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Dziga Vertov, Travel Cinema, and Soviet Patriotism*

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Dziga Vertov, Travel Cinema, and Soviet Patriotism* Across One Sixth of the World: Dziga Vertov, Travel Cinema, and Soviet Patriotism* OKSANA SARKISOVA The films of Dziga Vertov display a persistent fascination with travel. Movement across vast spaces is perhaps the most recurrent motif in his oeuvre, and the cine-race [kino-probeg]—a genre developed by Vertov’s group of filmmak- ers, the Kinoks 1—stands as an encompassing metaphor for Vertov’s own work. His cinematographic journeys transported viewers to the most remote as well as to the most advanced sites of the Soviet universe, creating a heterogeneous cine-world stretching from the desert to the icy tundra and featuring customs, costumes, and cultural practices unfamiliar to most of his audience. Vertov’s personal travelogue began when he moved from his native Bialystok2 in the ex–Pale of Settlement to Petrograd and later to Moscow, from where, hav- ing embarked on a career in filmmaking, he proceeded to the numerous sites of the Civil War. Recalling his first steps in cinema, Vertov described a complex itin- erary that included Rostov, Chuguev, the Lugansk suburbs, and even the Astrakhan steppes.3 In the early 1920s, when the film distribution network was severely restricted by the Civil War and uneven nationalization, traveling and film- making were inseparable. Along with other filmmakers, he used an improvised * This article is part of my broader research “Envisioned Communities: Representations of Nationalities in Non-Fiction Cinema in Soviet Russia, 1923–1935” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Central European University, 2004). I would like to warmly thank my teachers and friends for sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm throughout this long journey. With special gratitude to the late Neia Zorkaia, Alexander Deriabin, Anna Geréb, Péter Kenéz, Naum Kleiman, Evgenii Margolit, and Balázs Trencsényi. I would also like to thank Yuri Tsivian for inviting me to take part in such exciting research on the polemics of Dziga Vertov’s early works. I thank Christopher Ryan, Malcolm Turvey, and Rachel Churner for their help with editing the text. 1. The Kinoks group was created by Dziga Vertov and included Mikhail Kaufman, Elizaveta Svilova, Ilia Kopalin, Ivan Beliakov, Alexander Lemberg, and others. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoki. Perevorot,” Lef, no. 3 (1923), pp. 135–43. 2. In Belarusian: Belastok; in Russian: Belostok. Located in northeastern Poland near the border with Belarus. After the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795 it belonged to the Prussian Kingdom, then after the Peace of Tilsit signed in 1807 it passed to Russia. In the years 1920–39 the city was again part of independent Poland. In September 1939 it was annexed by the Soviet Union as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and since 1945 it has been a part of Poland. 3. Russian State Arts and Literature Archive (hereafter RGALI) f. 2091, op. 1, d. 179, ll. 16–17. OCTOBER 121, Summer 2007, pp. 19–40. © 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.121.1.19 by guest on 27 September 2021 20 OCTOBER distribution network of cine-trains [kino-poezda] and traveling projectors [pered- vizhki] to make and exhibit his films. Traveling remained a lifelong preoccupation for Vertov. His spatially most ambitious film, A Sixth Part of the World [Shestaia chast’ mira] (1926),4 features a cine-race across the Soviet universe stretching from Dagestan villages to Siberian forests. It creates a highly ambiguous image of a “union of Soviet borderlands,” which earned the author both high praise as an “epic cine-poet” and vilification as an “exoticism-hunter.”5 In this essay, I situate this unjustly overlooked work within the context of early travel films and point to the structural and conceptual innova- tions introduced by Vertov into this genre. I also reinsert the work into the context of its reception and briefly outline the further development of the travel motif in Vertov’s later films and film scripts. Local Sights, Global Visions: Exoticism and Patriotism in Early Travel Films Long before the appearance of cinema, fascination with remote and unfa- miliar peoples and places was catered to by literature, drawing, painting, and travel photography.6 Colonial expansion, military advances, and commercial exploitation created the ideal conditions for the merging of education, entertain- ment, propaganda, and advertisement in both verbal and visual travel accounts. The world seemed easily accessible via a variety of images not