NEW SCORE – WORLD PREMIERE
Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year
Psychedelic Cinema Orchestra (PCO) will premiere their new score for The Eleventh Year by Dziga Vertov at the Somerville Theatre.
This dynamic film is a masterpiece of Ukrainian cinema. The film has renewed relevance today. As part of this film tour, PCO screenings will raise funds to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. The group will donate a large percentage of the proceeds to Ukrainian humanitarian relief agencies.
Dziga Vertov (best known as director of Man with a Movie Camera 1929) was born and raised in Ukraine. He retained an allegiance to this Soviet republic throughout his life, and did extensive filming there – releasing several films on the subject. The Eleventh Year was released in 1927 and was his last film before Man with a Movie Camera.
The film traces the Ukraine’s progress 10 years after the Russian Revolution. It celebrates the working people of Ukraine, their labor, new technology, the exploitation of natural resources, their strong military and the people’s enduring relationship to the land.
According to the Dovzhenko Center (the Ukrainian film archive), “Dziga Vertov said, ‘The Eleventh Year was written directly by the movie camera, without the mediation of a script, and that the camera had replaced the writer’s pen’. This allowed Vertov to claim that he had invented a pure cinematic language (deeply socialist at the same time), in which the camera deals directly with the raw material of the facts.”
Psychedelic Cinema Orchestra is a four man ensemble which composes contemporary scores for silent films. The group is led by Ken Winokur, former director, composer and percussionist for Alloy Orchestra. PCO began in 2013 with a score for Ken Brown’s 1969 film Psychedelic Cinema (hence the orchestra’s name) and has since scored and performed to the films, South – Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition, Hitchcock’s The Lodger, and several short films.
The group has toured extensively in the United States (AFI Silver, MASS MoCA, Real Artways, Shalin Liu Performance Center, Somerville Theatre, Cabot Theater, Cornell University, Hamilton College etc.) and in the Balkans (Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Montenegro).
Psychedelic Cinema Orchestra is:
Ken Winokur – PCO director, percussion, clarinet (Alloy Orchestra, Concussion Ensemble, Lookie Lookie)
Jonathan LaMaster – violin, guitar, bass, electronics (performed with Elliott Sharp, Damo Suzuki, Cul de Sac)
Russ Gershon – keyboard (Director of Either/Orchestra, Lookie Lookie, Listen to This, Russ Gershon Trio)
P. Andrew Willis – guitar viol, electronics (Composer for many films including numerous for American Experience, performer with Trinary System, The Web/Azuza Inkh)
