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Film Energy: Process and Metanarrative in Dziga Vertov's The Film Energy: Process and Metanarrative in Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (1928)* JOHN MacKAY Historical Prologue With the possible exception of Stride, Soviet [Shagai, Sovet] (1926), The Eleventh Year [Odinnadtsatyi] (1928), Dziga Vertov’s most important film on the great early Soviet theme of electrification and the first of his three Ukrainian productions, is probably the least known and least frequently discussed of Vertov’s major silent documentary features.1 Inaccessibility is surely the prime reason for this neglect: to my knowledge, the film has never been released in any home viewing format in any country, and prints are available in only a few archives worldwide.2 Beyond this, The Eleventh Year, for all the complexity of its montage, imparts a rather sim- ple agitational message, as befits its fundamental purpose as propaganda for the Soviet state’s drive toward industrialization and electrification.3 Beginning with a nearly wordless account of humans and machines collectively overcoming nature’s stony inertia to mobilize water and coal for human (specifically, agricultural and * I would like to thank Annette Michelson, Elizabeth Papazian, Malcolm Turvey, and the students in “Russian Film from the Beginnings to 1945” (2005) at Yale for the many thoughtful remarks that helped me think through the issues discussed in this essay. 1. The other two Ukrainian productions were Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1931). Though sections of the major studies in Russian by N. P. Abramov (Dziga Vertov [Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1962]) and Lev Roshal’ (Dziga Vertov [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982]) have discussed the film, I know of no full-length essay in any language devoted exclusively or even in large part to The Eleventh Year. The most significant comments in English are Graham Roberts’s treatment of the film in his Forward Soviet!: History and Non-Fiction Film in the USSR (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 70, 75, 79, 115; Yuri Tsivian’s catalog entry for the Vertov retrospective at the 2004 Giornate del Cinema Muto, “Odinnadtsatyi/[L’Undicesimo/The Eleventh Year],” 23rd Pordenone Silent Film Festival Catalogue (Sacile/Pordenone: Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), pp. 58–61; and Jeremy Hicks’s brief discussion in his recent Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 56–63. 2. Prints of The Eleventh Year exist in, among other places, Russia at Gosfil’mofond; in Europe at the Austrian Film Museum; in the U.S. at Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Yale University. 3. Tsivian puts it this way in his catalog entry: “It is true that the political theme of this film is as orthodox and plain as its photography and editing are daring and complex, but why do we always have OCTOBER 121, Summer 2007, pp. 41–78. © 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.121.1.41 by guest on 29 September 2021 42 OCTOBER industrial) purposes in the form of electricity (reels 1 through 3), the film goes on to show the benefits of modernization for industrial and household economies and argue for the need to defend those advances militarily (reel 4). It concludes with a celebration, punctuated by the admiring gazes of Soviet, African, Indian, and Chinese comrades, of these industrial achievements (reel 5) and a final affirmation of the upward, modernizing trajectory of conjoined peasant, proletarian, natural, and technological energy (reel 6). Such is the film’s rather unproblematic overall rhetorical shape: neither anarchically playful like Kino-Eye (1924) nor self-reflexively probing like Man with a Movie Camera, there might seem little to do with The Eleventh Year except describe, rather than analyze, its scintillating textures. There are, moreover, possible historical reasons for the film’s ongoing mar- ginalization. Like Stride, Soviet, The Eleventh Year was an apparently “secondary” project shot and produced amid the larger productions of One Sixth of the World (1926) and Man with a Movie Camera.4 Vertov was fired at the beginning of January 1927 from Moscow’s Sovkino studio, following the release of One Sixth of the World, after a series of ferocious arguments with studio head Ilya Trainin. The disputes, centering on what was thought to be the excessive cost of the One Sixth production to the studio and on Trainin’s decision to pass directorial control over the studio’s planned found-footage film commemorating the tenth anniversary of the revolu- tion to Esfir Shub,5 reached the boiling point when Vertov refused to present Trainin with a script for Man with a Movie Camera, footage for which Vertov had to treat such things as a contradiction? Vertov did not, for in the eyes of a Left-wing artist of the 1920s, ten years of Socialism (well, eleven) was a radical social experiment, and as such deserved, nay required, presentation in a radically experimental way.” Tsivian, “Odinnadtsatyi/[L’Undicesimo/The Eleventh Year],” p. 60. I write “drive toward industrialization” rather than “Five-Year Plan” because the actual First Five-Year Plan began only in December 1927—the month the film was completed—on the basis of resolutions at the Fifteenth Party Congress; see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 158. 