»Liberated from temporal and spatial constraints [...] I decipher anew a world unknown to you.« That statement stems from Dziga Vertov’s 1923 manifesto »Kinoks – Revolution«1, asserting that the filmmaker’s activity has a revolutionary role on three fronts: politically, economically (within the Soviet system) and artistically (as the avant-garde). Vertov’s notion of »kino-glaz« comprises a conception of the capabilities of the mechanical eye, which not only »catches life unawares« but also perceives the world anew – an approach akin to Benjamin’s ideas of the optical unconscious of photography. The »Kinoks« around Vertov carry their cameras out into the »pulsating heart of life«, just like the ethnographic precursors of the Nouvelle Vague (Jean Rouch) or indeed the experimental representatives of New American Cinema (Jonas Mekas) would subsequently do.
This concept of wanting to see better seems, in as much as it is a technological promise, to be an augur of contemporary surveillance apparatus: Vertov defines the cinema-eye of the Kinok camera men as ubiquitous and analogous to the »radio-ear« as »a film apparatus for covert observation, concealed recording«2. The »kino-glaz« is however to be understood primarily as an aesthetic programme: in addition to focusing on the (always also social) nature of what is recorded, Vertov is just as concerned with appropriate organisation of the images (and sounds), the activity of the Kinok film editors engaged in montage. Vertov’s complex, ambitious approach to composition can be seen, for example, in his symphonic portrait of an industrial region, »Entuziazm« (1931), in the passages where telegraph Morse code in the soundtrack is accompanied by rail tracks and sleepers speeding past with fast editing: the technical origin of the montage notion of the interval appears clearly here. »Entuziazm«, just like »Celovek s Kinoapparatom« (The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) is not simply a film about trains and machines, but also a poetic essay about cinema and radio.
Harun Farocki’s installation »Contre-Chant« (Counter-Music, 2004), which incorporates sections of Vertov’s »Celovek s Kinoapparatom« as quotations, reveals how the utopia of »The Man with a Movie Camera« has been simultaneously realised and transformed since the city symphony films of the twenties. Cameras nowadays have certainly broken free of constraints and are omnipresent, yet their automatic surveillance shots, cut adrift from the »Kinoks«, are at best a reworking with a utilitarian focus. Nor do the images now find their way back into the cinema, nor for the most part even onto television screens. In his thirty-minute double-screen projection, inspired by Vertov, Farocki depicts a day unfolding in a city, the diverse modes of visual monitoring of that city now being taken on by what are known as intelligent “seeing machines”. This annexation of Vertov’s film makes it possible to portray the relationship between humans, machines, the economy and society in their historicity: whilst a utopian dimension is no longer ascribed to the rhythm of machines, the modern masses have visibly been rationalised and adapted to the production process. Farocki’s montages, which mingle found material and footage he has shot himself, also pay tribute to the Russian Avant-garde in formal terms. The interstices between the images serve as a locus for reflection, entirely in keeping with Vertov’s notion of the interval: the temporal and visual discontinuity in the shots aims to combine the leap in conception with the conceptual leap.
There has been a reappraisal of Dziga Vertov recently, with new input stemming not solely from film historians in the context of major retrospectives3, but in particular with contributions from media theoreticians too due to Vertov’s interest in experimenting with recording systems and transmission channels. Media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinski, along with critic Jean-Paul Fargier, refer to Vertov as a visionary and a pioneering thinker in his ideas on television (as radio plus film) 4; Barbara Wurm has even identified Vertov as a media artist in a catalogue published by the Film Museum in Vienna.5 In this respect, Vertov’s multimedia approach can be understood first and foremost in the context of his own era. In a pioneering volume on Vertov’s silent films, Yuri Tsivian recently underscored the context in which the Russian »cubo-futurist« poet was working, referring to Vertov’s illustrated poems, which also need to be »heard and seen«. 6 Vertov’s contemporary relevance should however also be seen in the context of historical reception. This is partly because the archive situation has changed dramatically since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also because new generations are now involved in establishing the coordinate system of the relevant aesthetic issues through the current reappraisal of political film after ’68 (from Guy Debord and Jean-Luc Godard to Alexander Kluge).
