PWT 39 2015

weekly transmission n째39

thursday 01 october 2015

early days in north korea

transmission 39 contents : Teodor Bunimovich papers on North Korea, 1947

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The e-bulletin presents books, albums, photographs and ancient documents as they have been transmitted to actual owners by their creators and by amateurs from past generations.

The physical descriptions, attributions, origins, place and date of printing of photographs have been carefully ascertained by collations and comparisons with comparable samples The books and photographs are presented in chronological order. It is the privilege of ancient and authentic things to be presented in this fashion, mirroring the flow of ideas and creations.

All the items presented are available at the time of transmission. The prices are denominated in euro. Paypal is accepted. Priority is given to the first outright purchase, confirmed by email to

serge@plantureux.fr N째39 : A group of printsand documents from Soviet photographer and filmmaker Teodor Zakarovich Bunimovich (1908-2001) archive

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teodor bunimovich papers on north korea, including printed books and posters, manuscript poems and one hundred and twenty silver prints, north korea, 1947

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a note about the author Teodor Bunimovitch was born in Tiflis (Tbilissi) in 1908 and had a long life as film operator.

He won the Stalin Prize of the first degree in 1942 for participation in the celebrated war documentary Moscow Strikes Back (Разгром немецких войск под Москвой), Razgrom Nemetskikh Voysk Pod Moskvoy, about the Battle of Moscow made during the battle in October 1941 – January 1942, directed by Leonid Varlamov and Ilya Kopalin who recalled of the film shoot in the winter of 1941–1942 that: “It's been severe, but happy days. Severe, because we made a movie in a front-line city. Basement studio has turned into the apartment where we lived like in casern. At night, we discussed with the cameramen the job for the next day, and in the morning the machine took away the cameramen to the front to back in the evening with the footage. The shooting was very heavy. There were thirty-degree frosts. The mechanism of the movie camera froze and clogged with snow, numbed hands refused to act. There were times when in the car, which returned from the front, lay the body of our dead comrade and broken equipment. But the knowledge that the enemy pulls back from Moscow, that collapses the myth of the invincibility of the Nazi armies, gave us strength”.

In 1942, the New York Times began its review with the words "Out of the great Winter counteroffensive that began on Dec. 6 of last year on the approaches to Moscow, Russian front-line cameramen have brought a film that will live in the archives of our time. Moscow Strikes Back, now at the Globe, is not a film to be described in ordinary reviewer's terms, for these events were not staged before a camera and artistically arranged; they were recorded amidst a struggle that knew no quarter. Yet, here is a film to knot the fist and seize the heart with anger, a film that stings like a slap in the face of complacence, a scourge and lash against the delusion that there may still be an easy way out. Here is a film to lift the spirit with the courage of a people who have gone all-out."

The Times reviewer describes the film in detail, admitting that words are inadequate, and adds that "The savagery of that retreat is a spectacle to stun the mind." He finds "infinitely more terrible" the sight of the atrocities, "the naked and slaughtered children stretched out in ghastly rows, the youths dangling limply in the cold from gallows that were rickety, but strong enough."[2] The review concludes that "To say that Moscow Strikes Back is a great film is to fall into inappropriate cliché." Slavko Vorkapich's editing is described as brilliant; Albert Maltz's writing as terse, Robinson's voice-over as moving, "but that does not tell the story of what the heroic cameramen have done", filming "amid the fury of battle"

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the 1947 north korea movie Teodor Bunimovitch was sent by Stalin in 1947 to produce a movie on Kim-Il-Sum and the elections which were supposed to happen, just before the war broke.

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Теодор Захарович Бунимо́вич (1908—2001). Ode to Kim-Il-Sum, russian translation, c. 1947. Manuscript leaf, 435x320 mm, handwritten by Bunimovich.

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Теодор Захарович Бунимо́вич (1908-2001). Manifestation in Pyong-Yang, 1947. Vintage silver print, 180x240 mm. The reproduction in the book published two years later has been significately altered and transformed.

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Number Thirty-nine of the Weekly Transmission has been uploaded on Thursday, 1st October at 15:15 (Paris time).

Upcoming uploads and transmissions now on Thursdays : Thursday 8th October, Thursday 15th October, Thursday 22th October. serge@plantureux.fr Phone (10 am-5 pm) : (+33) 6.50.85.60.74