Donbass: Yesterday & Today (Russian Propaganda Film)

Year Published: 1974

Complete Record: Opens zooming in on a map of Eastern Ukraine/Southern Russia (east of the Caspian Sea, near the confluence of the Don and Volga rivers). This is a major industrial region called Donbass (or the Donets Basin). Views of the Eastern Steppes of the Ukraine, with explanatory voice over throughout. Panning shots along an oil refinery. Aerial shots of a city. The camera follows a moving car as it heads for a tunnel. Cut to a photograph of the film maker Dziga Vertov and a montage of black & white clips from his documentary ‘Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass’ (1931). Footage of workers toiling in factories whilst fulfilling the first Five Year Plan. Avant Garde shots of coal mining and peasants being trained for work. Excellent shot of a line of peasants practicing on their knees with pick axes. Also working underground. Very moody stuff! Some time lapse shots of the sky and clouds over a coal mine pit head. Men shoveling coal into a furnace and a man works with red hot wire. Choreographed shots. Experimental. Also features what looks like even older footage of an industrial complex. Special effects are used to make men hammering a spike into the ground look giant sized, whilst a train passes below their feet. This is fantastic stuff! Color footage of a man climbing an electrical pylon and electric cable being laid. Shots of a huge power plant and massive control rooms. Views shot around the urban areas of the Donbass (interesting Soviet street life in the 1970s but low key). Man climbs a huge crane. Lots of large diggers working in a quarry. Another sequence taken from Vertov’s ‘Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass’, featuring men working underground in a coal mine (poor picture quality in places). A painter/miner paints outdoors and in a studio. Views of workers in an amateur painters studio. More urban shots taken around the Donbass. Footage cut with Soviet statues and CU of people’s faces. Also of Soviet soldiers returning home to be greeted by their overwrought parents in 1945. Troops rebuilding the ruins of the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Interiors of a large furnace plant. Lots of molten steel being smelted. Ingots of molten steel moving along conveyors. A jazzy score is used to edit this sequence of steel being produced in the steel works. Lots of CU of impassive workers faces. Shots taken around the Kramatorsk Metallurgical Works. A huge molten piece of metal is manipulated by workers as it comes out of the furnace. Montage of workers pulling levers. Views of students walking towards a university. Interior of the Donets branch of the Soviet Academy of Science. Suspiciously attractive young women working in a laboratory. Shots of the waste heaps next to quarries. Diggers moving top soil. An old man digs a hole and CU of him planting a sapling. CU of a local man in his dark room, developing photos. A look at the photos he took in the area over the years. Kind of worthy and dull. Lots of soppy music and sunsets. POV shot from a combine harvester, collecting the harvest of grain. Diggers working on the bed of the new Dnieper-Donbass Canal (huge area). Uplifting montage of irrigation, farming projects, the canal being built and fountains (?). Young boys float and send off a model boat into a river. Time lapse footage of the modern Donbass area, edited with Vertov’s 1931 black & white footage from ‘Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass’. Includes electrifying scenes of 3 men using the same specially adapted hammer to smash the ground with. Interesting camera work. Also cut with modern Soviet workers carrying red flags, filing past a huge picture of Lenin. End credits