Urban Media Archive
Укр
Center for Urban History
6 Bohomoltsia Str. Lviv 79005, Ukraine

The Tooth Extractor

Videos and films

ID:
62502
Place
Rozhdestvenske village (Chernihiv region)
Date:
1982
Genre:
Amateur film
Technique:
16 mm film
Duration:
00:08:42 min
Color:
black and white
Creator
Dmytro Kozel
Collection
Volnytsia People's Film Studio
Description
The film features an amateur short fiction piece — a comedy sketch about a home tooth extraction:

A man suffering from a toothache (Ivan Koshelenko) arrives at a paramedic and obstetric center. On the door, a handwritten note reads: “Having a day off, gone to the godmother’s birthday party.” Disheartened, the man leaves. On his way, he encounters a fellow villager (Ivan Petrenko), who offers to help pull out the tooth. They enter a grocery store. The patient glances at shelves of beer and vodka. It’s only nine in the morning, and the saleswoman refuses to sell alcohol. The man reads a sign detailing the alcohol sales policy: from 11:00 to 19:00, with the sale of strong drinks prohibited on Sundays. He exits and drinks water from a bucket at a nearby well. The pain intensifies. The patient arrives at his fellow villager’s home. In the living room, his host lays out a set of tools: scissors, a hammer, a chisel, and pliers. He ties one end of a rope to the headboard and the other to the aching tooth. The rope slips off the bed, and a cat begins playing with it. The host returns, pulls the rope back up, and steps out again. The patient nervously surveys the room. On the walls hang reproductions of paintings by I. Shishkin (Morning in a Pine Forest, Pine Forest), V. Perov (Hunters at a Halt, Fishing), and K. Makovsky (Children Running from a Storm). The fellow villager returns with a burning armful of straw, startling the patient, who falls off his chair in fright — the tooth is left dangling from the rope. The two men shake hands.

The sound design of the film is predominantly musical, interspersed with bursts of mumbling and vocal imitations to heighten the comic effect. The soundtrack includes Alla Pugacheva’s Million Roses (1982).

The second audio track contains an editing cue sheet of the film with frame-by-frame descriptions of characters, objects, and actions. These scene descriptions are emotional and vivid, enriching the silent film’s narrative and lending deeper meaning to the actors’ performances. Dmytro Kozel immerses himself in each episode alongside the actors, revealing the characters’ unspoken lines and emotions as envisioned in the film’s artistic concept.

Starring: Ivan Koshelenko and Ivan Petrenko. The film is set in the village of Zhovtneve (now Rozhdestvenske).
Language:
Ukrainian
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