4. Both Stride, Soviet and the first, unrealized version of Man with a Movie Camera—unrealized because of Vertov’s dismissal from the Sovkino studio—were by-products of the extraordinarily com- plex One Sixth of the World production, which took up most of 1925–26. Stride, Soviet, shot virtually entirely (with the exception of extensively incorporated archival footage) by Kinok Ivan Belyakov with assistance from “film scout” Ilya Kopalin, was shot between late August 1925 and late March 1926. Several other, shorter films were made as part of Sovkino’s contract with the State Trading Organization Gostorg (on whose commission One Sixth was produced) during the course of 1925–26 by Vertov’s Kinoks, including Dagestan (1927, shot by Kinoks Petr Zotov and Iakov Tolchan), Elizaveta Svilova’s Bukhara (1927, shot by Tolchan), and Nikolai Konstantinov’s Around Asia [Vokrug Azii] (1927). This last-named film, shot by one of the many cameramen involved in the One Sixth production, was the only realization of a plan Vertov had to make a “global” film based on the voyage of the Soviet com- mercial cargo ship Decembrist from Odessa to Egypt, Indonesia, and Japan. See, e.g., RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) f. 2091, op. 2, d. 405, ll. 12, 14. 5. This is the film Shub made under the title The Great Path [Velikii Put’] (1927). Vertov had been given the assignment on September 11, 1926, at the same meeting at which Eisenstein was assigned to make his fateful October (1927); the job was handed over to Shub sometime in November 1926. See RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 405, ll. 1–30. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.121.1.41 by guest on 29 September 2021 Film Energy 43 been amassing through 1925 and 1926.6 After several months of melancholy unemployment,7 Vertov was hired by VUFKU (the All-Ukrainian Photo-Film Directorate, based in Kiev) and was contracted to make an anniversary film about industrialization in the Ukrainian SSR, with a focus on the construction of the Dnepr Hydroelectric Station near Zaporozh’e—The Eleventh Year, whose original working title was Journey through Ukraine or simply Ukrainian SSR 8—prior to recom- mencing work on Man with a Movie Camera.9 Vertov’s Eleventh Year crew—his wife and assistant Elizaveta Svilova, cameramen Mikhail Kaufman (Vertov’s brother), Boris Tseitlin, Konstantin Kuliaev,10 and administrator Abram Kagarlitskii—filmed from approximately June 12 to around November 7, 1928.11 The film was edited and, with the aid of technician I. Kotel’nikov, augmented by a large number of 6. A number of the extant shooting diaries for One Sixth of the World indicate that footage was filmed simultaneously for that film and for Man with a Movie Camera (the latter under its working title The Movie Camera’s Race across the USSR), with shots for the two films listed in separate columns; see, for example, RGALI f. 2091, op. 1, d. 12, ll. 1–2. From what I can tell, little or none of the 1925–26 footage made it into the completed Man with a Movie Camera. The main Moscow footage for that film was shot in June 1928 (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 407, ll. 38, 41), and much of its “industrial” footage was filmed during the production of The Eleventh Year in the summer of 1927 (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 39, ll. 14–17, 28–32); this was when Boris Tseitlin, who would be Vertov’s main cameraman on Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass, filmed Mikhail Kaufman climbing up factory chimneys, filming inside foundries, and so on. The other main “second cameramen” who provided footage for Man with a Movie Camera were Konstantin Kuliaev (see below) and Georgii Nikolaevich Khimchenko, who worked with Kaufman and Vertov during the summer of 1928 (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 407, l. 36). 7. Vertov was hired by VUFKU sometime in April 1927; see Roshal’, Dziga Vertov, p. 172. From January through March, he labored intensively on working plans for Man with a Movie Camera (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 236, ll. 16–24ob), and at the end of March he drafted a script for a fascinating, never- to-be-produced film entitled Earth [Zemlia] about Jewish agricultural settlement in the Crimea (RGALI f.
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