Various readings used to distinguish inter alia between political, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries and formalistic avant-garde artists. Vertov’s concept of »kino-pravda« was transposed quite literally as »cinéma-verité« (truth-cinema) in the documentary-ethnographic film practice of the post-war years and the Nouvelle Vague, with all the ambitions to incorporating links back to reality that arise once again in the montage process. The »Ciné-Tracts« produced by advocates of political agitation in the post-68 era are the explicit heirs of Vertov’s revolutionary film practice of showing weekly news reels in railway carriages in distant Soviet republics. Duo Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard, who set up the Groupe Dziga Vertov, worked as a production collective. However, given the importance he ascribes to montage, Godard also proves to be a Vertovian, which impacts on his films and his political manifestoes, which were recently reprinted in a catalogue. For Godard in 1970 making a film »political« (and not: »making a political film«) meant, following in Vertov’s footsteps, »engaging in the montage of a film before shooting, while shooting and after shooting«7.
Vertov, like Jean-Luc Godard or Harun Farocki subsequently, was an assured master when it came to compiling material shot by others, yet wanted to protect his own films from plunderers. He held the welding of images depicting crowds of people acclaiming Lenin, as well as shots of machines, (such as in »Kinopravda N°13«), to be the art of a »master builder«, able to take unpromising material and construct from it a »kino-phrase«, following the intervals of the movement – that is how he sees himself in his manifesto »Kinok-Revolution«. In contrast, formalistic thinker Victor Sklovsky, one of his contemporaries, criticised for example »Sagaj, Sovet« (Forward, Soviet!, 1926) for the very fact that the majority of the shots here were filmed »neither by Vertov nor in keeping with his instructions«8. Yuri Tsivian has reconstructed and analysed the polemical debates between Vertov and his critics. Sklovsky’s criticism about the way the newsreel footage is processed, disregarding time and space, emerges in sharp focus here, highlighting that this approach robs the material of its soul and its documentary quality: »These directors transform our film archives into piles of hacked-up films. « Here Sklovsky is not simply concerned about the lack of a clear authorial signature, of a script in documentary films, but above all addresses the question of the »subject«. Vertov, in contrast, seeks to preserve films from theatrical staging and drama, placing the montage of images of »life caught unawares« at the heart of his approach as an act of reading and reflection. Thus in Vertov’s work, for example, the mere repetition of images within a film, either with an altered rhythm, as an individual strip of freeze-frame shots or as edited material, 9 already proves to be a pivotal component of filmic thinking: on the one hand as a formal/musical principle of variation and on the other hand as a visible form making it possible to tap into the shift in significance and the structural determinancy of the images.
In the early 1920s Vertov, inspired by his sound experiments, which he called a »laboratory of hearing«, dreamt of an »omnipresent ear and mouthpiece«, the »radio-telephone« (in »Kinok-Revolution«). Vertov proved to be a driving force for aesthetic renewal in the early days of sound films. Like Renoir in the world of feature films, Vertov experimented with direct sound in documentary films. In one of his own accounts back in 1947 he underscores that he was the one who liberated sound equipment from the confines of the atelier; for example in those days recordings of the sounds made by machines on the factory floors of the steel industry, such as those made for »Enthuziazm« (1931), broke new ground. They are striking nowadays above all for their symphonic processing, as Charlie Chaplin, once opposed to sound films, has pointed out enthusiastically. Vertov’s idea of sound mixing guided by musical principles, endowing sound with a new function, such as in Luigi Russolo’s futuristic compositions, anticipates approaches later adopted in noise music. His split screens, time-lapse and fade sequences from the city symphony »The Man with a Movie Camera« (1929) are heralds of electronic and digital art, which take leave of the traditional filmic montage of shots, setting store instead by selecting a mix of images and collage.

The »Dziga Vertov« retrospective was shown as part of the »Kino-Revolution« programme from 1st to 28th May 2006 in the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna. The Film Museum also released the »Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa) « DVD in winter 2006.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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