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Dziga Vertov Published and Forthcoming in KINO: the Russian Cinema Series Dziga Vertov Published and forthcoming in KINO: The Russian Cinema Series Series Editor: Richard Taylor Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin Peter Kenez The Cinema of the New Russia Birgit Beumers Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film Jeremy Hicks Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (second, revised edition) Richard Taylor Forward Soviet!: History and Non-Fiction Film in the USSR Graham Roberts Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw Josephine Woll Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema Edited by Birgit Beumers Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking Anne Nesbet The Stalinist Musical: Mass Entertainment and Soviet Cinema Richard Taylor Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde Amy Sargeant DZIGA VERTOV Defining Documentary Film JEREMY HICKS Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Jeremy Hicks, 2007 The right of Jeremy Hicks to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84511 377 3 (paperback) 978 1 84511 376 6 (hardback) A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset in Calisto by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd. Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Introduction: Dziga Vertov – Defining Documentary Film 1 1. The Birth of Documentary from the Spirit of 5 Journalism: Cine-Pravda, Cine-Eye 2. Vertov and Documentary Theory: ‘The Goal 22 Was Truth, the Means Cine-Eye’ 3. ‘A Card Catalogue in the Gutter.’ Forward, Soviet!, 39 A Sixth Part of the World 4. New Paths: The Eleventh Year, Man with a 55 Movie Camera 5. Sound and the Defence of Documentary: Enthusiasm 71 6. Documentary or Hagiography? Three Songs of Lenin 90 7. Years of Sound and Silence: Lullaby 106 8. Forward Dziga! Foreign and Posthumous Reception 123 Notes 137 Select Bibliography 171 Filmography 179 Index 189 Acknowledgements Thanks to the general editor of the Tauris KINO series, Richard Taylor, whose responses to queries were always prompt, pithy, and often amusing; to the School of Modern Languages at Queen Mary for giving me the sabbatical leave in 2004–2005 that enabled me to complete the book; to Zhenya Tsymbal for his inspiration; to Faya for her accommodation; and to Donald and Anna for the start in academic life. I am also grateful to Oksana Sarkisova and Valérie Pozner for letting me read their unpublished dissertations, and to the staff at a host of libraries and archives (especially SSEES and IWM) for their help. Most thanks to Inger and Nina for making all worthwhile. vii List of Illustrations 1. Still from Cine-Pravda no. 1. Courtesy of 7 BFI Stills 2. Still from Cine-Pravda no. 21 (Leninist Cine- 12 Pravda). Courtesy of BFI Stills 3. Poster for Cine-Eye by Aleksandr Rodchenko. 22 Author’s Collection 4. Still from Man with a Movie Camera.34 Author’s Collection 5. Still from Forward, Soviet! Author’s Collection 44 6. Still from A Sixth Part of the World.47 Author’s Collection 7. Still from Man with a Movie Camera.55 Author’s Collection 8. Poster for The Eleventh Year by Stenberg 61 Brothers. Author’s Collection 9. Still from Man with a Movie Camera 66 Author’s Collection 10. Still from Enthusiasm.Author’s Collection 75 11. Still from Enthusiasm. Courtesy of BFI Stills 78 12. Still from Three Songs of Lenin.96 Author’s Collection 13. Still from Lullaby. Courtesy of Imperial War 111 Museum, London 14. Still from Lullaby. Courtesy of Imperial War 113 Museum, London 15. Still from News of the Day no. 3, January 1945. 121 Courtesy of Imperial War Museum, London ix Preface I have chosen to translate Kino-Eye, Kino-Pravda and kinok as Cine-Eye. As a result readers will have to determine from context and italics whether I am referring to the film (Cine-Eye), the method, the movement (Cine- Eye) (all kinoglaz) or its members (Cine-Eyes) (kinoki). For reasons of consistency and so as not to confuse the reader I have correspondingly altered my quotations from Julian Graffy’s and Kevin O’Brien’s translations of these terms to Cine-Eye and Cine-Pravda. In the text I have used familiar and more reader-friendly transliterations of Russian names and terms: Mayakovsky rather than Maiakovskii, Koltsov rather than Kol´tsov. In references to Russian terms, in the endnotes, and in the bibliography, I have consistently used the Library of Congress system for transliteration. All unattributed translations from Russian or French are my own. In the endnotes I have given titles or descriptions, years and (where necessary) authors for materials quoted from anthologies and from Vertov’s archive (RGALI Collection 2091) so as to retain a better sense of the evolution of Vertov’s views and the critical climate. Similarly, I have supplied English translations, where they do not already exist, for the titles of Vertov’s written works. xi Introduction: Dziga Vertov – Defining Documentary Film This is the golden age of documentary. But what distinguishes it from other films? Is it devalued by bias or editorial manipulation? Can it capture the unperformed? What gives a film-maker the right to pry and show? These questions, still central for study of the form, lie at the heart of the thought and films of Dziga Vertov. Yet Vertov’s reputation as director of a lone masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera, does not reflect his deep commitment to exploring issues of structure, film activism, surveillance, the status of recording and performance. In fact, the true nature of his engagement with these concerns emerges only from a study of the whole body of his films and writings. That Vertov was the creator of a sizeable body of innovative and distinct films is a fact recognised by retrospectives at recent film festivals in Cambridge and Pordenone. However, as yet there exists no work in English covering his whole career. Dziga Vertov – Defining Documentary Film will fill this gap, enabling a broad swathe of readers to link the familiar and less familiar aspects of his film-making and thinking in a cohesive narrative. At the same time this study challenges dominant views of Vertov solely as avant-garde artist and film poet,1 showing instead how Soviet journalism inspired his creative transformation of newsreel into the new form of documentary film. While documentary has long been said to borrow from journalism,2 this dimension of Vertov’s work has never been adequately explored.3 Yet the example of the Soviet press enabled him to turn newsreel from the illustration or recording of events into an overt attempt to persuade through images. Vertov nevertheless insisted upon intervening minimally in what he filmed, striving for a balance between recording and reworking. Claims that Vertov obviated performance in his films by exclusively employing hidden cameras are likewise an exaggeration. He, in fact, also used reconstruction but evolved methods to combat the tendency to pose. Vertov’s greatest works combine unstaged footage ingeniously so as to unleash a tremendous rhetorical force. They distil the sensibilities of newspaper column and Futurist poem into non-fiction feature films of incredible power and sophistication. In other words, they are classic 1 2 DZIGA VERTOV documentaries, as the book seeks to demonstrate. Yet the sheer novelty of documentary perplexed Vertov’s contemporaries. Critics either would not accept their creative use of newsreel footage or denounced the apparently perverse rejection of acting. Vertov’s struggle to make films, to describe and defend his film-making practice, was the struggle to define documentary as such. 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.5 These same sorts of views still colour reception of contemporary documentaries, leading some to argue that the partisan approach of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 [USA 2004] meant it could not be a documentary.6 Vertov’s achievements in documentary were soon under threat. Towards the end of the 1920s, and more markedly by the early 1930s, Soviet journalism and documentary began to subordinate news to commemoration and the cults of the hero and the leader. Soviet film criticism now began to attack the whole notion of a distinction between documentary and fiction film, insisting that the only point of a film was its ideological stance regardless of the means used to achieve it. Journalism and imaginative writing, documentary and fiction film became largely indistinguishable.
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