Unprecedented Campaign / Nebuvalyi pokhid / Nechuvanyi pokhid

Unprecedented Campaign is a constructivist documentary film about the “25-thousanders” movement – workers sent by the Communist party in 1929 to develop the countryside. The film was shot at three locations – one of the largest collective farms of its time, Hihant, meaning “gigant”, at the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, and on the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.

Unprecedented Campaign was the last work of the Kaufman brothers in Ukrainian film studios. The creative paths of Mikhail Kaufman and Dziga Vertov diverged after Man with a Movie Camera (1929). From some of the footage shot, Mikhail edited his own film In Spring (1929). Unprecedented Campaign was his next work, created in an atmosphere of the beginning of unfriendly attitude of film critics towards the “mechanization of machines” and “non-acting” in cinema.

In Unprecedented Campaign, Kaufman was already moving away from the idea of the mechanical camera-eye, but he still devoted much more attention to machines – tractors and combines – than to people. He contrasts the hardships of the villages of that time with the geometric rhythm of mechanized factories. The film portrays the problems of the villages of that time through the propaganda lens by showing kulaks, and presents the formation of collective farms as a positive development. Collectivization in the film goes hand in hand with industrialization, and the militarization is shown in the final frames of the film as the next stage of the “unprecedented campaign.”

This paradoxical film, which shows the countryside of that time as cities are accustomed to being shown, despite its totally propagandistic form, combines Vertov’s industrial fervor with Dovzhenko’s pantheistic softness.