Dziga Vertov, the spinning gypsy, born David Abelevich Kaufman in Bielystock in the Russian Empire in 1896, was the son of Jewish librarians. During his lifetime Vertov was not, as many have noted, as celebrated as other Soviet filmmakers of his era such as Sergey Yestenstein or Vsevolod Pudovkin. Today, however, things have changed as they sometimes do and Vertov is as celebrated today as both Yesenstein and Pudovkin.
Vertov, as Jeremy Hicks makes clear in his excellent monograph Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: Tauris, 2007), was not only a maker of what came to be called unplayed, unacted, caught unawares, fly on the wall, actuality, documentary, or non-fiction films--Vertov was averse to calling them documentaries or non-fiction films--he was also, as Hick's subtitle makes clear, a film theorist. Finally, as Hicks notes, Vertov was the founder of an influential school of film makers, the Cine-Eyes, who wanted to film life unaware and who Vertov imagined would one day "publish" a daily cinematic newspaper, a kind of kino-pravda, for the masses. Between 1918 and 1947 Vertov, after 1919 editor, assistant director, and director, and also Vertov's wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, and, after 1922, Vertov's cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman--Vertov called the three the Council of Three--made newsreel films, cine-eye films, cine-truth films, song films, and feature length caught unawares films including Forward, Soviet (1926). A Sixth Part of the World (1926), The Eleventh Hour (1928), Man With a (or the) Movie Camera (1929), the last film with Mikhail, Enthusiasm (1931), Three Songs About Lenin (1934), and Lullaby (1937).
Drawing on archival material, including an extensive analysis of Vertov's writings, the work of post-Thaw Soviet historians of journalism, and film, particularly documentary films, and Western analysts of Vertov, Hicks argues that the Council of Three's films must be understood against the backdrop of late Tsarist and early Soviet journalism. The Council of Three's caught unawares films, Hicks argues, melded the precise description and heroic themes of ocherk and the sharp juxtapositions, ironies, and critical aspects of the feuilleton. The Council of Three's films were thus, according to Hicks, attempts to simultaneously capture via the mechanical eye of the camera, life unaware, and, capture the lives of the heroic Soviet builders of communism, who were, with a little help from the surveiling gaze and paternalistic guidance of Soviet leaders, building the industrial and secular future of not only the Soviet Union but of humankind.
Vertov, as Hicks notes, was an apologist and a polemicist for a particular kind of what we now call documentary film. Instead of finding actuality in the filmic documentation of events, historical reconstructions or stagings of events--though sometimes Vertov did engage in staging and even used animation--in the use of professional actors and scripted scenes, or or the voice of god voice overs so common to documentaries then and now--Vertov even disliked intertitles and tried to keep them to a minimum--Vertov strove for truth in images, sounds, music like structures, and montage, in, in other words, argument arising out of the juxtaposition of images. This, as Hicks notes, eventually put Vertov at odds with the doctrine of socialist realism, which became dogma in the late 1920s in the USSR, given that the films Vertov made were rarely easily understood by the millions the high priests of socialist realism thought all art should be. This, in turn, made it difficult for Vertov, Svilova, and to a lesser extent, Kaufman, to make the films they wanted to make in the Stalin era USSR.
Some have seen a decline in the quality of the Vertov group's films after 1929 and The Man With a Movie Camera. For many Vertov and Svilova sold their souls to the devil of socialist realism after 1929 and their films increasingly became a film by the numbers garden variety socialist realism. Hicks, however, notes that elements from what some call the Council's avant garde (futurist and constructivist) era are present in Vertov's and Svilova's later documentaries and that theoretically, at the very least, Vertov pursued his dream of a pure documentary cinema that fit well with internationalist and nationalist Soviet Communist orthodoxy, making the marginalisation of Vertov and Svilova somewhat ironic, I suppose.
Though by the time of his death in 1954 Vertov was largely forgotten in the USSR and around the world, it would be, as Hicks notes, the experimental nature of the Vertov group's films, particularly Man With a Movie Camera, that would resurrect both the reputation and the works of Dziga Vertov particularly in the countercultural West. After the 1960s Vertov joined the ranks of Yesenstein--whose work and approach Vertov disdained--Pudovkin, Alexandr Dovzehnko, Abram Room, and others, as one of the great auteurs of Soviet cinema, a rank Vertov thought he deserved all along. Vertov now became celebrated by film makers such as the French auteur Jean Rouch, father of a reborn cinema vérité or direct cinema in the 1960s, an approach Rouch and others traced back to Vertov, and Jean-Luc Godard, who, with Jean-Pierre Gorin, formed Groupe Dziga Vertov in that failed revolutionary year of 1968. Vertov's reputation was also resurrected in the USSR during the periodic Thaws of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. In 1966, for instance, Soviet historian Sergey Drobashenko published an edited for the new Soviet orthodoxy collection of Vertov's diaries, articles, and projects that was published in Moscow. In this new somewhat thawed USSR Three Songs About Lenin came to be regarded as Vertov's and Svilova's masterpiece.
As Hick's book and other articles and books published in the West and in post-Soviet Russia point up, Vertov, Svilova, and Kaufman, are alive and well and living in the limited compass of intellectual, scholarly, and academic cultures, these days. Given the impact of Man With a Movie Camera on film theorists, and film students and cineastes of both the theoretical and practical film making variety, I very much expect the legacies of all three to live as long as media live. As Hicks notes, after all, Vertov can be seen as the father of database media theory and practise and surveillance media theory and practise, two major aspects and characteristics of the brave new digital media world, though the increasingly mainstream paternalistic practitioners of both throughout the core nation world, may not realise it.
