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Dziga Vertov

 
Director: Dziga Vertov
 
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  • Born: Jan 02, 1896 in Bialystok, Poland
  • Died: Feb 12, 1954
  • Occupation: Director, Writer
  • Active: '20s-'30s
  • Major Genres: Avant-garde / Experimental, Culture & Society
  • Career Highlights: The Man With a Movie Camera, Kolybelnaya, Enthusiasm
  • First Major Screen Credit: Kino-Pravda (1922)

Biography

The theories and experimental films of Dziga Vertov revolutionized documentary cinema and continue to influence filmmakers ranging from Godard to Stan Brakhage to Chris Marker. He was born Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman in Bialystok, Poland (which at the time was part of Czarist Russia), the son of a librarian. His brothers, Mikhail Kaufman and Boris Kaufman, both became noted cinematographers. Vertov began writing poetry at age ten and at 16 was attending the Bialystok Music Conservatory where he studied violin and piano. A resident of Russia since 1915, Vertov studied neurology in St. Petersburg in 1917. While there, he began researching human perception with sound and created a Laboratory of Hearing in which he made montages of natural sounds and then tried to re-create them by grouping them in phonetic units. He took his pseudonym (loosely translated as "spinning top" or literally "top turning") at this time.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Vertov was invited to become the writer, editor, and overseer of Kino-Nedelia/Cinema Weekly, a filmed periodical that contained snippets of the lives of Soviet citizens. Through these, Vertov began experimenting with creative editing to increase audience impact. He left the film series in 1919 to edit the full-length compilation film Anniversary of the Revolution. He followed it with two short films, Battle of Tsaritsyn (1920) and The Agit-Train VTSIK (1921). In 1922, he made the 13-reel History of Civil War (1922). Next Vertov started his own newsreel series, Kino-Pravda (Cine-Truth) which he named in honor of the official Soviet newspaper Pravda. During this period, Vertov developed his montage techniques and honed his growing theories about cinema as the art form best suited for the masses. In 1919, he joined the fray with other intellectuals in debating the issue of art versus the people. That year he joined with other filmmakers, including his future wife, Elisaveta Svilova, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, to form Kino-Glaz (Cinema-Eye) to promote his idea that the impartial eye of the camera is far better suited to recording and organizing the truth than the subjective and often faulty human eye. In 1922, the group published a revolutionary manifesto in which he derided all fiction films as backward, packed with lies and powerless while lauding those films that recorded truth of real life "caught unawares." He was profoundly influenced by Marxism and presented a rather poetic view of it in his many subsequent films such as Shagai, Sovet!/Forward, Soviet!, Shestaya Chast' Mira/A Sixth Part of the World (both 1926), and his best-known film Chelovek s Kinoapparatom/The Man With the Movie Camera (1929), a frequently humorous, lyrical, and avant-garde portrait of Soviet city life that employed numerous innovative camera techniques, including superimposition, fast and slow motion, split screens, and rapid montage to engage the audience in an active dialogue on filmed reality versus human perceptions of reality.

When sound technology came to film, Vertov, who had earlier experimented with sound recordings, was able to use it to full advantage in Enthusiasm: Donbass Symphony (1931), a film that utilized sound montages and earned him international acclaim, but was panned in the Soviet Union. Vertov next made Tri Pesni o Lenine/Three Songs About Lenin (1934) and won a prize at that year's Venice Film Festival. It was not immediately released in Russia because it was felt that Stalin's role in the Revolution wasn't developed enough. His film Kolybel'naya/The Lullaby (1937) was edited sans Vertov's permission to make Stalin's role bigger. By then the conservative government began showing more interest in fictional features and Vertov ended up spending his last 20 years editing artless newsreels. In the early '60s, six years after Vertov died, French documentary makers Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch revived interest in Vertov's early theories and integrated them into the cinéma vérité movement. In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard with Jean-Pierre Gorin organized the so-called Dziga Vertov group to further promote the late filmmaker's ideas. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
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Biography: Dziga Vertov
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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Biographies

The foremost avant-garde figure of Soviet Russian cinema in its early days, Dziga Vertov (1896 - 1954) attempted to create a purely cinematic language, untouched by the narrative principles of literature or theater.

Vertov's best-known film, a staple of film curricula and an inspiration to experiment-minded young filmmakers of subsequent generations in the West, was The Man with a Movie Camera, a sort of silent ballet of everyday life and work as it is captured by the roving camera of the film's title. Vertov made other innovative films, however, and he held an important place among the large group of creative Russian intellectuals that turned out several of the most important landmarks of silent cinema. That he is not better known is due in part to the course of political history; a supporter of Communism, Vertov guessed wrong in opposing the liberalization of Soviet culture in the mid-1920s, and his creativity was eventually suppressed by the Soviet Communist government.

Family Fled Poland

Vertov was born Denis Abramovich Kaufman in Bialystok, Poland, on January 2, 1896. His family was Jewish, and his father owned a bookstore. Vertov was interested in the arts from an early age, writing poetry and playing the violin and piano. His family fled Poland, which at the time was controlled by czarist Russia, in order to escape advancing German troops during World War I. They settled in St. Petersburg, and Vertov changed his middle name to the more Russian-sounding Arkadievich. He took the name Dziga Vertov after he became active in cinema; the name evokes the turning of a movie camera's crank handle (Vertov is derived from the Russian word for "spin," and Dziga is an onomatopoetic representation of the grinding of a piece of machinery).

Enrolling at the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg, Vertov studied human perception of sound and soon created a makeshift "laboratory of hearing" where he could experiment with sound effects. He was influenced by the Italian Futurists, a group of artists and composers, who strove to create an anti-expressive, mechanistic aesthetic. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917 and brought the Communists to power, Vertov and his brother Mikhail took to the streets in support of the Bolsheviks. Both of Vertov's brothers became active in cinema as well; Boris Kaufman served as a cameraman for French director Jean Vigo in the 1930s, and Mikhail Kaufman made some films in Russia that have mostly disappeared from view.

Volunteering for the new Bolshevik government's cinema committee in Moscow, Vertov was put to work on newsreels. He became writer and editor of Kinonedelia (Film Week), the first Soviet newsreel agency. Vertov captured the chaotic world of the Soviet Union's first years, as foreign troops aided anti-Communist rebels but were eventually vanquished. Several young filmmakers working in the Soviet Union around this time went on to make cinematic history; Vertov met the experimental director and film editor Lev Kuleshov and camera operator Edouard Tissé, who later worked with Sergei Eisenstein. Revolutionary rhetoric was in the air, and Vertov and his friends began to churn out articles and pamphlets announcing their new artistic aims. In 1919 he made his first feature-length film, Anniversary of the Revolution, which was a compilation of earlier newsreels.

Vertov met film archivist Elisaveta Svilova while working on newsreels, and the two married. They founded a new group of filmmakers called kino-oki (Cinema Eyes) or Kinoks, devoted to documentary-style filmmaking. "I am kino-eye; I am mechanical eye; I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it," Vertov wrote in a manifesto quoted on the Images website. "My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you." In the early 1920s Vertov, under the auspices of the state Goskino cinema agency, launched a new newsreel series called Kino-Pravda or Cinema of Truth. The name reflected the influence of the party-line Soviet newspaper Pravda, but Vertov's path soon made a left turn away from sheer realism.

Experimented with Newsreel Format

On one hand, the Kino-Pravda films fit the requirements of Communist propaganda. They showed Soviet citizens at work, reported on the completion of civil engineering projects, and presented footage of hospitals and streetcars. But Vertov assembled his crews' footage innovatively and artistically, using such techniques as a split screen, superimposed images, and slow or speeded-up motion, in an attempt to create compositions that would reflect what he called Soviet reality or Life as It Is. "We leave the film studio for … that whirlpool of colliding visible phenomena, where everything is real, where people, tramways, motorcycles, and trains meet and part, where each bus follows its route, where cars scurry about their business, where smiles, tears, deaths, and taxes do not obey the director's megaphone," Vertov wrote, as quoted in the New Republic. His film Kino-Eye: Life Caught Unawares won a silver medal at the 1924 World Exhibition in Paris.

A good example of Vertov's work of this period was One Sixth of the World, released in 1926. Writings and films glorifying the Soviet Union's ethnic diversity were a staple of the country's culture for its entire existence, and Vertov's film fell under that classification. But his method was unique. The dialogue of the entire film (on title cards, for this was still during the silent film era) consisted of a series of short geographic calls: "You in the small villages … You in the tundra … You on the ocean … You Uzbeks … You Kalmiks." These were blended with film imagery and rhythmic sounds to create a sort of visual poem of the Soviet Union. The International Dictionary of Films and Film-makers noted that the technique results in a mood similar to that of Walt Whitman's poetry, which Vertov knew and liked. The Kino-Pravda films, and their successors, the 55 episodes of Goskino Kalendar, were closer in general to modern music videos than to the usual run of silent films.

Vertov and his associates continued to buttress their aesthetic experiments with vigorous written justifications of their works. Clearly Vertov benefited from the relatively free atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s, prior to Josef Stalin's ascent to power. Imports of Western films were permitted at this time, and they became popular. But Vertov, anxious to claim the mantle of Communist legitimacy for his experiments, condemned them. "We declare the old films, the romantic, the theatricalised, etc., to be leprous," he wrote, as quoted in a Vertov biography on the University of Glasgow, Scotland, website. "Don't come near! Don't look! Mortally dangerous! Contagious!" According to the Senses of Cinema website, he declared, "The film drama is the Opium of the people … down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios … long live life as it is!"

Vertov's polemics paid off in government support for several more of his unique films, including Stride, Soviet! (1926). But he was playing a dangerous game, for his own work was as artistic and individualistic as that which he fulminated against. In the late 1920s, as the Soviet Union spun toward totalitarian rule, he began to fall out of favor in official circles. In order to make his masterpiece, The Man with a Movie Camera, he was forced to leave the Goskino studio and the city of Moscow itself, accepting support from the VUFKU studio in Ukraine, then under Soviet rule but temporarily still somewhat independent-minded.

In corporated Cameraman into Film

The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) summed up everything Vertov had done thus far, in a large-scale, abstract, self-referential composition. It had no dialogue, and was set in a nameless city that conflated images of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. The film, according to New Republic writer J. Hoberman, "matches the rhythms of the workday to the cycle of life, and the mechanisms of moviemaking to the processes of industrial production." The film showed Soviet citizens at work and en route to their places of employment. But it added several new elements. Vertov used a full range of cinematic techniques, including special effects and variable-speed filming, to try and demonstrate that cinema could stand on its own as a completely new art form. And he incorporated the camera itself as a participant in his cinematic composition: the camera, operated by Vertov's brother Mikhail, is seen in action as it moves around the city and is superimposed on other images in a dazzling sequence near the film's conclusion.

The Man with a Movie Camera was one of a group of films known to cinema buffs as city symphonies. It remained part of numerous film school curricula three-quarters of a century later, and was performed with a live improvised score by the Alloy Orchestra, a group of experimental silent film accompanists. But at the time of its creation it was condemned in the Soviet Union. Sergei Eisenstein, as quoted on the Silents Are Golden website, said that it was filled with "formalist jackstraws and unmotivated camera mischief."

Vertov was able to make just one more film that reflected his experimental outlook: Enthusiasm: Donbass Symphony (1931), his first sound film, used sound as an abstract element, not always synchronized with the action on screen. The film brought Vertov recognition abroad and was hailed as a masterwork by Charlie Chaplin, among others. But Vertov's situation at home deteriorated still further. In 1934 he wrote (according to Hoberman) that he felt "anxiety day and night. I used to think I'd always be tireless. Not so. They've exhausted me. My brain's so tired that a breeze knocks me over." According to Hoberman, Vertov wrote a little satirical sketch of his cultural overlords: "You wish to continue working on the ponetic documentary?," he imagined them saying. "Go right ahead. You have our general permission…. You can sit in your damp hole beneath the water tank and above the sobering station for drunks. You can stand in line for the toilet, for the kitchen burner, the sink, the streetcar, and the bath. With no elevator, you can climb up to the sixth floor ten times a day."

The disillusioned Vertov attempted to regain the Party's good graces with Three Songs of Lenin (1934), a tribute to the Soviet Union's founder, but even this did not help his position. The film's release was delayed, perhaps because it did not include any appropriate homage to Stalin. Despite his declining status, Vertov did not end up in a prison camp like so many of his progressive contemporaries. He returned to making propaganda documentaries like For You at the Front: the Kazakhstan Front (1942) for the Soviet state, and he survived Stalinist purges and the horrors of the Second World War. Beginning in 1944 he came full circle and worked on Soviet newsreels. He died of cancer on February 12, 1954, in Moscow.

Books

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, vol. 2: Directors, 4th ed., St. James, 2000.

Periodicals

New Republic, December 9, 1985.

Variety, March 15, 2004.

Online

"Dziga Vertov," Senses of Cinema, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/vertov.html (February 1, 2006).

"Man with a Movie Camera," Images, http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue05/reviews/vertov.html (February 1, 2006).

"Man with a Movie Camera," Silents Are Golden, http://www.silentsaregolden.com (February 1, 2006).

"No Fiction Films Allowed," University of Glasgow, http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk (February 1, 2006).

 
Wikipedia: Dziga Vertov
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Dziga Vertov

Dziga Vertov (Russian: Дзига Вертов, Ukrainian: Дзиґа Вертов) January 2 (New Style), 1896–February 12, 1954) was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories paved the way to Cinéma vérité style of documentary moviemaking.

Vertov's brothers Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman were also notable filmmakers, as was his wife, Elizaveta Svilova.

Contents

Early years

Born David Abelevich Kaufman (Russian: Давид Абелевич Кауфман) into a family of Jewish intellectuals in Białystok, Congress Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire. His father was a librarian. He Russified his Jewish patronymic to Arkadievich at some point after 1918. Kaufman studied music at Białystok Conservatory until his family fled from the invading German army to Moscow in 1915. The Kaufmans soon settled in Petrograd, where Denis Kaufman began writing poetry, science fiction and satire. In 1916-1917 Kaufman was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and experimenting with "sound collages" in his free time. Kaufman adopted the name "Dziga Vertov", which means "spinning top"[1] in Ukrainian; Vertov's political writings and his work on the Kino-Pravda newsreel series show a revolutionary romanticism.

Career after the October Revolution

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya (Кино-Неделя, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia), which first came out in June 1918. While working for Kino-Nedelya he met his future wife, the film director and editor, Elizaveta Svilova, who at the time was working as an editor at Goskino. She began collaborating with Vertov, beginning as his editor but becoming assistant and co-director in subsequent films, such as Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and Three Songs About Lenin (1934).

Boris Kaufman (cameraman) with Jean Vigo (director)

Vertov worked on the Kino-Nedelya series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin's agit-train during the ongoing Russian Civil War between Communists and counterrevolutionaries. Some of the cars on the agit-trains were equipped with actors for live performances or printing presses; Vertov's had equipment to shoot, develop, edit, and project film. The trains went to battlefronts on agitation-propaganda missions intended primarily to bolster the morale of the troops; they were also intended to stir up revolutionary fervor of the masses.

In 1919, Vertov compiled newsreel footage for his documentary Anniversary of the Revolution; in 1921 he compiled History of the Civil War. The so-called "Council of Three," a group issuing manifestoes in LEF, a radical Russian newsmagazine, was established in 1922; the group's "three" were Vertov, his wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman. Vertov's interest in machinery led to a curiosity about the mechanical basis of cinema.

Kino-Pravda

In 1922, the year that Nanook of the North was released, Vertov started the Kino-Pravda series. The series took its title from the official government newspaper Pravda. "Kino-Pravda" (literally translated, "film truth") continued Vertov's agit-prop bent. "The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow" Vertov explained. He called it damp and dark. There was an earthen floor and holes one stumbled into at every turn. Dziga said, " This dampness prevented our reels of lovingly edited film from sticking together properly, rusted our scissors and our splicers." "Before dawn- damp, cold, teeth chattering- I wrap comrade Svilova in a third jacket."

Vertov's driving vision, expounded in his frequent essays, was to capture "film truth"—that is, fragments of actuality which, when organized together, have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye. In the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first. The episodes of "Kino-Pravda" usually did not include reenactments or stagings (one exception is the segment about the trial of the Social Revolutionaries: the scenes of the selling of the newspapers on the streets and the people reading the papers in the trolley were both staged for the camera). The cinematography is simple, functional, unelaborate—perhaps a result of Vertov's disinterest in both "beauty" and the "grandeur of fiction." Twenty-three issues of the series were produced over a period of three years; each issue lasted about twenty minutes and usually covered three topics. The stories were typically descriptive, not narrative, and included vignettes and exposés, showing for instance the renovation of a trolley system, the organization of farmers into communes, and the trial of Social Revolutionaries; one story shows starvation in the nascent Marxist state. Propagandistic tendencies are also present, but with more subtlety, in the episode featuring the construction of an airport: one shot shows the former Tsar's tanks helping prepare a foundation, with an intertitle reading "Tanks on the labor front."

Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series—in the final segment he includes contact information—but by the 14th episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as "insane". Vertov responds to their criticisms with the assertion that the critics were hacks nipping "revolutionary effort" in the bud, and concludes the essay with his promise to "explode art's tower of Babel."[2] In Vertov's view, "art's tower of Babel" was the subservience of cinematic technique to narrative, commonly known as the Institutional Mode of Representation.

By this point in his career, Vertov was clearly and emphatically dissatisfied with narrative tradition, and expresses his hostility towards dramatic fiction of any kind both openly and repeatedly; he regarded drama as another "opiate of the masses". Vertov freely admitted one criticism leveled at his efforts on the "Kino-Pravda" series--that the series, while influential, had a limited release.

By the end of the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov made liberal use of stop motion, freeze frames, and other cinematic "artificialities," giving rise to criticisms not just of his trenchant dogmatism, but also of his cinematic technique. Vertov explains himself in "On 'Kinopravda'": in editing "chance film clippings" together for the Kino-Nedelia series, he "began to doubt the necessity of a literary connection between individual visual elements spliced together.... This work served as the point of departure for 'Kinopravda.'"[3] Towards the end of the same essay, Vertov mentions an upcoming project which seems likely to be Man with the Movie Camera, calling it an "experimental film" made without a scenario; just three paragraphs above, Vertov mentions a scene from "Kino Pravda" which should be quite familiar to viewers of Man with the Movie Camera: the peasant works, and so does the urban woman, and so too, the woman film editor selecting the negative...."[4]

Man with a Movie Camera

With Lenin's admission of limited private enterprise through his New Economic Policy, Russia began receiving fiction films from afar, an occurrence that Vertov regarded with undeniable suspicion, calling drama a "corrupting influence" on the proletarian sensibility ("On 'Kinopravda,'" 1924). By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in 1925. Potemkin was a heavily fictionalized film telling the story of a mutiny on a battleship which came about as a result of the sailors' mistreatment; the film was an obvious but skillful propaganda piece glorifying the proletariat. Vertov lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, possibly as a result of criticizing a film which effectively preaches the Communist party line. He was fired for creating "A Sixth Part of the World: Advertising and the Soviet Universe" for the State Trade Organization into a propaganda film, selling the Soviet as an advanced society under the New Economic Policy of Lenin, instead of showing how they fit into the world economy. The Ukraine State Studio hired Vertov to create "man with a Movie Camera". Vertov says in his essay "The Man with a Movie Camera" that he was fighting "for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature."[5] By the later segments of "Kino-Pravda," Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés (and receiving criticism for it); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of Man with the Movie Camera (filmed in the Ukraine). Some have criticized the obvious stagings in Man With the Movie Camera as being at odds with Vertov's credos "life as it is" and "life caught unawares": the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot which films Mikhail Kaufman riding in a car filming a third car.

However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera (16:04 on the commentary track). This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera." All of these shots might conform to Vertov's credo "caught unawares." Dziga's slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Vertov's brother Mikhail described in a interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. For example, in "Man with a Movie Cameara", two trains are shown almost melting into each other, although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail talked about Eisenstein's films as different from his and his brother Vertov's in that Eisenstein, "came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads." "We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism" Mikhail explained. More than even film truth, "Man with a Movie Camera," was supposed to be a way to make those in the Soviet Union more efficient in their actions. He slowed down his actions, such as the decision whether to jump or not, you can see the decision in his face, a psychological dissection for the audience. He wanted a peace between the actions of man and the actions of a machine, form them to be in a sense, one.

Cine-Eye

Dziga Vertov believed his concept of Cine-Eye, or "Kino Eye" would help contemporary man evolve from a flawed creature into a higher, more precise form. He compared man unfavorably to machines: “In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people [...]”[6] "I am an eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see" Dziga was quoted as saying.

Like other Russian filmmakers, he attempted to connect his ideas and techniques to the advancement of the aims of the Soviet Union. Whereas Sergei Eisenstein viewed his montage of attractions as a propaganda tool through which the film-viewing masses could be subjected to “emotional and psychological influence” and therefore able to perceive “the ideological aspect” of the films they were being shown, Vertov believed the Cine-Eye would influence the actual evolution of man, “from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man.”[7]

Vertov believed film was too “romantic” and “theatricalised” due to the influence of literature, theater, and music, and that these psychological film-dramas “prevent man from being as precise as a stop watch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine.” He desired to move away from “the pre-Revolutionary ‘fictional’ models” of filmmaking to one based on the rhythm of machines, seeking to “bring creative joy to all mechanical labour”[8] and to “bring men closer to machines.”[8]

Late career

Vertov's cinema success continued into the 1930s. In 1931, he released Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass, an examination into Soviet miners. Enthusiasm has been called a 'sound film', with sound recorded on location, and these mechanical sounds woven together, producing a symphony-like effect.

Three years later, Three Songs about Lenin looked at the revolution through the eyes of the Russian peasantry. For his film, however, Vertov had been hired by Mezhrabpomfilm, a Soviet studio that produced mainly propaganda efforts. To conform to the studio's, and the Soviet government's expectations, the film was edited to include Stalin and provide a more acceptable, 'Stalinesque', ending[specify]. With the rise and official sanction of socialist realism in 1934, Vertov was forced to cut his personal artistic output significantly, eventually becoming little more than an editor for Soviet newsreels. Lullaby, perhaps the last film in which Vertov was able to maintain his artistic vision, was released in 1937. Dziga Vertov died of cancer in 1954, after surviving, unscathed, Stalin's purges.

Vertov's brother Boris Kaufman was a noted cinematographer who worked much later for directors such as Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet in America; his other brother, Mikhail Kaufman, worked as Vertov's cinematographer until he became a documentarian in his own right.

Influence

Vertov's legacy still lives on today. His ideas are echoed in cinéma vérité, the movement of the 1960s named after Vertov's Kino-Pravda. The 1960s and 1970s saw an international revival of interest in Vertov.[9]

The independent, exploratory style of Vertov influenced and inspired many filmmakers and directors like the Situationist Guy Debord and companies such as "Vertov Industries". The Dziga Vertov Group borrowed his name. In 1960, Jean Rouch used Vertov's filming theory when making Chronicle of a Summer. His partner Edgar Morin coined Cinéma vérité term when describing the style, using direct translation of Vertov’s KinoPravda.

The Free Cinema movement in England in the 1950s, the Direct Cinema in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Candid Eye series in Canada in the 1950s, all essentially owed a debt to Vertov.[10]

This revival of Vertov's legacy included rehabilitation of his reputation in the Soviet Union, with retrospectives of his films, biographical works and writings. 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. [11]

New Media theorist Lev Manovich suggested Vertov as on of the early pioneers of database cinema genre in his essay Database as a symbolic form.

Quotes

  • "It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple." [1]
  • "I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only I alone am able to see it."
  • "I was returning from the railroad station. In my ears, there remained chugs and bursts of steam from a departing train. Somebody cries in laughter, a whistle, the station bell, the clanking locomotive...whispers, shouts, farewells. And walking away I thought I need to find a machine not only to describe but to register, to photograph these sounds. Otherwise, one cannot organize or assemble them. They fly like time. Perhaps a camera? That records the visual. But to organize the visual world and not the audible world? Is this the answer?"- Dziga Vertov
  • "Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope...now they have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten."

Filmography

Poster for Kino-Glaz, designed by Aleksandr Rodchenko (1924)
  • 1919 Кинонеделя (Kino Nedelya, Cinema Week)
  • 1919 Годовщина революции (Anniversary of the Revolution)
  • 1922 История гражданской войны (History of the Civil War)
  • 1924 Советские игрушки (Soviet Toys)
  • 1924 Кино-глаз (Kino Glaz, Cinema Eye)
  • 1925 Киноправда (Kino Pravda)
  • 1926 Шестая часть мира (A Sixth of the World/The Sixth Part of the World)
  • 1928 Одиннадцатый (The Eleventh)
  • 1929 Человек с киноаппаратом (Man with a Movie Camera)
  • 1931 Энтузиазм (Enthusiasm)
  • 1934 Три песни о Ленине (Three Songs About Lenin)
  • 1937 Памяти Серго Орджоникидзе (In Memory of Sergo Ordzhonikidze)
  • 1937 Колыбельная (Lullaby)
  • 1938 Три героини (Three Heroines)
  • 1942 Казахстан — фронту! (Kazakhstan for the Front!)
  • 1944 В горах Ала-Тау (In the Mountains of Ala-Tau)
  • 1954 Новости дня (News of the Day)

Notes

  1. ^ Roberts, p. 15
  2. ^ Vertov 1924, p. 47
  3. ^ Vertov 1924, p. 42
  4. ^ Vertov 1924, p. 46
  5. ^ Vertov 1928, p. 83
  6. ^ Vertov 1922, p. 69
  7. ^ Vertov 1922, pp. 69-71
  8. ^ a b Vertov 1922, p. 71
  9. ^ "Dziga Vertov, by Erik Barnouw". http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Ve-Y/Vertov-Dziga.html. 
  10. ^ "The technique of film and video editing: history, theory, and practice, by Ken Dancyger". http://books.google.com/books?id=RFszBZIqf40C&pg=PA324. 
  11. ^ "Dziga Vertov, Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman, by Jonathan Dawson". http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/vertov.html. 

References

Books and Articles
  • Erik Barnouw. Documentary: a History of the Non-fiction Film. Oxford University Press. Original copyright 1974.
  • Bohlman, Philip Vilas. "Music, Modernity, and the Foreign in the New Germany." 1994, pgs. 121-152
  • Cook, Simon. "Our Eyes, Spinning Like Propellers: Wheel of Life, Curve of Velocities, and Dziga Vertov's Theory of the Interval." October, 2007,pages 79-91.
  • Jack C. Ellis. The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of English-Language Documentary Film and Video. Prentice Hall, 1989.
  • Seth Feldman. "'Peace between Man and Machine': Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera." in Barry Keith Grant, and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds.Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Wayne State University Press, 1998. pp. 40-53.
  • Feldman, Seth. "Evolution of style in the early work of Dziga Vertov." 1977, Arno Press, New York.
  • Graffy, Julian; Deriabin, Aleksandr ;Sarkisova, Oksana ; Keller, Sarah ; Scandiffio, Theresa . "Lines of resistance : Dziga Vertov and the twenties / edited and with an introduction by Yuri Tsivian." Le Giornate del cinema muto, Gemona, Udine
  • Jeremy Hicks. Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. London & New York: IB Tauris, 2007.
  • Christie,Ian. "Rushes: Pordenone Retrospective: Gazing into the Future."Sight and Sound. 2005, 15, 1, 4-5, British Film Institute
  • Malcolm Le Grice. Abstract Film and Beyond. Studio Vista, 1977.
  • John MacKay. "Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film." In Film History: An International Journal 18.4 (2006) 376-391.
  • John MacKay. "Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective." Available at [www.kinokultura.com/articles/jan05-mackay.html].
  • John MacKay. "Film Energy: Process and Metanarrative in Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year (1928)." October 121 (Summer 2007): 41-78.
  • John MacKay. "The 'Spinning Top' Takes Another Turn: Vertov Today." Available at [www.kinokultura.com/articles/apr05-mackay.html].
  • Annette Michelson and Malcolm Turvey eds. "New Vertov Studies." Special Issue of October, (October 121 (Summer 2007)).
  • Graham Roberts. The Man with the Movie Camera. I.B.Tauris, 2001. ISBN 1860643949
  • Ben Singer. "Connoisseurs of Chaos: Whitman, Vertov and the 'Poetic Survey,'" Literature/Film Quarterly 15:4 (Fall 1987): 247-258.
  • Thomas Tode, Barbara Wurm, Austrian Film Museum eds.Dziga Vertov. The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum, Bilingual (German-English). (Paperback - May 2006), FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, available at [www.filmmuseum.at].
  • Yuri Tsivian, ed. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. La Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004. ISBN 88-86155-15-8
  • Dziga Vertov. On Kinopravda. 1924, and The Man with the Movie Camera. 1928, in Annette Michelson ed. Kevin O'Brien tr. Kino-Eye : The Writings of Dziga Vertov, University of California Press, 1995.
  • Dziga Vertov. We. A Version of a Manifesto. 1922, in Ian Christie, Richard Taylor eds. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 Routledge, 1994. ISBN 041505298X
  • Charles Warren ed. Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film. Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
DVDs
  • Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera DVD, audio commentary track by Yuri Tsivian.
  • Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa) DVD, restored version and unrestored version plus documentary on Peter Kubelka's restoration.
Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Dziga Vertov

See also

External links


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