The talk and screening of Viktor Turin’s documentary Turksib (1929) are part of the public program for VOKS kinema Research Laboratory.
Viktor Turin’s documentary about the construction of a railway from Siberia to Central Asia is rarely recalled in any conversation about Soviet film of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Its maker is much less known than Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub or Vladimir Erofeev.
However, in its time, this documentary was considered an important achievement of the Soviet film industry, and more great works were expected from Turin. Having emigrated to the USA in his youth, Turin had had an opportunity to work “with Griffith himself” (as they used to say in the Soviet Union about anyone who had been to Hollywood) and managed to bring the excitement of fiction into documentary filmmaking. Close in this respect to Vertov, whose Man with a Movie Camera was to confirm documentary film as a priority, Turin however followed his own path. This is why Turksib was among the avant-garde films that the Soviet Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) used in their work with Western audiences. In Turksib, the freshness of the form met an optimistic message, convincing the audience of the success of the first five-year plan. Later, reflecting on the history of documentary filmmaking, director Sergei Yutkevich put Turin’s work in a category of its own, arguing that the form Turin found to present his material “emotionally captivated the viewer and helped them make grand generalizations.”
The talk on Turksib will be followed by the screening of the film to a cassette set by Kasya Ekstovich.
Turksib
Director: Viktor Turin
USSR, 1929. 54 min.
12+