Vertov, as Jeremy Hicks makes clear in his excellent monograph Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: Tauris, 2007), was not only a maker of what came to be called unplayed, unacted, caught unawares, fly on the wall, actuality, documentary, or non-fiction films--Vertov was averse to calling them documentaries or non-fiction films--he was also, as Hick's subtitle makes clear, a film theorist. Finally, as Hicks notes, Vertov was the founder of an influential school of film makers, the Cine-Eyes, who wanted to film life unaware and who Vertov imagined would one day "publish" a daily cinematic newspaper, a kind of kino-pravda, for the masses. Between 1918 and 1947 Vertov, after 1919 editor, assistant director, and director, and also Vertov's wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, and, after 1922, Vertov's cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman--Vertov called the three the Council of Three--made newsreel films, cine-eye films, cine-truth films, song films, and feature length caught unawares films including Forward, Soviet (1926). A Sixth Part of the World (1926), The Eleventh Hour (1928), Man With a (or the) Movie Camera (1929), the last film with Mikhail, Enthusiasm (1931), Three Songs About Lenin (1934), and Lullaby (1937).
Drawing on archival material, including an extensive analysis of Vertov's writings, the work of post-Thaw Soviet historians of journalism, and film, particularly documentary films, and Western analysts of Vertov, Hicks argues that the Council of Three's films must be understood against the backdrop of late Tsarist and early Soviet journalism. The Council of Three's caught unawares films, Hicks argues, melded the precise description and heroic themes of ocherk and the sharp juxtapositions, ironies, and critical aspects of the feuilleton. The Council of Three's films were thus, according to Hicks, attempts to simultaneously capture via the mechanical eye of the camera, life unaware, and, capture the lives of the heroic Soviet builders of communism, who were, with a little help from the surveiling gaze and paternalistic guidance of Soviet leaders, building the industrial and secular future of not only the Soviet Union but of humankind.
Vertov, as Hicks notes, was an apologist and a polemicist for a particular kind of what we now call documentary film. Instead of finding actuality in the filmic documentation of events, historical reconstructions or stagings of events--though sometimes Vertov did engage in staging and even used animation--in the use of professional actors and scripted scenes, or or the voice of god voice overs so common to documentaries then and now--Vertov even disliked intertitles and tried to keep them to a minimum--Vertov strove for truth in images, sounds, music like structures, and montage, in, in other words, argument arising out of the juxtaposition of images. This, as Hicks notes, eventually put Vertov at odds with the doctrine of socialist realism, which became dogma in the late 1920s in the USSR, given that the films Vertov made were rarely easily understood by the millions the high priests of socialist realism thought all art should be. This, in turn, made it difficult for Vertov, Svilova, and to a lesser extent, Kaufman, to make the films they wanted to make in the Stalin era USSR.
Some have seen a decline in the quality of the Vertov group's films after 1929 and The Man With a Movie Camera. For many Vertov and Svilova sold their souls to the devil of socialist realism after 1929 and their films increasingly became a film by the numbers garden variety socialist realism. Hicks, however, notes that elements from what some call the Council's avant garde (futurist and constructivist) era are present in Vertov's and Svilova's later documentaries and that theoretically, at the very least, Vertov pursued his dream of a pure documentary cinema that fit well with internationalist and nationalist Soviet Communist orthodoxy, making the marginalisation of Vertov and Svilova somewhat ironic, I suppose.
Though by the time of his death in 1954 Vertov was largely forgotten in the USSR and around the world, it would be, as Hicks notes, the experimental nature of the Vertov group's films, particularly Man With a Movie Camera, that would resurrect both the reputation and the works of Dziga Vertov particularly in the countercultural West. After the 1960s Vertov joined the ranks of Yesenstein--whose work and approach Vertov disdained--Pudovkin, Alexandr Dovzehnko, Abram Room, and others, as one of the great auteurs of Soviet cinema, a rank Vertov thought he deserved all along. Vertov now became celebrated by film makers such as the French auteur Jean Rouch, father of a reborn cinema vérité or direct cinema in the 1960s, an approach Rouch and others traced back to Vertov, and Jean-Luc Godard, who, with Jean-Pierre Gorin, formed Groupe Dziga Vertov in that failed revolutionary year of 1968. Vertov's reputation was also resurrected in the USSR during the periodic Thaws of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. In 1966, for instance, Soviet historian Sergey Drobashenko published an edited for the new Soviet orthodoxy collection of Vertov's diaries, articles, and projects that was published in Moscow. In this new somewhat thawed USSR Three Songs About Lenin came to be regarded as Vertov's and Svilova's masterpiece.
As Hick's book and other articles and books published in the West and in post-Soviet Russia point up, Vertov, Svilova, and Kaufman, are alive and well and living in the limited compass of intellectual, scholarly, and academic cultures, these days. Given the impact of Man With a Movie Camera on film theorists, and film students and cineastes of both the theoretical and practical film making variety, I very much expect the legacies of all three to live as long as media live. As Hicks notes, after all, Vertov can be seen as the father of database media theory and practise and surveillance media theory and practise, two major aspects and characteristics of the brave new digital media world, though the increasingly mainstream paternalistic practitioners of both throughout the core nation world, may not realise it.
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