only to travelers, but also to those who familiarized themselves with the travels of others.7 By the 1910s, travel films had become a typical part of the composite programs produced and distributed by all major film companies. Early travel cinema evolved in three main 4. The full title of the film is A Sixth Part of the World. A Kino-Eye Race around the USSR: Export and Import by the State Trading Organization of the USSR [Shestaia chast’ mira. Probeg Kino-Glaza po SSSR: Eksport i import Gostorga SSSR]; see Yuri Tsivian, ed., Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, trans. Julian Graffy (Sacile/Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), p. 408. The title is sometimes trans- lated as One Sixth of the World, as in Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); or as A Sixth of the World, as in Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003). 5. The contributions to the debate over the film are translated in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, pp. 182– 256. For an overview of A Sixth Part of the World in the context of construction of the Soviet space in cin- ema, see Widdis, Visions of a New Land, pp. 108–11. 6. See Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Peter D. Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel, and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 7. See Tom Gunning “The Whole World within Reach: Travel Images without Borders,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 25–41; Jean-Jacques Meusy, “La diffusion des films de non-fiction dans les établissements parisiens,” and Jacques Malthête, “Georges Méliès, de la non-fiction à la fiction,” both in 1895 18 (Summer 1995), the- matic issue “Images du réel: La non-fiction en France (1890–1930),” ed. Thierry Lefebvre, pp. 173, 175–78, and 71–83, respectively; and Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, pp. 171–203. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.121.1.19 by guest on 27 September 2021 Across One Sixth of the World 21 Image from A Sixth Part of the World. 1926. directions that affected the construction of ethnic and national imagery: ethno- graphic research, popular educational films, and commercial cinema shot against an “ethnographic” background.8 Along with “exotic” lands, filmmakers also explored and recorded local con- texts, motivated by the desire to educate and inspired by ongoing nation-building.9 This was especially true during World War I, when the cinema was viewed as an important means for encouraging patriotism and mobilizing popular support for the war.10 Even after the war, travel films often continued to present local cultures in national terms, ascribing a symbolic and cultural unity to natural vistas.11 8. See Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic,” in Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), pp. 9–24; Christian H. Stifter, “Der Urania-Kulturfilm, die Exotik des Fremden und die Völkerversöhnung: Veränderungen und Kontinuitäten: vom Austro- faschismus, über den Nationalsozialismus zur Zweiten Republik,” Spurensuche 1–4 (2002), pp. 114–48; and Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903–1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 123–32. 9. Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 4 (Summer 2001), p. 582. 10. Wolfgang Mühl-Benninghaus, “Newsreel Images of the Military and War, 1914–1918,” in A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), pp. 175–84; Rainer Rother, “Learning from the Enemy: German Film Propaganda in World War I,” in Elsaesser, A Second Life, pp. 185–91; Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), pp. 18–19; Michael Paris, ed., The First World War and Popular Cinema: 1914 to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); and Denise J. Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 11. For example, Wein-Weib-Gesang (Willy Achsel, 1924) fused publicity for the wine industry with a patriotic narrative about the “Germanic” landscape. Der Rhein in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Felix Lampe and Walter Zürn, 1922) featured the river as a symbolic center, unifying German culture both historically and geographically: the visitor not only viewed the monuments of the past but saw history itself “coming alive” in staged episodes, ranging from the Roman Empire to the Napoleonic wars, from the Nibelungen to the life of Beethoven. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.121.1.19 by guest on 27 September 2021 22 OCTOBER Travel and scenic films quickly became popular in Russia, and locally filmed travelogues, undertaken for commercial as well as educational reasons, appeared alongside imports.
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