Revolutionary Army in Russia. This documentary is propaganda for the Bolsheviks and depicts the years when the group sought to defeat the internal resistance against the revolution. In this documentary, you can see scenes of street fighting and military courts and trenches.

The film will be released in Moscow this spring and will be screened at next year’s Venice Film Festival in Italy.