Ken & Beth

LATE ADDITION to the SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL!
Beth Custer and Ken Winokur will premiere their score to the trailer for Vertov’s THE ELEVENTH YEAR
Sunday, July 21 before the screening of THE WEAVERS at 6:00pm!

Ken Winokur of the Alloy Orchestra made an amazing discovery while the orchestra was traveling in the Ukraine—a two-minute trailer for Dziga Vertov’s THE ELEVENTH YEAR, created by Aleksander Rodchenko! As a special gift to San Francisco, he and Beth Custer will perform the World Premiere of their score accompanying Vertov’s trailer. The 35mm print of THE ELEVENTH YEAR trailer is courtesy of EYE International, The Netherlands.

Winokur describes his find:
In May of this year, while traveling in the Ukraine with Alloy Orchestra, I had the great pleasure of visiting the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre (the Ukrainian National Film Archive). Located in a building that once, during the Soviet Era, housed a massive film processing lab, the archive has rapidly developed into an impressive collection of films, particularly films of the Ukraine. The curators at the archive seem to have a special interest in silent films, and also run the Mute Nights, Silent Film festival, every June in Odessa Ukraine.

Shortly before leaving the archive, curator Stas Menzelevskyi, beckoned me to look at a film he had on his computer. He explained that it was a trailer for the Dziga Vertov film The THE ELEVENTH YEAR, and that it is believed to be animated and directed by Aleksander Rodchenko, a noted graphic designer and one of the founders of the Constructivist movement in the Soviet Union.

I was stunned! This 2 minute film is like nothing I have ever seen from the silent era. Swirling circles, and dancing stick figures—the film looks more like something from the summer of love in San Francisco than a film from the 1920s.

Upon returning the US, I started talking to SFSFF about showing this short gem. My colleague, Beth Custer of the Clubfoot Orchestra (who preceded Alloy in composing new scores for silent films), and I decided that we would collaborate on a score. We decided to do it as a duet using traditional instruments, found percussion and sampled background tapes. Once again the Dovzhenko Centre came to our aid, sending us a digital version of the film to work from, and permitting us to sample the music concrete score of Enthusiasm (Dziga Vertov’s first sound film), which the Dovzhenko had recently released as a DVD.