Engineer Pright’s Project“Engineer Pright’s Project” (Proekt Inzhenera Praita, 1918) is the film debut of Lev Kuleshov (1899 – 1970). This work was tremendously important not only for the Russian cinema; it also became a milestone of the art of cinematography worldwide. This film introduced a specific method of film montage which later became universally known as “Soviet montage”. In spite of the fact that Kuleshov’s classical work had preceded many discoveries and inventions of Eisenstein and Vertov, his films are less known outside Russia. Among his pupils were Vsevolod Pudovkin (“Mother” - “Mat”) and Boris Barnet (“The Secret Agent s Heroic Act” – “Podvig razvedchika”). In the introduction to Kuleshov’s book “The Art of Cinema” (1928) his students wrote: “He has carried us into the open sea on his shoulders. We make films – he has made cinema”. “Engineer Pright’s Project” is well known among film scholars, but the general public and film lovers are practically unfamiliar with this unique work. The material contains a lot of puzzles which had to be solved during the course of reconstruction carried out by N. Izvolov in 2002. The film has been a subject of numerous interpretations, commentaries and scholarly analyses. This is precisely why we have chosen “Engineer Pright’s Project” to demonstrate a new method of commenting upon film on a DVD.
NEW: “Engineer Pright’s Project” is now available in a Russian/German version at absolutMedien:
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