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Dziga
Vertov by Jonathan Dawson Jonathan Dawson is Associate Professor in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Griffith University (Queensland, Australia). He has written and directed scores of films and television series and documentaries. |
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—Provisional Instructions to Kino-Eye Groups, Dziga Vertov, 1926 So much of what Dziga Vertov thought and wrote about cinema was written at the time of the greatest propagandist uproar in the twentieth century—the birth of the Modern Soviet State. Yet so much, in hindsight, sounds more like a classic realist position than that of the formalist experiments Vertov claimed for his group, Kino-Pravda and its doctrine of Kino Eye—the term he invented to cover both the ideology of his short lived group and the filmmakers in it. For a little more than ten years he was, along with Sergei Eisenstein, the leading theoretician of the new art of cinema itself and by the end of that ten years his career and his outpouring of cinema ideas were effectively over.Dziga Vertov was born as Denis Abramovich (later changed to Arkadievich) Kaufman in a Jewish book-dealer's family. As a child, he studied piano and violin, and at ten began to write poetry. Then, in 1916 Vertov enrolled in Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute. For his studies of human perception, he recorded and edited natural sounds in his 'Laboratory of Hearing,' trying to create new forms of sound effects by means of the rhythmic grouping of phonetic units. At this time the Futurists and Formalists were also very influential in Russia and beyond. Kaufman invented the nom de guerre 'Dziga Vertov' (roughly, 'the humming top'). In 1918 Mikhail Koltstov, who headed the Moscow Film Committee's newsreel section, hired Vertov as his assistant. Among Vertov's colleagues was Lev Kuleshov, who was conducting his now legendary experiments in montage, as well as Edouard Tissé, Eisenstein's future cameraman.
Then in 1919 Vertov and his future wife, film editor Elisaveta Svilova, along with other young filmmakers, created a group called Kinoks ('kino-oki', meaning cinema-eyes). In 1922 they were joined by Vertov's brother, Mikhail Kaufman, who had just returned from the civil war. From 1922 to 1923 Vertov, Kaufman, and Svilova published a number of manifestos in avant-garde journals, which set out the Kinoks' positions as opposed to other leftist groups. The Kinoks rejected 'staged' cinema with its stars, plots, props and studio shooting. They insisted that the cinema of the future be the cinema of fact: newsreels recording the real world, as 'life caught unawares.' Vertov proclaimed the primacy of the camera itself (the 'Kino-Eye') over the human eye. He clearly saw it as some kind of innocent machine that could record without bias or superfluous aesthetic considerations (as would, say, its human operator) the world as it really was. The camera lens was a machine that could be perfected bit by bit, to seize the world in its entirety and organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective set of pictures. At the same time Vertov was keen to assert that his Kino-Eye principle was a method of 'communist' (or 'true marxist') deciphering of the world, though this latter tenet was not much more convincing then than now. For Vertov was a true believer and he considered Marxism the only objective and scientific tool of analysis. He even called the 23 newreels he directed between 1922 and 1925 Kino-Pravda, 'pravda' being not only the Russian word for the truth but also the title of the official party newspaper. Almost a century later Vertov's films still look revolutionary. And a contemporary digital video clip screened alongside them might not look so modern (or post-modern) after all. Created from documentary footage, Vertov's films represented an intricate blend of art and political and poetic rhetoric. Certainly his writing from early on puts him in a tradition that closely resembles that of the Futurists like Marinetti at their most frenetic:
—Dziga Vertov All this sounds as much like Marinetti as it does like Lars von Trier's proscriptions for the Dogme film group in the very late years of the twentieth century. Just compare Vertov (above) with this from the (Dogme) Group Manifesto in 1995:
—von Trier and Vinterberg, 1995
But the central authorities were also becoming fed up with Vertov's experiments, and they refused to support his greatest and still most rewardingly complex film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Given the difficulties in getting the film made at all, Vertov must have looked back nostalgically at his Kinok checklist of essentials for a Kino-Eye filmmaker: 1. rapid means of transport 2. highly sensitive film stock 3. light handheld film cameras 4. equally light lighting equipment 5. a crew of super-swift cinema reporters (etc) —Vertov op cit This all looks like a shopping list for a post 1960s Direct Cinema crew and indeed filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers and Fred Wiseman all acknowledged the conceptual debt to Vertov's ideas and practices so many years before.
—J-L Comolli in Cahiers du cinéma, nos 209, 211
Nevertheless even some critics and filmmakers of the time were less than enthusiastic about Vertov's effect on filmmaking practice:
—John Grierson in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), 1966 The Griersonian tone of voice is as unmistakable as John Reith's, the schoolmasterly reproof to a too-clever lad, is sharp. But viewed eighty years on, Vertov's best film work seems as bright and challenging as so many Grierson productions from the 1930s no longer do.Vertov's concept of a self-reflective cinema, of the viewer identifying himself with the filmmaking process, would really only reappear at the end of the 1950s in the work of filmmakers like Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, or in America, Stan Brakhage.When sound came, Vertov moved briefly ahead of Eisenstein and most of the other silent cinema masters. He was prepared for the sound revolution because of his early experiments with noise recording, and in A Sixth of the World he had even experimented a la John Cage with rhythmic substitutes for the human voice. By alternating the phrases with images, Vertov achieved the illusion of off-screen narration. His first real sound picture, Enthusiasm, Donbass Symphony (1931), was an instant success abroad. Charles Chaplin observed that he had never imagined that industrial sounds could be organized in such a beautiful way and called it the best film of the year.
In spite of his international acclaim and acknowledged influence, by the end of the 1930s Vertov was deprived of any serious independent work. He was not specifically persecuted, but was confined to the production of dull and standard industrial newsreels, exactly the same sorts of 'reality films' that he had himself so unfavourably compared to his own far more complex and poetic constructs of the perceived world—films he would and could never make again. Six years after his death, the French documentary filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin adopted Vertov's theory and practice into their methode of cinéma vérité. In recent years Vertov's heritage of poetic documentary has influenced many filmmakers all over the world. In 1962, the first Soviet monograph on Vertov was published, followed by another collection, 'Dziga Vertov: Articles, Diaries, Projects.' To recall the 30th anniversary of Vertov's death, three New York cultural organizations put on the first American retrospective of Vertov's work, with seminars and curated screenings of films by Vertov's contemporaries and his followers from all over the world. Just as some feature films—Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), or Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), say, with San Francisco, or almost any film set in Paris—capture a particular and enduring sense of a city, so many early documentary filmmakers felt that the modern city itself was the only proper subject of their cameras. Through this avant-garde genre of the 'city-film', which included films as diverse as Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les Heures (1926), Walter Ruttman's Berlin (1927) and several of the later Crown Film Unit productions, it is now possible to see Dziga Vertov's work as the most innovative and excitingly free with the new medium of them all. Certainly Man with a Movie Camera, made up as it is of 'bits and pieces' of cities from Moscow to the Ukraine, remains a perfect distillation of the sense of a modern city life that looks fresh and true still. In the end this one film is the strongest reminder that, in spite of the extraordinary pressures on his personal and working life, Vertov was one of the greatest of all the pioneer filmmakers. © Jonathan Dawson, February 2003
Kino-Pravda
(1922-5) Newsreel series Enthusiasm
(1931)
Lullaby (1937) Three Heroines
(1938) 
Select Bibliography Jean-Louis Comolli
and J Narboni, “Cinema/Ideologie/Critique” in Cahiers du
cinéma, Oct/Nov, Paris, 1969
Web Resources Compiled by Albert Fung Dziga
Vertov www.25hrs.org
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