Three Songs About Lenin

Three Songs About Lenin
Directed by	Dziga Vertov
Written by	Dziga Vertov
Cinematography	Mark Magidson Bentsion Monastyrsky Dmitri Surensky
Distributed by	Amkino Corporation (USA, 1934)
Release date	1934 (1934)
Running time	57 minutes
Country	Soviet Union
Language	Silent film

Three Songs about Lenin

Three Songs About Lenin (Russian: Три песни о Ленине) is a 1934 documentary sound film by Ukrainian-Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. It is based on three admiring songs sung by anonymous people in Soviet Russia about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It is made up of 3 episodes and is 57 minutes long.

In 1969 it was re-edited by Elizaveta Svilova, Ilya Kopalin and Serafima Pumpyanskaya as part of the 1970 Lenin centenary.

The songs in the film

The film opens with some texts on Lenin, and then continue with three episodes. The first episode opens with the music from the second movement of Beethoven's piano sonata Pathétique, adapted for orchestra. It then moves to the first song My face was in a gloomy prison. The first episode lasts about 19 minutes. The second episode opens with the third movement (funeral march) of Chopin's piano sonata in b-flat minor, adapted for orchestra. In the middle section of the second song, Vertov uses Wagner's Siegfried's Funeral March in Götterdämmerung, the last installment of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The third song In a big city made of stone, where Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers is used.

Home media

This film was restored and released in home media (BD and DVD) by Flicker Alley and Eureka.

External links

• Three Songs About Lenin at IMDb
• Three Songs About Lenin is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive