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).
