"OK, I've finally got round to exploring an Academia DVD in depth - Lev Kuleshov's Engineer Prite's Project (1918), the oldest of the initial batch of titles.

Although no masterpiece, the film itself is a fascinating slice of history - made when Kuleshov was just eighteen, it's one of the first films funded by the recently victorious Bolsheviks (which accounts for the aggressively anti-capitalist message, vaguely reminiscent of The Man in the White Suit in its tale of an engineer who devises a method of extracting electricity from peat, only to find himself undermined by American oil magnates seeking to protect their share price), but it also marks a clear link between the pre-revolutionary work of Yevgeny Bauer (Kuleshov's former boss) and what would eventually become Soviet montage (many of whose underlying theories would later be devised by Kuleshov). The montage here is far less flamboyant than what was to come, but there are already considerably more shots than would be the case with an equivalent American or earlier Russian film.

Like all the Academia releases, this is presented as a two-disc set, with one disc presenting an unadulterated version of the main feature (original Russian soundtrack/intertitles, with optional subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch or Portuguese), and the other offering the same transfer of the feature but with 'Hyperkino' contextual backup available in Russian or English.

In practice, this means that an orange number will occasionally pop up on the screen, indicating that contextual information is available - pressing 'enter' on your remote lets you jump to the relevant screen, which offers a mini-essay analysing or contextualising that particular part of the film (taking up multiple pages if necessary), complete with further links to stills, facsimile documents and even video clips - in this particular case, from the Yevgeny Bauer films on which Kuleshov originally cut his filmmaking teeth, and whose influence can clearly be seen. Annoyingly, the facsimile texts in Russian (original reviews, scripts, etc.) generally aren't translated, though the entire original treatment is presented in English.

With 27 contextual sections servicing a film running just 30 minutes, you can probably already appreciate that there's a fair bit of material to explore - it runs the gamut from production anecdotes through reception and its subsequent archival life, together with a fair bit of analysis, including clips from the actual film with added onscreen graphics to highlight key details. There's also a themed index of subjects in the style of one of Criterion's commentary indexes - for instance, 'Russian cinema of 1918', 'The film's plot and libretto', '"Super American drama"', 'First formula of montage', and so on.

As for the print and transfer, it's in pretty good condition for a 1918 film, and has clearly undergone a fair bit of restoration - purists may baulk at the fact that the intertitles are so obviously electronically-created, but the layout and typesetting seem appropriate to the period. English subtitles"

«Кино по пятницам». Еженедельная авторская программа Валерия Кичина:

24 сентября 2010: "В этой программе речь пойдет о выпуске кинокомпанией «R.U.S.C.I.C.O.» на dvd отечественной киноклассики с комментариями и системой ссылок. В гостях у Валерия Кичина: генеральный директор компании Роман Дихтяр; киновед и главный редактор серии Николай Изволов; участник проекта и один из его вдохновителей преподавательница из Германии Наташа Друбек."

IL CINEMA RITROVATO DVD AWARDS 2010 VII edition. BEST SPECIAL FEATURES (BONUS). "Our BEST SPECIAL FEATURES (BONUS) award goes jointly to:

(a) three recent Ruscico releases of classic Russian films (two previously unavailable films by Lev Kuleshov, ENGINEER PRITE’S PROJECT and THE GREAT CONSOLER, and Sergey Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s OCTOBER)—both for their innovative handling of printed and illustrated commentaries by scholars and for their subtitles in many languages, despite the unfortunate fact that all three releases are identified on their covers only by their Russian titles

ENGINEERS PRITE’S PROJECT (Russia/1918) di Lev Kuleshov – Ruscico (Russia) -

THE GREAT CONSOLER (Russia/1933) di Lev Kuleshov – Ruscico (Russia)

OCTOBER (Russia/1927) di Sergey Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov – Ruscico (Russia)

and

(b) the Filmmuseum with Filmmuseum München and Goethe Institut Deutschland release of G.W. Pabst’s DIE FREUDLOSE GASSE (THE JOYLESS STREET), for the three documentaries about Pabst that are included."

...at the 12^th Russian Film Symposium, University of Pittsburgh:

"From Art-house to Cineplex: Russian Cinema's Search for a Mass Audience"

May 2010

"Annotations for the Hyperkino edition of Lev Kuleshov’s Engineer
Prite’s Project (1918), Academia series, RUSCICO, 2010""

in: Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

Volume 4 Number 1

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=135/

Second year of „Open archives“ conference took place within The Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival