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Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film
Pioneer of political documentary and inventor of cinema verite, Dziga Vertov has exerted a decisive influence on directors from Eisenstein to Godard. Yet his reputation long rested upon a lone masterpiece, 'Man with a Movie Camera'. Recently, however Vertov has begun to be recognised as the creator of a body of innovative and distinct films and, as Jeremy Hicks argues, documentary as we know it today is unthinkable without the rediscovery of Vertov. This, the first book in English to cover the whole of Vertov's career, reveals him to be an auteur, allowing readers to combine the familiar and less familiar aspects of his filmmaking and thinking in a cohesive narrative. Jeremy Hicks demonstrates how Vertov draws on Soviet journalistic models for his transformation of newsreel into the new form of documentary film. Through analyses of "Cine-Pravda No 21" (Leninist Cine-Pravda), "Cine-Eye", "Forward Soviet!", "A Sixth Part of the Earth", "The Eleventh Year", "Man with a Movie Camera", "Enthusiasm", "Three Songs of Lenin", and "Lullaby", he shows how Vertov's greatest works combine authentic documentary footage ingeniously for tremendous rhetorical effect.
Today, with the energetic revival of interest in documentary film, Vertov's reflexive and overtly partisan films are of great relevance; but they need to be better known and understood. This is the purpose of "Dziga Vertov - Defining Documentary Film".
Today, with the energetic revival of interest in documentary film, Vertov's reflexive and overtly partisan films are of great relevance; but they need to be better known and understood. This is the purpose of "Dziga Vertov - Defining Documentary Film".
- GenresFilm
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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December 3, 2022
The sense of documentary as a combination of recording and argument is a point that has to be made repeatedly when discussing documentary, even in the present. The assumption that a documentary must strive for balance and eschew political bias has led some of the most prominent historians of Soviet cinema to claim that there is a contradiction between documentary and the Communist world-view,4 or to condemn Vertov’s lack of ‘objectivity’: a false virtue he had neither claimed nor desired.
The character of this journalism is clearly illustrated in its dominant and most typical genres: the ocherk and the feuilleton. Both applied to journalism the methods of imaginative literature, engagingly reworking factual material in an attempt to reach out to as wide an audience as possible.
One unusual and characteristic feature of Vertov’s approach to planning and conceiving a film was the stress upon the process of observation. Moreover, the whole notion of ‘life-off guard’ needs to be tempered by the fact that Vertov believed in recording processes and underlying patterns, rather than just events. Hence the notion of ‘Communist decoding’ referred to repeatedly in his writings.
The eschewal of the detailed script, the emphasis placed on observation and on the filming of processes, are part of Vertov’s conception of documentary as an analytical tool implicit in the very notion of Cine-Eye. Indeed, for Vertov, the cinema is presented as an optical tool analogous to the telescope or microscope, enabling him to reveal a new perspective on life: ‘It is as if the eyes of children and adults, the literate and illiterate are opening for the first time.’
Vertov is implying that all is public, there is no private sphere into which a camera has no right to intrude, and the camera therefore needs no consent on the part of individuals to film them. For Vertov, the personal is political.
But what does this elusive notion of poetic film mean, and what does it mean when applied to Vertov? It may be contended that A Sixth Part of the World resembles poetry in three main ways: subjectivity, reflexivity and structure.
Lists and poems have much in common: both weaken horizontal, narrative structures to invite comparison of their items as similar. It is not a great leap from a listing of items in a similar category to the poetic comparison of unexpectedly similar things. A given device cannot be exclusive to the style of documentary or of poetry. The difference lies in the purpose to which the device is put.
Vertov put it vividly: ‘When a critic denounces a horse for its inability to miaow, he is saying something about himself, and not the horse.’
An unintended effect, however, of these panegyrics against fictional cinema and directors was to supply ammunition to those fostering the impression that Vertov was unwilling to structure his material. It was in this spirit that a critic called Levidov argued that Vertov’s ‘caught off-guard’ approach to material was something of a dereliction of duty for a director. This was Eisenstein’s critique of Vertov too. In Eisenstein’s view the role of the director was to use editing to shape ‘reality and real phenomena’, whereas Vertov simply recorded passively.
Man with a Movie Camera is in part a tongue-in-cheek response to such calls to foreground the human being. Here we have not actors but genuine film-makers photographed doing their job: filming. Vertov’s conception of documentary, in which acting is obviated, is foregrounded as never before in a parody of the acted instructional Kulturfilm.
In its very form Man with a Movie Camera is a defence of documentary. For Vertov, however, the defence of documentary was inextricable from the defence of the integrity of cinema itself, since documentary was its purest, least theatrical form.
Certainly, Vertov was one of the first Soviet directors to write about sound, and his experiments with it predate his film debut. As early as 1923, four years before the first sound film, Vertov envisaged the extension of Cine-Eye to the realm of sound in an article entitled ‘Cine- Eyes: A Revolution’. Nowhere in Vertov do we detect a trace of the guarded attitude to the ‘double-edged invention’ of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov in their famous 1928 ‘Statement on Sound’.
Vertov’s approach to sound differed from the other leading Soviet documentarists, Erofeev and Shub, who were wary of incorporating location recorded sound into montage-style constructions.
Vertov described his three ways of recording synchronised sound sequences: if sound and film are recorded on different strips of film at different times then the image is superior to the sound; if on different strips of film at the same time then the sound is better than the image; and if they are recorded on the same strip of film at the same time then both image and sound are satisfactory. This is compounded by the fact that ease of synchronisation makes for difficulty of recording and vice versa.
Characteristically, Vertov maintained a commitment to recording equalling that of the other documentarists, but not to the detriment of film’s expressive power. Recording was never an absolute for Vertov. This approach, and his outspoken defense of it, continued to antagonize exponents of documentary and fiction film alike, and continues to perplex those seeking to appropriate Vertov either as documentarian or reflexive cine-poet.
Moreover, Vertov’s theorisation of film was informed by music, most notably in the theory of intervals. Film was already a rhythmic art, one which structured time, and needed to find its specific rhythm.
The greatest danger of sound film was seen as the talkie, of the re-theatricalization of cinema through synchronised dialogue so typical of much early sound film in America. This was seen as a continuation of the intertitle, and was therefore, like it, an offence against movement, the essence of cinema.
Like Man with a Movie Camera, Enthusiasm is also intended to challenge our concepts of work and entertainment, workdays and celebrations. The notion of the final Sunday, or final sabbath, means the end of a distinction between rest and labour. This is a theme close to Vertov’s heart. In keeping with the spirit of the First Five-Year Plan, henceforth all will be work, and celebration will be part of work.
For Vertov, the image of unveiling represents not only the political trope of casting off the shackles of religion, opening onto light as knowledge, but also filmic awakening. Unveiling becomes a metaphor of liberated vision, embedded within a political metaphor. It is another image like the eye superimposed on the camera lens, standing for the renewed and enhanced vision granted by cinema alone.
The folkloric form also gave Vertov a new justification for his startling juxtapositions of images. He could be poetical since he was showing the world through the eyes of a folk poet rather than a Futurist. This latitude was all the more important as the language of Soviet documentary became increasingly flat and inexpressive. Thus Vertov is free to associate dandelions and flowers budding with Lenin so as to suggest ‘Lenin is springtime’. Lenin becomes a flexible image for the new society, freedom and all that is good. This is clear from a 1933 diary entry: ‘Lenin is when the melancholy songs of slavery grow gay and lively.’
In adapting his method to sound film, Vertov once more innovated by introducing a journalistic form: the interview. In part the interview was a response to criticism that Enthusiasm gave more space to machines than to human beings. Nevertheless, this was a consistent extension of Vertov’s conception of documentary.
In Vertov’s hands the sound bridge has become an instrument of montage, a way of linking together images to suggest associations or concepts.
The day after the screening of Enthusiasm at the Film Society, Chaplin requested Vertov show him the film privately which he duly did.25 After the screening Chaplin gave Vertov the famous letter:
Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician. The professors should learn from him, not quarrel with him.
Congratulations.
Ultimately, Vertov’s method had lost out to other approaches to documentary. However, it was precisely this marginal position which ensured that, when the cinéma-vérité and direct cinema movements reacted against the stagnant mainstream of the form, Vertov appeared far more relevant, and less dated than any of his contemporaries.
In the early 1960s Jean Rouch was one of the first Western film-makers who explicitly drew inspiration from Vertov: ‘When Edgar Morin and I decided to make Chronicle of a Summer [Chronique d’un été, France, 1961] a new experiment in ‘cinéma vérité’, our sole intention was a homage to Dziga Vertov.’ ‘I’m one of the people responsible for this phrase [cinéma- vérité] and it’s really in homage to Dziga Vertov, who completely invented the kind of film we do today.’
Indeed, the very phrase ‘cinéma-vérité’ was a direct translation of ‘kinopravda’ (i.e. Cine-Pravda) by Sadoul, whose 1948 first edition of Histoire du cinéma made the phrase emblematic of Vertov’s whole approach. Sometimes shortened to ‘vérité’, it is now virtually synonymous, even in the English language, with documentary itself.
Digital imagery seems to herald a new scepticism towards documentary as an objective register, further weakening the Griersonian realist tradition. Vertov’s explicitly partisan exhortation, as well as his scepticism towards the image and recording process, echo central themes of the digital age. Indeed, it has been argued that his search for non- narrative solutions to the organisation of material anticipates those of the database.87 Yet, for all his relevance to these themes, Vertov’s revelation of the persuasive power of images was ultimately rooted in record.
The character of this journalism is clearly illustrated in its dominant and most typical genres: the ocherk and the feuilleton. Both applied to journalism the methods of imaginative literature, engagingly reworking factual material in an attempt to reach out to as wide an audience as possible.
One unusual and characteristic feature of Vertov’s approach to planning and conceiving a film was the stress upon the process of observation. Moreover, the whole notion of ‘life-off guard’ needs to be tempered by the fact that Vertov believed in recording processes and underlying patterns, rather than just events. Hence the notion of ‘Communist decoding’ referred to repeatedly in his writings.
The eschewal of the detailed script, the emphasis placed on observation and on the filming of processes, are part of Vertov’s conception of documentary as an analytical tool implicit in the very notion of Cine-Eye. Indeed, for Vertov, the cinema is presented as an optical tool analogous to the telescope or microscope, enabling him to reveal a new perspective on life: ‘It is as if the eyes of children and adults, the literate and illiterate are opening for the first time.’
Vertov is implying that all is public, there is no private sphere into which a camera has no right to intrude, and the camera therefore needs no consent on the part of individuals to film them. For Vertov, the personal is political.
But what does this elusive notion of poetic film mean, and what does it mean when applied to Vertov? It may be contended that A Sixth Part of the World resembles poetry in three main ways: subjectivity, reflexivity and structure.
Lists and poems have much in common: both weaken horizontal, narrative structures to invite comparison of their items as similar. It is not a great leap from a listing of items in a similar category to the poetic comparison of unexpectedly similar things. A given device cannot be exclusive to the style of documentary or of poetry. The difference lies in the purpose to which the device is put.
Vertov put it vividly: ‘When a critic denounces a horse for its inability to miaow, he is saying something about himself, and not the horse.’
An unintended effect, however, of these panegyrics against fictional cinema and directors was to supply ammunition to those fostering the impression that Vertov was unwilling to structure his material. It was in this spirit that a critic called Levidov argued that Vertov’s ‘caught off-guard’ approach to material was something of a dereliction of duty for a director. This was Eisenstein’s critique of Vertov too. In Eisenstein’s view the role of the director was to use editing to shape ‘reality and real phenomena’, whereas Vertov simply recorded passively.
Man with a Movie Camera is in part a tongue-in-cheek response to such calls to foreground the human being. Here we have not actors but genuine film-makers photographed doing their job: filming. Vertov’s conception of documentary, in which acting is obviated, is foregrounded as never before in a parody of the acted instructional Kulturfilm.
In its very form Man with a Movie Camera is a defence of documentary. For Vertov, however, the defence of documentary was inextricable from the defence of the integrity of cinema itself, since documentary was its purest, least theatrical form.
Certainly, Vertov was one of the first Soviet directors to write about sound, and his experiments with it predate his film debut. As early as 1923, four years before the first sound film, Vertov envisaged the extension of Cine-Eye to the realm of sound in an article entitled ‘Cine- Eyes: A Revolution’. Nowhere in Vertov do we detect a trace of the guarded attitude to the ‘double-edged invention’ of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov in their famous 1928 ‘Statement on Sound’.
Vertov’s approach to sound differed from the other leading Soviet documentarists, Erofeev and Shub, who were wary of incorporating location recorded sound into montage-style constructions.
Vertov described his three ways of recording synchronised sound sequences: if sound and film are recorded on different strips of film at different times then the image is superior to the sound; if on different strips of film at the same time then the sound is better than the image; and if they are recorded on the same strip of film at the same time then both image and sound are satisfactory. This is compounded by the fact that ease of synchronisation makes for difficulty of recording and vice versa.
Characteristically, Vertov maintained a commitment to recording equalling that of the other documentarists, but not to the detriment of film’s expressive power. Recording was never an absolute for Vertov. This approach, and his outspoken defense of it, continued to antagonize exponents of documentary and fiction film alike, and continues to perplex those seeking to appropriate Vertov either as documentarian or reflexive cine-poet.
Moreover, Vertov’s theorisation of film was informed by music, most notably in the theory of intervals. Film was already a rhythmic art, one which structured time, and needed to find its specific rhythm.
The greatest danger of sound film was seen as the talkie, of the re-theatricalization of cinema through synchronised dialogue so typical of much early sound film in America. This was seen as a continuation of the intertitle, and was therefore, like it, an offence against movement, the essence of cinema.
Like Man with a Movie Camera, Enthusiasm is also intended to challenge our concepts of work and entertainment, workdays and celebrations. The notion of the final Sunday, or final sabbath, means the end of a distinction between rest and labour. This is a theme close to Vertov’s heart. In keeping with the spirit of the First Five-Year Plan, henceforth all will be work, and celebration will be part of work.
For Vertov, the image of unveiling represents not only the political trope of casting off the shackles of religion, opening onto light as knowledge, but also filmic awakening. Unveiling becomes a metaphor of liberated vision, embedded within a political metaphor. It is another image like the eye superimposed on the camera lens, standing for the renewed and enhanced vision granted by cinema alone.
The folkloric form also gave Vertov a new justification for his startling juxtapositions of images. He could be poetical since he was showing the world through the eyes of a folk poet rather than a Futurist. This latitude was all the more important as the language of Soviet documentary became increasingly flat and inexpressive. Thus Vertov is free to associate dandelions and flowers budding with Lenin so as to suggest ‘Lenin is springtime’. Lenin becomes a flexible image for the new society, freedom and all that is good. This is clear from a 1933 diary entry: ‘Lenin is when the melancholy songs of slavery grow gay and lively.’
In adapting his method to sound film, Vertov once more innovated by introducing a journalistic form: the interview. In part the interview was a response to criticism that Enthusiasm gave more space to machines than to human beings. Nevertheless, this was a consistent extension of Vertov’s conception of documentary.
In Vertov’s hands the sound bridge has become an instrument of montage, a way of linking together images to suggest associations or concepts.
The day after the screening of Enthusiasm at the Film Society, Chaplin requested Vertov show him the film privately which he duly did.25 After the screening Chaplin gave Vertov the famous letter:
Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician. The professors should learn from him, not quarrel with him.
Congratulations.
Ultimately, Vertov’s method had lost out to other approaches to documentary. However, it was precisely this marginal position which ensured that, when the cinéma-vérité and direct cinema movements reacted against the stagnant mainstream of the form, Vertov appeared far more relevant, and less dated than any of his contemporaries.
In the early 1960s Jean Rouch was one of the first Western film-makers who explicitly drew inspiration from Vertov: ‘When Edgar Morin and I decided to make Chronicle of a Summer [Chronique d’un été, France, 1961] a new experiment in ‘cinéma vérité’, our sole intention was a homage to Dziga Vertov.’ ‘I’m one of the people responsible for this phrase [cinéma- vérité] and it’s really in homage to Dziga Vertov, who completely invented the kind of film we do today.’
Indeed, the very phrase ‘cinéma-vérité’ was a direct translation of ‘kinopravda’ (i.e. Cine-Pravda) by Sadoul, whose 1948 first edition of Histoire du cinéma made the phrase emblematic of Vertov’s whole approach. Sometimes shortened to ‘vérité’, it is now virtually synonymous, even in the English language, with documentary itself.
Digital imagery seems to herald a new scepticism towards documentary as an objective register, further weakening the Griersonian realist tradition. Vertov’s explicitly partisan exhortation, as well as his scepticism towards the image and recording process, echo central themes of the digital age. Indeed, it has been argued that his search for non- narrative solutions to the organisation of material anticipates those of the database.87 Yet, for all his relevance to these themes, Vertov’s revelation of the persuasive power of images was ultimately rooted in record.
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January 3, 2025Pretty elucidating discussions of Vertov's place within early Soviet cinema and documentary filmmaking as a whole, deftly avoids some of the more common pitfalls of Western discussion of the early Soviet Union such as the sometimes exaggerated vilification of the spector of propoganda. Its comprehensiveness does rob it of some specificity when it comes to analysis its example films but like most broad studies the notes function as a suitable enough jumping off point for more distinct analysises.
May 12, 2011
Tem muita informação mas achei a reflexão meio rasteira. A análise do Silvio Da-Rin, em "Espelho Partido" é bem mais interessante.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews