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.

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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.

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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. 2091, op. 2, d. 236, ll. 38ob–48); the script has recently been published in Alexander Deriabin, ed., Dziga Vertov: Iz Naslediia, vol. 1, Dramaturgicheskie Opyty (Moscow: Eisenstein-Center, 2004), pp. 116–18. A number of filmmakers planned films about the settlements, and at least two were made (by Abram Room [1927] and Aleksandr Lemberg [1930]). For more on the settlement project, see Jonathan L. Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). 8. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 236, ll. 50–51ob. Yet other variant titles were The Electric Monument (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 37, l. 1ff.) The Rapids (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 38, l. 1) and, according to Lev Roshal’, The Great Workdays (in Dziga Vertov, p. 177). The film had its present title by May 26, 1927, at the latest (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 236, l. 60). 9. See Dziga Vertov, “From the History of the Kinoks” (1929), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 95. 10. Two additional assistants, Barantsevich and Stefanovich, also worked with the group in Ukraine (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 38, l. 17 and d. 237, ll. 3, 7ob), with Barantsevich apparently handling the lights for the mining shots. The main second cameraman was evidently Tseitlin; Kuliaev seems to have worked primarily early on in the production, when the group was shooting in Moscow and at the Volkhov Hydroelectric Station near Leningrad (RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 236, l. 65). 11. The production’s approximately five-month shooting itinerary took the group from Moscow (June 12–13) to the Volkhov Hydroelectric Station (June 16–23) to the Ukrainian sites of Kharkov (June 28–July 10), the Kamenskoe Iron Foundry (July 13–August 7), the Rutchenkovo and Lidievka mines and coke ovens (August 17–25), the only-just-begun Dnepr Hydroelectric Station (ca. September 12–30), and ultimately to Kiev for the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (November 7). The group also shot in and around the port of Odessa and on the border with Romania, but I have been unable to determine the exact dates of that filming. RGALI f. 2091, op. 1, d. 21, ll. 1–24; op. 1, d. 24, l. 1; op. 2, d. 39, ll. 1–32ob; op. 2, d. 236, ll. 64–71; op. 2, d. 237, ll. 3–9ob.

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superimpositions and other “complex shots” between mid-November and late December 1927. Evidently screened in Kiev early in January 1928,12 its first major documented exhibition took place in Moscow before the Association of Revolutionary Cinema Workers (ARK) on February 16, 1928.13 Although The Eleventh Year elicited the controversy typical for a Vertov film—about which more in a moment—it is clear that Vertov was already fully re-engaged by March 10 with Man with a Movie Camera, the film that would occupy him entirely for the remain- der of 1928.14 By Vertov’s standards, The Eleventh Year production went quite smoothly and uneventfully, and indeed we might think that the filmmaker regarded this work as on the one hand a matter of sheer contractual obligation, and on the other as a fine way to secure valuable footage for his renewed and long-cherished Man with a Movie Camera project.15 We might also surmise that The Eleventh Year’s themes of electrification and industrialization were of less creative urgency to Vertov than the fashioning of his self-reflexive “manifesto in celluloid”—although plans for The Eleventh Year indicate that that film, too, was at one point going to explicitly allude to the filmmaking process throughout.16 Yet while Vertov himself rarely singled out The Eleventh Year for special attention when discussing his achievements in later years,17 there are good reasons, both “intrinsic” and “extrinsic,” for regarding it as an important work. It is both the first film in which Vertov’s long-standing

12. A review of the film by Ia. Belsky appeared in the Kiev paper Kommunist on January 6, 1928; see “The Eleventh Year,” in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, ed. Yuri Tsivian, trans. Julian Graffy et al. (Sacile/Pordenone: Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), p. 298. 13. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 201, ll. 1–41. The film received its Moscow public release on May 15, 1928. Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, p. 408. 14. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 407, l. 25. 15. By far the most significant problems encountered during the production concerned Vertov’s personal and creative relationship with his brother Mikhail, who was clearly eager to continue the independent work he had begun with his and Kopalin’s Moscow (1926). While shooting at the Volkhov Hydroelectric Station, Kaufman waved a flag while riding in a cart suspended over the waters of the dam, and images of this flag-waving appear prominently in the penultimate reel of Man with a Movie Camera. Apparently the group had not received permission to film there, and Kaufman’s gesture got the group into some trouble with the station’s controller-supervisor. According to Vertov, Kaufman reacted “rudely” to his older brother’s reproaches; on the pages of his diary, Vertov accused Kaufman of being “disproportionately” sure of his own photographic abilities, risk-averse, immobile, and irrita- ble, although he attributed these qualities to some unspecified illness Kaufman was suffering from: “[Kaufman] is indeed sick with a whole range of stomach and nervous ailments which are hard to sort out. To these is added hypochondria. To hypochondria, nervousness. To nervousness, irritability. To irritability, a persecution complex. This is all, to be sure, in embryo, but already it taints all the joy of filming.” RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 236, ll. 68–69; dated July 19, 1927. The brothers never worked togeth- er again after Man with a Movie Camera. (Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, all transla- tions from foreign languages are my own.) 16. An early, undated draft of the film’s scenario is at least partially structured in the form of the diary notes of the assistant cameraman, who recounts both the activities filmed in the mines and facto- ries and the cameraman’s filming of them. RGALI f. 2091, op. 1, d. 19, ll. 9–15ob. 17. The film barely figures, for example, in his “Artistic Calling Card” of 1947—the closest thing to an autobiography within Vertov’s written corpus. See “Artistic Calling Card,” in Dziga Vertov: The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum, ed. Thomas Tode and Barbara Wurm (Vienna: Austrian Film Museum/SYNEMA, 2006), pp. 119–20.

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desire to create a film that dispensed (or nearly dispensed) with intertitles was realized, and the first culmination of his early experiments with superimposition and split-screen effects. It is also (from the “extrinsic” point of view) the Vertov film produced closest to the cusp of the momentous shift from the mixed economy of the years of NEP (New Economic Policy: 1921–27) to the total appropriation by the state of control over the economy during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32). On the cinematic front, The Eleventh Year was previewed immediately prior to the First All-Union Party Conference on Cinema of March 1928, which marked a major turning point in the long process of bringing the studios under the “direct and close guidance” of Party organs.18 Finally, the film had, I think, a special resonance for Vertov both personally and creatively, inasmuch as its production brought him back, for the first time since 1920, to those regions of the USSR (southern Russia and the Donbass area of eastern Ukraine) through which he had traveled on the famous “October Revolution” agit-train. The coal- and steel-producing Donbass had been a crucial strategic front during the Civil War19 and would arguably

18. The citation is from Stanislav V. Kosior, who made the introductory speech at the conference; quoted in Richard Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 107. 19. Vertov’s History of the Civil War (1921) contained footage of the destruction of Ukrainian metal- lurgical factories, though primarily in and around Kiev (western Ukraine).

A survey, filled out and signed by Vertov, indicating the results for a screening on March 13, 1920, in the Donbass town of Gorlovka. The cinema division on board the “October Revolution” agit-train dur- ing its eighth journey (March 2–25, 1920) conducted the screening. The survey indicates where the train stopped (here, Gorlovka), where the screening took place (“inside the [cinema-] car”), how many screen- ings (“one, for children”), which films were shown (three, including Ladislaw Starewicz’s animation The Dragonfly and the Ant [1913]), number of spectators (220), social makeup of the audience (“the children of workers”), who provided explanations of the films (“comrade Vertov”), the reactions of specta- tors (“joy and laughter from the kids”), and which films were most popular (The Dragonfly and the Ant). From GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation) f. 1252, op. 1, d. 64, l. 153.

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become the epicenter of the Stalinist industrialization drive during the early 1930s.20 Vertov would return to this area for Man with a Movie Camera, Enthusiasm, and Three Songs of Lenin (1934); together, these films narrate the changes in the industrializing eastern Ukraine, culminating, in Three Songs of Lenin, with the opening of the great Dnepr Hydroelectric Station, the very first stages of whose construction Vertov depicts in the first reel of The Eleventh Year, at the beginning of what we might call his “biography”—a tendentious one, to be sure—of the Donbass.

A Card Catalog in a Gutter

Around the time of its release, The Eleventh Year attracted considerable criti- cal attention, if less than the more grandiose and scandal-ridden One Sixth of the World had.21 Kaufman’s photography was widely praised,22 and Vertov’s usual sup- porters (particularly the critic Naum Kaufman, no relation) praised the director’s use of the “more perfect” camera eye to create out of “semantic segments of rhythm” “a synthetic image of the machine” and “a notion of the growth of our industry or our construction.”23 The bulk of the reviews, however, while free of the violently hostile rhetoric to which most of Vertov’s other films (excepting Three Songs of Lenin) were subjected, expressed doubt as to the film’s overall artistic suc- cess. Two reproaches were heard especially often, reproaches which, when taken together, might seem mutually contradictory. One strand of response regarded the film as rich in movement and sensory appeal but so poor in meaning and of such formal complexity as to be indiscernible, at times, from a chaos of images. Reviewers wrote of “the muddled montage,”24 of the film as “too disjointed, too various in the character of its material,” and as offering a “purely aesthetic demon- stration of a large number of machines without any connection to their real meaning and purpose, their industrial significance.”25 In one of the few German

20. For more on this history, see my “Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective,” KinoKultura 7, http://www.kinokultura.com/articles/jan05-mackay.html. 21. The loudest uproars generated by The Eleventh Year grew out of Osip Brik’s April 1928 review of the film in Novyi lef (about which more below) and the strange 1929 case of the German found-footage filmmaker Albrecht Viktor Blum’s appropriation of sections of it, without Vertov’s permission, for his 1928 In the Shadow of the Machines; for more on the latter controversy, see Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, pp. 377–82, and RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 412, ll. 45, 54–56. 22. For example, by Mikhail Kol’tsov (“Odinnadtsatyi,” Pravda, February 26, 1928) and Osip Brik (“Odinnadtsatyi Vertova,” Novyi lef, no. 4 (1928), pp. 27–29; both in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, pp. 303, 310. 23. Naum Kaufman, “Vertov,” Sovetskii Ekran 45 (1928), pp. 6–7; trans. in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, pp. 295–97. A special booklet was also published by VUFKU to accompany the film (Odinnadtsatyi [Kiev: VUFKU, 1928]). 24. Belsky, “The Eleventh Year,” in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, p. 298. 25. L. Shatov, “Odinnadtsatyi,” Zhizn’ Iskusstva, February 21, 1928, p. 14; trans. in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, p. 298. Similar comments were made by the anonymous reviewer for Molot (“Odinnadtsatyi,” Molot, June 26, 1928) and by critic and filmmaker Vitaly Zhemchuzhny (“Odinnadtsatyi,” Vechernaia

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reviews of the film, Frankfurter Zeitung editor Benno Reifenberg put it especially sharply when he asked “for whom these images were taken in the first place”: The worker who sees these effective shots of iron smelting knows more about this kind of work than the images tell him; the layman who doesn’t know anything about this kind of work doesn’t learn anything about it from these images, instead receiving only its aesthetic effect. And that is precisely what is irrelevant here. He ended by bemoaning “the troubling fact that those who make these Russian films about labor do so nonobjectively—that is, in an aestheticizing way.”26 On the other hand—sometimes in the same reviews—Vertov was accused of imposing entirely extraneous “symbolic” meanings upon his footage, often (it was suggested) in a desperate effort semantically to anchor images that, deprived of the orientation offered by newsreel-type informational intertitles, threatened to drift into nonsignificance. L. Shatov argued that Vertov had “obviously failed to bear in mind that an artistic synthetic image is beyond the capabilities of a non- fiction newsreel film,” and that throughout The Eleventh Year Vertov unsuccessfully attempts to counterfeit such an artistic synthesis either with the help of semantic associative chains [that] grow at a frantic rate, or through refined multiple exposures and other similar photo-tricks, which are often whipped up into a cheap symbolism which has outlived its time.27 Vitaly Zhemchuzhny likewise wrote of the “cheap symbolism” yielded “when a real filmed factory turns into a symbol of industrialization, and real man into ‘Man’ with a capital letter.”28 Vladimir Fefer, expanding on the same point, argued that in the The Eleventh Year The material loses its individuality, and becomes only a toy in the direc- tor’s hands. . . . The gatherers and organizers of facts should not have armed themselves with a lyre and grown long hair.29

Moskva, February 4, 1928), who wrote that the nonlogical, “lyrical and emotional” structure of the film means that “the viewer quickly gets exhausted, loses the line of sequence, and simply takes in only indi- vidual sequences, without linking them together”; see Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, pp. 298, 301. 26. Benno Reifenberg, “Für wen sieht das ‘Kino-Auge’? Zur Diskussion um den russischen Film- regisseur Dziga Vertov (Frankfurt, den 25 Juli),” Frankfurter Zeitung, July 25, 1929; in RGALI f. 2091, op. 1, d. 96, l. 9. The film was shown in Germany during Vertov’s first trip to Europe (May through August 1929); many of the German news articles about The Eleventh Year touched mainly on the Albrecht Blum controversy. See note 21, above. 27. Shatov, in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, pp. 298–99. 28. Zhemchuzhny, in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, p. 301. 29. Vladimir Fefer, “‘Odinnadtsatyi’ Dzigi Vertova,” Chitatel’ i pisatel’. Ezhenedelnik literatury I iskusstva, no. 4 (1928), in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, p. 306.

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Left and right: Images from The Eleventh Year. 1928. These are shots taken in September 1928 during the first phases of the construction of the Dnepr Hydroelectric Station. The left image depicts the “Crag of Love,” one of a number of large rocks in the Dnepr shown in the film’s first few moments. In the right image (not contiguous in the film), the crag is “brought down to size” by workers previously dwarfed and thwarted by the giant stones.

A particularly low blow was struck at the stormy ARK preview, when several speak- ers compared The Eleventh Year to Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), which had just been playing in Moscow, on the basis of the rapid editing and split-screen “sym- bolic” effects common to both films.30 A year and a half later in Frankfurt, Reifenberg would repeat the charge of symbol mongering, while making refer- ence to a well-known image in the film’s first reel: Vertov mounts a giant worker on a tiny, miniature-like mountain. In the midst of an unheard-of confusion of details of laboring activity, he places this picture of a worker and has him symbolically swing the ham- mer. He converts his comrades in labor into a metaphor for “labor”— a metaphor that we no longer tolerate even in the worst and most taste- less works of our own industrial literature.31 One might reply that there is, in fact, nothing contradictory about these dis- tinct complaints. Vertov, the critics claim, refuses the most necessary tool of silent documentary newsreel—explanatory intertitles that designate, in Viktor Shklovsky’s phrase, “the date, the time, and the place” whence a given shot originates, without which the “newsreel . . . is a card catalogue in a gutter”32—and because of this he

30. Vertov’s repetitions in The Eleventh Year were specifically compared to the rapid intercutting between the National Assembly and Napoleon crossing the stormy sea in Gance’s film; see RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 201, ll. 7–14. 31. Reifenberg, “Für wen sieht das ‘Kino-Auge’?” 32. Viktor Shklovsky, “Kuda shagaet Dziga Vertov?,” Sovetskii Ekran 32 (1926), p. 4; trans. in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, p. 170.

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either makes recourse to strained figurative (“symbolic”) procedures, or simply edits his material without any signifying framework as a guide. Yet obviously enough, the criticisms more fundamentally point to a stark divide, seemingly on the levels of both reception and production, between too much meaning and not enough (or none at all). To be sure, this would not be the last time Vertov’s work would be critiqued for its apparently simultaneous deficit and surplus of significa- tion.33 Indeed, a striking feature of Vertov’s films is the frequency with which they bring us almost immediately to the conceptual knot at the center of documentary theory and practice: the tension between relatively autonomous “indexical traces of a real past,” and “the control of pastness,” the sequencing and signifying work performed upon those (photographic) traces.34 Why does Vertov’s work inflame this tension so insistently, and how, conversely, might the underlying contradic- tion be rethought, if not resolved? Here I shall bracket various potential answers to these questions—such as the possibility that Vertov’s reviewers are obtuse ideologues, or that Vertov is simply a stubborn cinematic contrarian, or that his aesthetic is basically incoherent— to speculate about another, conceptually more fruitful alternative. In an earlier essay, I hypothesized that Vertov conceived of documentary photographic registra- tions as having the ability, if properly executed and displayed, to make the specific, salient features of a given phenomenon (a place, an action, a process) actually legible to an audience without verbal aids. Meanwhile, I claimed that Vertovian “montage” is above all a way of making the interrelationships between these disparate phenomena visible, and therefore ultimately of expanding the boundaries of visual perception as such.35 I want to refine this characterization here by suggesting that Vertov finds some of the basis of his conceptions of both the legibility of indexical photographic registration and of the power of editing to represent relationship in the belief that all existent phenomena of any kind are manifestations of a single, continually mobile energy that leaves traces of its effects while not being itself directly representable. I will show how Vertov’s con- ception of cinema—read as much out of his artistic practice as from his theoretical writings—derives in part from what the intellectual historian Anson Rabinbach has identified as the nineteenth-century tradition of “productivism” or “transcendental materialism.” This tradition was based in the thermodynamic dis- coveries and models offered by Hermann von Helmholtz, Lord Kelvin, and Rudolf Clausius, and it holds that “human society and nature are linked” by virtue of that fact that grounding “all productive activity, whether of laborers, of machines, or of natural forces” is “a single, universal energy . . . that cannot be either added to or

33. For an extended discussion of this issue in relation to Enthusiasm, see my “Disorganized Noise.” 34. I am quoting here from the most important recent discussion of this question: Philip Rosen’s “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts,” in his Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 234. 35. This is the argument made in “Disorganized Noise,” although the focus there is on documen- tary sound.

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destroyed.”36 Vertov’s own immersion in this doctrine happened in a rather con- centrated way, during his student years (1914–16) at the Psychoneurological Institute in Petrograd, where transcendental materialism was the accepted ground for scientific theory and practice. Within Vertov’s mature film work, the task of documentary moving photography becomes to a significant extent one of register- ing as vividly as possible the traces of energy; the job of montage, by extension, is to narrate the trajectory of energy, the conversions it undergoes, including the forms that still-latent energy might adopt. And it is in The Eleventh Year—a film about energy, the harnessing of energy, and the forms that energy takes, as regis- tered across changing material surfaces—that an “energeticist” model, or myth, of cinematic signification finds fullest expression within Vertov’s oeuvre.37 It should be readily apparent, however, that for artists like Vertov—that is, for professional propaganda artists concerned to promote and participate in the construction of socialism—the problem of this model is that (assuming its picture of reality is correct) there is nothing inherently “progressive” or even particularly “meaningful” about energy flow. It simply happens, and indeed, as Rabinbach indicates, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which adumbrates what we know as “entropy”) might imply a slow, spiraling, and inevitable decline of the universe into “heat death” rather than its optimistic opposite.38 Yet a representation of sheer energy flow, without “real meaning and purpose,” could hardly suffice as the premise for a documentary about Soviet industrialization in 1927–28. At the very least, Vertov’s detractors would seem justified in thinking that newsreel-type explanatory intertitles, largely abjured by Vertov in The Eleventh Year, would be the most efficient way of anchoring a specific image of labor to its setting and ostensive purpose—that is, of giving it a particular narrative role and progressive direction. That would certainly be the “classical” position in relation to newsreel-based cinema. In an important recent study, Mary Ann Doane maintains that early cin- ema (ca. 1896–1912) gradually if unevenly imposed the “classical form” of narrative order and mise-en-scène—an imposition that reinforced the already- established sense of cinematic time as necessarily “irreversible,” due to the steady, unidirectional path of the film through the camera or projector—upon images that, given the nature of photographic film, could in fact be registrations of the purely contingent or sheerly random. As such, Doane argues, early cinema partici- pated alongside statistics, thermodynamics, and other disciplines in functioning

36. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 3. Malcolm Turvey has illuminatingly discussed the relevance of Rabinbach’s work on “energeticism” to interpretations of Vertov in “Can the Camera See? Mimesis in Man with a Movie Camera,” October 89 (Summer 1999), pp. 25–50; esp. 35–37. 37. An initial proviso: in what follows, I do not intend to assert that energeticism is the sole frame- work within which Vertov’s films and thought should be considered, but rather to add energeticism to those other notions (like Constructivism and, more problematically, Marxism) that have already been established as useful for thinking about Vertov’s work. 38. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 62.

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“to restabilize a time subject to multiple disruptions in the nineteenth century’s confrontation with the epistemological implications of the loss of determinism and law.”39 If what Doane claims is true, it would seem that Vertov in The Eleventh Year stages a return, as he so often does, to primordial questions of filmmaking, as though confronting the problem of contingency-versus-order for the first time, but now under conditions that promise to revolutionize in toto the human rela- tionship to nature.40 In part because he sees his own film work as participating in that revolution—by helping to reconfigure, expand, and sharpen perception— Vertov refuses some of the conventional structuring and narrativizing tools of newsreel, intertitles above all, choosing instead to have viewers attend to what he believes to be the legible surfaces of reality itself. He thus produces images that are on some level analogous to the graphic representations of energy generated by scientific measuring-inscribing devices, whose first appearance roughly coin- cided with that of cinema.41 Yet the evolutionary, developmental pathos of socialist construction requires more than mere inscription of light on a photo- sensitive surface, and Vertov mobilizes an array of rhetorical devices—some fundamentally heterogeneous to the “energeticist” model as such—to endow his film of energy with the proper narrative meaning.42

Social Immortality

Before examining how these still somewhat abstract proposals actually oper- ate within The Eleventh Year, it will be necessary to determine more precisely the sources of “transcendental materialism” with which Vertov might have come in

39. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 139. 40. For some reflections on what his contemporaries sometimes called Vertov’s “infantilism,” or his continual reinventing or purifying of cinema to make it usable in Soviet society, see my “Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist film,” Film History 18, no. 4 (2006), pp. 376–91, especially p. 384. To be sure, Vertov was no believer in “temporal irreversibility” (viz. the famous beef-to-bull sequence in Kino-Eye) and seems to have had a rather complex, fluid, Einsteinian conception of time, spiced by good doses of Leninist voluntarism and futuristic utopianism. 41. Scientific energy measurement and proto-cinematic exploration overlapped in Helmholtz fol- lower Etienne-Jules Marey’s famous graphic and “chronophotographic” representations of bodily processes. “By deciphering the signs produced by the body’s most intimate processes the graphic method ‘penetrates the intimate function of the organs, where life is expressed by an incessant move- ment.’ The use of instruments to decode ‘nameless, nonacoustic languages . . . issuing from matter’ is closer to the work of a linguist than a physician. . . . These tracings reveal the ‘langue inconnue’ of physiological time, the interior rhythms of the body.” Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 95. 42. In my discussion of these devices, I will ignore the importance of music for Vertov (and silent cinema generally) as a means of guiding interpretation and affective response. The “musical scenario” for The Eleventh Year, which included such stirring material as the Flying Dutchman and Rienzi overtures, was recently published in Deriabin, Dramaturgicheskie Opyty, pp. 121–22. More regrettably, I will also ignore the extraordinary way, noted by many observers, that Vertov manages to imply sound entirely visually; indeed, this is a major feature of The Eleventh Year, and no account of the film can be complete without a close consideration of this “silent sound.”

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contact, and the degree to which this ideology recognizably informs his thought and work. Certainly, books on contemporary physiology and works by Russian Helmholtzians like Nikolai Lange were available in the large bookstore/lending library that Vertov’s father Abel Kaufman ran in Bialystok from 1893;43 school and family acquaintances of the Kaufmans might have been important in this respect as well.44 But there can be little doubt that Vertov’s major encounter with tran- scendental materialism (or energeticism) came during his approximately two-year period of study (1914–16) at Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev’s Psychoneurological Institute in Petrograd.45 Bekhterev (1857–1927) was not only one of the founda- tional figures in Russian psychiatry and neurology—he had studied under Charcot and Wundt, among others—but a psychophysicist of world reputation and enor- mous prestige whose works appeared in German and French starting in the 1890s. Bekhterev founded the Psychoneurological Institute in 1907, and it was there that, in addition to an enormous amount of pedagogical work,46 he continued his researches and developed his late theory of “collective reflexology,” an effort to understand the totality of human behavior in terms of various displacements and conversions (“reflexes”) of energy.47 Whatever modifications he may have brought to the basic energetic theory through his neurological research and speculative ambition, Bekhterev, whose views were dominant at the Institute, was clearly

43. See A. K. Kaufman, Dobavochnyi katalog russkikh knig biblioteki A. K. Kaufmana v Belostoke 1909 g. (Bialystok: Oppengeim, 1909). The centrality of Helmholtz in Russian writing on psychology at the turn of the twentieth century can hardly be exaggerated; he is crucial for the work of Ivan Pavlov, I. M. Sechenev, and Vladimir Bekhterev (see below) among many others. As Rabinbach shows, Helmholtz should “be credited as a major contributor to social thought” for his “elaboration of the modern con- cept of labor power as the quantitative equivalent of work produced, regardless of the source of the energy transformed. Helmholtz was the first to demonstrate explicitly the equivalent between natural, inorganic, and social conceptions of labor power.” Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 57. 44. Here I am thinking particularly of Vertov’s favorite aunt Masha (Rivka-Miriam) Gal’pern, who both became a doctor in Petrograd (later practicing in Israel) and apparently gave the Kaufman broth- ers their first camera. Vertov lived with her while he was studying at the Psychoneurological Institute in Petrograd; see the research contained in Valérie Pozner’s “Vertov before Vertov: Psychoneurology in Petrograd,” in Tode and Wurm, eds., Dziga Vertov, pp. 12–15, and Vertov’s student file in TsGIASPb (Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstsvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga), f. 115, op. 2, d. 4048, l. 13. As a student at the Women’s Higher Medical Institute in St. Petersburg, Masha Gal’pern had studied “nervous illnesses” for two semesters in 1910 with Vladimir Bekhterev himself. TsGIASPb f. 436, op. 1, d. 2552, l. 5ob. 45. For more details on the institute’s innovative curriculum and Vertov’s study there, see Pozner, “Vertov before Vertov.” The famous journalist Mikhail Kol’tsov, who gave Vertov his first job in cinema, journalist Larissa Reisner, author and filmmaker Grigorii Boltianskii, and director Abram Room were all fellow students. TsGIASPb f. 115, op. 2, d. 9788, 7917, 965, 366. 46. Some 15,000 students registered at the Institute between 1908 and 1918; see Pozner, “Vertov before Vertov,” p. 13. 47. See V. M. Bekhterev, Collective Reflexology: The Complete Edition, ed. Lloyd H. Strickland, trans. Eugenia Lockwood and Alisa Lockwood (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001). After the 1917 revolution, Bekhterev worked on questions of labor efficiency and many other topics at the insti- tute, now renamed the State University of Medical Science. “Bekhterevism” was officially disapproved following the so-called “reflexological discussion” of 1929, and Bekhterev’s reputation revived in the USSR only very gradually after Stalin’s death in 1953, although his hidden influence persisted in the intervening years through the work of his many students.

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always an orthodox Helmholtzian who regarded all phenomena as manifestations of a single, not-directly-representable energy, as he indicates in his 1902 essay on “The Psyche and Life”: our entire inner world is . . . one of the manifestations of a general uni- versal energy which serves, through the conversion of latent energy, as the origin for the self-determining activity of organisms with their par- ticular goal-directed effects upon the external world; the whole varie- gated nature of the external and internal world is conditioned by many and varied conversions of a single, general, unified universal energy, the specific forms of which we call luminous, thermal, electrical, and so on, including the latent energy of organisms.48 By “latent energy,” Bekhterev is here referring to that energy, partially derived from the brain and partially from external stimuli, which within the conscious subject is actively converted into the two interlocked aspects of the psyche: the “nervous current” produced by the firing of neurons, and “psychic or subjective changes,” associated with “material changes in the brain which occur in parallel with psychic processes.”49 Clearly enough, Bekhterev’s energetic conception is radically monistic: There is ultimately no difference, on his account, between mental entities and processes and physical ones. We find a particularly forceful articulation of this position in his lecture on “The Immortality of the Human Subject as a Scientific Problem,” delivered at a ceremonial speech day before the entire Psychoneurological Institute in February 1916, when Vertov was a student there. Bekhterev’s chosen theme was a topical and extremely painful one: he begins by noting how the ques- tion of immortality becomes particularly acute at times like the present, “when almost every day brings news of the deaths of many hundreds and thousands of people on the fields of battle.”50 It can be assumed that many if not most in attendance at the lecture had been directly touched by the devastation wrought in

48. V. M. Bekhterev, “Psikhika i Zhizn’,” in Psikhika i Zhizn’: Izbrannye trudy po psikhologii lichnosti v dvukh tomakh, ed. G. S. Nikiforov and L. A. Korostyleva (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 1999), vol. 1, p. 73. Helmholtz is a constant fulcrum of authority for Bekhterev in his works on space perception (e.g., Teoriia obrazovaniia nashikh predstavlenij o prostranstve, 1884), neurology, and psychiatry. See especially the remarks in his 1902 Die Energie des lebenden Organismus on “latent energy” as the common basis for both psychic and physical phenomena in the body: “With the designation ‘energy’ we are by no means linking it to the common notion of ‘physical energy.’ . . . According to our interpretation, energy or power [Kraft] is in its essence nothing less than an active ubiquitous principle within the nature of the universe itself.” Bekhterev adds that we cannot perceive this energy in itself, but only its “expressions . . . in the constant transmutations of material things around us.” W. v. Bechterew, Die Energie des lebenden Organismus [no. 16 in the series Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens, ed. L. Loewenfeld and H. Kurella] (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1902), p. 31. 49. Bekhterev, “Psikhika i zhizn’,” p. 71. 50. “Bessmertie chelovecheskoi lichnosti kak nauchnaia problema,” in Bekhterev, Psikhika i Zhizn’, pp. 225–52; here p. 225. The lecture was first published as a special supplement to the important jour- nal Herald of Knowledge [Vestnik Znaniia] 2 (1916), pp. 1–23, and was reprinted several times.

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Russia by World War I, including Vertov, whose entire family was forced to leave Bialystok and seek refuge in Petrograd in 1915.51 Bekhterev’s goal in his speech is to bring consolation to his audience within the terms of his own scientific out- look, and thus he appeals to the law of conservation of energy—which states that the total amount of energy in a closed system, like the universe, remains constant, and energy considered within the bounds of such a system can neither be created nor destroyed—to fashion an idiosyncratic defense of the belief in immortality. After reasserting that “all phenomena . . . including the internal processes of living creatures or the manifestations of ‘spirit,’ may and must be regarded as derivatives of a single universal energy,”52 Bekhterev goes on to argue at once for the perishability of all things and for their paradoxical persistence as “traces” left by their activity within the total continuity of energy exchange in the universe: Everything in the world is in motion, everything is flowing; the world is an eternal movement, the unceasing conversion of one form of energy into another: thus declares science. There is nothing constant; one thing always succeeds another. People are born and die, kingdoms appear and are destroyed. Nothing stays the same even for a minute, and it only seems to the human being that upon death he decays and vanishes, turning into nothing. . . . But this is not so. The human being is an actor and participant in the overall universal process. It’s obvious that any new step forward in science, technology, art, and ethical life remains eternal. . . . But even the everyday activity of the person does not disappear without a trace.53 The reason for this persistence of “traces of activity” seems, again, to be the con- servation of energy through its various conversions. (That energy might be indeed imperishable while its legible “traces” remain fully subject to decay seems not to occur to or concern Bekhterev.) What Bekhterev has in mind is a kind of grand cosmic developmental trajectory—he referred to his own outlook, tellingly, as an “evolutionary monism”54—in which each individual subject would partici- pate actively, while recognizing both the contingency of her “individual” existence and its necessary consequentiality for the future. (Again, the problem of the absolute unpredictability and illegibility of those “consequences,” given the com- plexity of the universe, is not addressed.) In profoundly utopian fashion, quotidian material existence is regarded through an optic that inflects it upward, in an immensely slow but still evolutionary arc:

51. See Pozner, “Vertov before Vertov,” p. 15, and on the refugee situation more generally, Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). The Russian Army suffered “a total of five million casualties for 1914–17.” Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, second ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 37. 52. “Bessmertie chelovecheskoi lichnosti kak nauchnaia problema,” p. 230. 53. Ibid., p. 242. 54. Ibid., p. 232.

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When a person dies, the organism decomposes and ceases to exist—that is a fact. Through the decomposition of complex protein and carbon- based substances the body breaks down into simpler substances. Thanks to this process, the energy is partially freed, partially again bound to serve as the basis for the growth of the vegetable kingdom, which in turn serves as nutritional material for life, and as a consequence as the condi- tion for the development of energy in new organisms. In this way, that which is called the physical side of the organism, that which bears the name of the body, breaks down and decays, but this does not mean that it is destroyed. It is not lost, but is merely converted into other forms and serves the creation of new organisms and new creatures, which through the law of evolution are capable of endless metamorphoses and perfec- tion. Thus, the cycle of energy does not end even after the death of the organism, and assists in the development of life on earth. . . . Not one human act, not one step, not one idea, expressed in words or even with a simple look, gesture, or mimicry in general, disappears without a trace. This is because every act, word, or gesture whatsoever or mimetic action is inevitably accompanied for the person himself by specific organic impressions, which in turn must have an effect on him as a subject, turn- ing into new forms of activity in the succeeding period of time.55 Even if Bekhterev never uses the word “sacrifice,” instead speaking of “disinter- ested service of . . . all of humanity to the point of forgetting oneself, to the point of annihilation of one’s own personal interests,”56 his evolutionary monism implies a continual sublating absorption of “individuals” into the evolving collec- tive. In a passage whose general relevance to Vertov’s later activities will be obvious, he clarifies that he is talking not about individual immortality but rather social immortality, in view of the indestructibility of that psycho-nervous energy which constitutes the basis of the human subject. Or, to use the language of philosophy, we are speaking of the immortality of the soul, which in the course of its full individual life, through mutual interac- tions passes as it were into thousands of surrounding human subjects; through specifically cultural attainments (such as writing, the press, tele- graph and wireless, telephone, gramophone, various works of art, tools of various kinds, and so on) as well, it spreads its influence far beyond the bounds of the immediate relation of one subject to another—this, not only if these subjects exist simultaneously, but also if they exist at various times, that is, in the relationship of the oldest generations to the newest.57

55. Ibid., pp. 233–34. 56. Ibid., p. 251. 57. Ibid., p. 238.

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The question of the validity of Bekhterev’s dubious defense of belief in immortal- ity will not detain me here; more interesting by far is the demonstrable extent to which the influence of these notions can be recognized within Vertov’s creative and theoretical work. I strongly suspect that Vertov’s preoccupation with move- ment and with labor, particularly obvious in early manifesta like “We: Variant of a Manifesto” (1922) and “Kinoks: A Revolution” (1923)—with their call for “the organization of movement,” for “the ordered fantasy of movement,” “the revela- tion of pure movement, the celebration of movement on the screen,” for letting the camera “be drawn or repelled by movement”58—derives in part from his immersion in Bekhterevian materialism. (We ought to affirm the importance of Russian and Italian Futurist influence here as well, while bearing in mind the cen- trality of Helmholtz disciple Etienne-Jules Marey to the Futurists—as well as to Marcel Duchamp—in their efforts to “represent the energy of the body in action.”59) Needless to say, within the Helmholtzian framework dominant in Russian scientific thought during the early twentieth century, movement would virtually invariably have been conceptualized in terms of energy flow.60 Evidence suggests that Vertov’s earliest encounter with the problem of cine- matically representing movement took place at the Psychoneurological Institute as well, under the guidance of the local Helmholtzians. In an interview conducted by Donald Crafton in January 1978, Vertov’s youngest brother Boris Kaufman gave an account of the origins of Vertov’s work in cinema that contains an astonishing mention of Bekhterev’s Institute: My earliest memory of my brother Dziga Vertov and myself was while we were still in Russia [in Petrograd], and he was just starting to become fascinated with cinematography. He took me twice to the Institute. . . . I forget the name of it. We had some screening there and

58. See Michelson, Kino-Eye, pp. 9, 10, 19. 59. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 115. In addition to Duchamp (in the 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase), Rabinbach mentions Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Umberto Boccioni as among the artists directly influenced by Marey. “In rendering visible ‘movements that the human eye cannot perceive’ and in converging with Bergson, with cubism, and with Futurism, Marey entered the vocabulary of modern art” (ibid.). Marey had been known in Russia at least since 1875, when a translation of his 1873 Machine Animale: Locomotion Terrestre et Aérienne [Mekhanika Zhivotnago Organizma: Peredvizhenie po zemle i po vozdukhu] (St. Petersburg: Znanie, 1875) appeared, and he was regularly recalled in pre-revolutionary film journals; a 1930 book on scientific uses of the movie camera mentions Marey as the first to use the camera in physics, singling out his work on “le mouvement des liquides étudié par la chronophotogra- phie.” L. Sukharebskii and A. Ptushko, Spetsial’nye Sposoby Kinos’emki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1930), p. 3. 60. I have not come across Russian scientific writing from the period that radically dissents from the energeticist perspective on movement; even those who reject the energeticist ideology (like O. D. Khvol’son in his Znanie i Vera v Fizike [Petrograd: F. R. Fetterlein, 1916], pp. 14–15) criticize the materi- alist monism of the paradigm, its reductiveness and refusal to countenance non-material realities, rather than its account of movement as such. Movement had certainly been analyzed in terms of ener- gy exchange and conservation in Russia since at least the 1870s. See Istoriia Mekhaniki v Rossii, ed. I. Z. Shtokalo et al. (Kiev: Naukova Dumka, 1987), pp. 223–58.

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he showed me what could be done by this miraculous means. I still remember the time-lapse photography with plants growing out of the soil into full growth, and especially flowers opening before your eyes, in time-lapse photography. That is how early I was already aware of his early camera work.61 The period referred to here must be 1915–16, when Vertov (still David Abelevich Kaufman, of course) was around nineteen years of age, and Boris, twelve or thir- teen. The last sentence, which suggests that this time-lapse photography was the product of Vertov’s own “early camera work,” is at the very least a tantalizing hint; what we can say with certainty is that, at this time, several major figures at the Psychoneurological Institute were writing about scientific-documentary cinema, and that at least one of them was involved in making scientific films.62 An article in the Petrograd film journal Kinematograf from early 1915 indi- cates that Professor Vladimir A. Vagner of the Psychoneurological Institute had “resolved to use cinema for scientific purposes,” and to that end was having many zoological and natural-science samples filmed.63 Vagner, the vice-president of the Psychoneurological Institute and head of the Petrograd Imperial Commercial Training School, was one of the founders of comparative psychology and animal psychology: what we would call today the study of animal behavior, though with a strong physiological inflection. He was also a major scientific popularizer who pro- duced educational books for children on the scientific observation of nature well into the 1920s. At the time Vertov was studying at the Institute, Vagner was insist- ing that “cinema would lead to a revolution in science, and would leave to future generations a large supply of scientific explanations.”64 Vagner’s own article on “The role of cinema in the area of phenomena in motion,” which appeared in the next issue of Kinematograf,65 stresses, as the title suggests, the uses of cinema for the study of movement, particularly excessively slow or rapid movement. He men- tions the Norwegian physicist Carl Størmer’s use of motion pictures to study the slow fluctuations of the northern lights; he discusses filming the growth of leaves, the development of eggs, and the rapid motion of the wings of insects. Indeed, the central power of the cinema, he asserts, lies in its ability to reveal otherwise invisible aspects of phenomena in motion: “Cinema literally opens up a new world of phenomena . . . entirely new points of view on these phenomena, and, in the end,

61. Donald Crafton, “Boris Kaufman: Shooting Vigo’s Films,” in Boris Kaufman Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Box 5, “Papers” (file 1), p. 1. 62. None, to my knowledge, has survived. 63. Kinematograf 1 (1915), p. 12. 64. Ibid. 65. V. A. Vagner, “Rol’ kinematografa v sfere iavleniia dvizheniia,” Kinematograf 2 (1915), pp. 1–2. Vagner’s article appeared under the same title in Vestnik Kinematografii 111, no. 9 (May 1, 1915), p. 10, and was reprinted as “Kinematograf, kak orudie izsledovanii” (“Cinema as a tool for research”) in Fotograficheskie Novosti 6 (1915), pp. 90–92.

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new possibilities for grasping them.”66 Bekhterev himself weighed in on “Cinema and Science” about a year later, though he noted that it was hardly new by then to observe how “cinema can be applied to the scientific study of various nervous dis- orders connected with motion.” “Only the cinema,” he affirmed, “can reproduce all the separate moments of a given movement, like an act of walking, derange- ment of gait, or gestural expression.”67 In short, there is considerable evidence showing that early on Vertov was embedded in a discursive context—one that seems to have directly inflected some of his first experiences in cinema, despite his later self-representation as a “new Adam” of the 1917 revolution—in which energeticist doctrine, the study of movement, and the representation of move- ment were all linked. If we leap ahead to Vertov’s mature works, it is obvious enough that in at least three of them—One Sixth of the World, The Eleventh Year, and Man with a Movie Camera—processes of energy conversion, with human labor as a central relay point, provide crucial representational pretexts for the films’ rhetoric, in whole or in part. In One Sixth of the World, which is essentially a cognitive map of the NEP economy’s structural basis in the state’s coordination of innumerable small enter- prises as a means of slowly accumulating industrial capital and (thereby) of modernizing the USSR, the “evolutionary conversion” of energy is nothing less than the governing conceit of the entire film.68 While working on that film and the first, unrealized version of Man with a Movie Camera in 1925, Vertov wrote some remarkable sketches for a series of film- études, none of which were produced but which in some cases presage episodes in his realized films. Each étude is a compressed vision of long- or medium-term process; the shorter sketches depict unidirectional change (such as a proposed four-shot film depicting a peasant woman passing from youth to old age),69 but the longer ones offer representations of evolutionary spirals, with each link in the narrative chain cemented by energy exchange. The following étude on death, which still includes explanatory intertitles (shown here in italics), is particularly interesting in light of both Bekhterev’s energeticist relativizing of individual exis- tence and Vertov’s later work:

66. Ibid. (emphasis in original). 67. V. M. Bekhterev, “Kinematograf i Nauka,” Kinematograf 3 (1916), p. 1. 68. See further John MacKay and Charles Musser, “Shestaia Chast Mira/[La Sesta Parte del Mundo/A Sixth Part of the World],” 23rd Pordenone Silent Film Festival Catalogue, pp. 55–58. One of a number of “flow charts” Vertov drafted for One Sixth indicates the steps of energy conversion under NEP: the nat- ural wealth of the USSR is converted by the labor of workers, peasants, and members of national minorities into useful products that are then processed and sold abroad in the foreign market by the State Trade Organization. The same organization then imports materials that go into developing Soviet industry, which in turn makes “perfected instruments of production” to be purchased and used by workers, peasants, and members of national minorities to increase their output. RGALI f. 2091, op. 1, d. 91, ll. 2–3. [For an analysis of A Sixth Part of the World, see Oksana Sarkisova’s essay elsewhere in this issue of October.—Ed.] 69. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 235, l. 6.

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1. The body of the deceased is lowered into the grave, his wife [standing by]—Time passes.

2. The body decays—Worms begin to crawl.

3. Worms move into the body—The work begins.

4. The worms dig into the decayed body—Bacteria come to help the worms.

5. Bacteria under the microscope—Finally, you end up as:

6. [A chart indicating] what a person is made up of—Carbon, iron . . . nitrogen is absorbed into the roots of grasses.

7. Animation [showing nitrogen being absorbed]—The animal eats the grass.

8. A sheep eating grass—The human eats the animal.

9. [The sheep] is killed and eaten—The human lives, and lives . . . then dies.

10. Death—He is buried in the earth.

11. Burial of the deceased—He is consumed by worms and bacteria.

12. Magnified view [of worms and bacteria]—And will become food for various plants.

13. Grain and other plants growing

14. Animals eat grass, oats, hay

15. Grain being consumed in various parts of the USSR—Digestion. The sketch concludes with a representation of the gathering of both human and equine dung—the former acquired through the “cleaning of public lavatories”— its dispersal on the fields as fertilizer, and a final shot of a “sea” of grain, with the word “Harvest” imprinted on the image itself.70 Clearly enough, no scene in One Sixth of the World, which focuses rather on the gathering of the products of labor and the conversion of that labor-energy into something new through rationaliza- tion of trade, corresponds directly to this profoundly Bekhterevian sketch. Yet it has a conceptual affinity to the great “marriage-death-burial-birth” sequence in

70. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 235, ll. 3–4. The sketch is dated June 21, 1925.

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Man with a Movie Camera, where, without details of putrefaction or intertitles, the very feeling of the cyclicality of life, inflected in the direction of birth and the New, is conveyed with unforgettable power. Interestingly, another of the longer 1925 sketches, on the theme “Everything Changes,” depicts straightforward gener- ational progression, with a female “you” being born, playing with dolls, mimicking her parents, getting married, and giving birth to a son who in turn plays sports, studies, works in a factory, and gets married; the sketch concludes with “a kiss.”71

Thematic Tasks

If One Sixth of the World depicts energy conversion largely within an economic framework, and Man with a Movie Camera in somewhat more biological, anthropo- logical terms, The Eleventh Year attempts a purer, more elemental representation of the trajectories of energy through the material world. For Vertov, the human is assuredly part, if a special part, of that material world, and the film contains a great deal of footage of humans and their machines struggling with the inertia of rocks, threshing grain, cutting coal out of mine shafts, and many other activities. While sometimes Vertov indicates a chain of laboring cause and productive effect through his editing—as in the film’s first reel, when workers are seen detaching a huge boulder from one of the rocky crags with crowbars—in many other instances we see no concrete result from all this expenditure of energy, which in general is shown to be very intense and applied in what seem to be distinctly

71. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 235, ll. 5–6.

Image from The Eleventh Year. 1928.

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Laboring bodies in The Eleventh Year. 1928.

uncomfortable working conditions. At least one commentator at the February 1928 ARK preview, Lef member and future Mayakovsky scholar Viktor Pertsov, per- ceived a problem in Vertov’s representation of labor when, after praising Vertov for showing how workers made “the earth move” in the film’s first section, expressed dismay at how the audience was then “shown people under the ground. We were shown hellish, intolerable labor. And that was out of place.”72 Pertsov’s comment suggests that, for at least some spectators, Vertov’s footage of labor was not given adequate narrative justification. Put in other (energetic-economic) terms, we might say that, for Pertsov, the outputs of labor depicted in The Eleventh Year were excessive, beyond whatever usable payoff they are represented as having within the terms of the film’s rhetoric. Again, an important way such rhetorical dividends are secured in early docu- mentary, especially moment-by-moment, is through the use of thematic intertitles and their narrative linkage: such-and-such an exertion of energy is named and located (“cutting coal in the fourth eastern shaft of the Lidievka mine,” for instance), the immediate result similarly described (“extracted coal is transferred to the processing area”), and the further useful consequences (like electricity pro- duction) rigorously, tersely, and unambiguously explained in verbal signs.73 And this approach would have been entirely possible for Vertov, who, despite rumors to the contrary, kept detailed notes about his footage (dates, places, and so on), and

72. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 201, l. 6. This was not the last time this charge would be leveled against Vertov; for the case of Enthusiasm, see my “Disorganized Noise.” 73. Of course, editing strategies (in particular, taking care not to dwell on any one labor process too long) and simple avoidance or censorship of the “intolerable” when shooting are of equal impor- tance here.

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could very easily have inserted explanatory-connective intertitles.74 Their absence is certainly due to his singular opposition to the intertitle and script, which is part of a more general anti-verbal bias that shows up in his very earliest writings. His 1922 “We: Variant of a Manifesto” invites sympathetic readers to flee “the sweet embraces of the romance, the poison of the psychological novel”;75 at a meeting of his Kinok group in 1923, he attacked the use of intertitles in vocabulary that purposely recalled Civil War–era intransigence: “Considering it established that the motion picture is but a skeleton of intertitles plus cine-illustrations, in the name of the liberation of cine-spectacle from the literary yoke I propose: BREAK THE BACK OF THIS SCUM!”76 I suspect that some of the sources of Vertov’s anti-literariness are to be found in nineteenth-century literature itself, particularly realist and naturalist prose (and in theories about that prose), but in poetry as well (Walt Whitman, for instance).77 All the same, Vertov’s own formative period (I have in mind the early 1920s in the USSR) can be said to have been characterized by a field of condition- ing technological, political, and more narrowly artistic factors that created an especially fertile environment for anti-verbal doctrines like Vertov’s. On one side, the technical exigencies of making agitational work within a largely illiterate or semiliterate population (particularly during the Civil War years, 1918–21) led to much reflection upon just how ideas might be conveyed quickly, bypassing verbal channels.78 At the same time, more strictly political or ideological considerations demanded that any new “proletarian” art form be international in character—that is to say, not bound to the particularities of a national language.79 Finally, artistic preoccupations with the intrinsic material properties of both medium and represented world—both the famous Constructivist faktura (atten- tion to “material texture”) and energeticism—led away from hybrid forms toward an investigation, in Vertov’s case, of the supposedly specific features of cinema and cinema’s ability to abet “scientific” investigation into the inherently energized material world.80 Kazimir Malevich, whose favorite filmmaker was apparently

74. My own hypothetical intertitles derive from some of Vertov’s notes; see RGALI f. 2091, op. 1, d. 21; op. 1, d. 23; op. 2, d. 39; and op. 2, d. 236, ll. 64–72. 75. Vertov, “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” in Kino-Eye, p. 7. 76. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 390, l. 7. 77. See, for example, Whitman’s “Song of the Exposition” (1871). 78. Vertov was, of course, an agitator and propagandist from the very beginning. In a report of March 1920 on the film activities of the “October Revolution” agit-train, he insists that “the films shown, in spite of their bad quality, had a more vivid and convincing impact upon the broad masses than the speeches of orators. . . . [A]n illuminated screen, set up outside the train, is a lure around which one can get any kind of meeting to gather.” RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 386, l. 19ob. 79. The best-known expression of this concern (evident everywhere in Vertov’s writings) is probably the famous Eisenstein/Pudovkin/Alexandrov “Statement on Sound” (1928), where the authors express their fear that the imminent introduction of sound might effect a “re-nationalizing” of cinematic language. 80. Vertov was a friend and associate of the Constructivists Aleksandr Rodchenko (who worked on several of Vertov’s films) and El Lissitzky. [For an analysis of Rodchenko’s intertitles for Vertov’s films, see Yuri Tsivian’s essay elsewhere in this issue.—Ed.]

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Vertov, wrote that Vertov’s films, though still containing too much documentary and verbal “junk,” were “moving inexorably toward a new form of expression for contemporary content . . . [our epoch’s] pure force and dynamics.”81 Vertov evidently believed intertitles to be unnecessary dead spots, clumps of inertia that impeded the free passage of the onscreen movements that the film-engineer was to orga- nize. At the 1923 Kinok meeting mentioned above, Vertov declared that, “in order not to destroy the feeling of interval between two adjacent shots,” a word or title required to designate some crucial element of the shot—in Vertov’s example, that element was “People’s Commissar of the Army Trotsky”—should be printed directly on the shot. In those cases where some slogan or other was needed for a given film, but in a form whose “construction is unsatisfactory to us,” Vertov announced that the Kinoks would “temporarily”—that is, until the complete aboli- tion of intertitles—“reserve for themselves the right to construct the slogan they need, a slogan in movement, that would offer the correct interval between the previous and succeeding shots.” In short, any verbal material, if not contained within the shot already as part of the thing photographed, would have to be “in movement,” “efficacious.”82 These comments help to confirm Annette Michelson’s argument that the Vertovian “interval” derives on one significant level from physi- cal science’s application of calculus to the description of movement.83 In sum, Vertov in the early 1920s was working at a unique moment when an apparently disparate set of factors—the development of technologies of communi- cation, provoked by the need to propagandize among the illiterate; the ideological imperatives of Communist internationalism; and the Constructivist reconsidera- tion of art in terms of “science”—all conspired to render verbal language productively suspect for at least some revolutionary art-makers. And as I indicated earlier, The Eleventh Year is one of Vertov’s major strides toward the title-less film- making realized a year later with Man with a Movie Camera; indeed, he later

81. “Zhivopisnye zakony v problemakh kino,” Kino i Kul’tura 7–8 (1929), pp. 22–26; here quoted from the translation by Cathy Young, “Painterly Laws in the Problems of Cinema,” in Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 156 (italics in the origi- nal). In this essay, Malevich compares a “dynamic” image of machine motion from The Eleventh Year with a work by the Futurist Giacomo Balla. 82. RGALI f. 2091, op. 1, d. 390, ll. 6–8. The name of Trotsky is obscured by thick pencil markings in the typescript—added later, of course—but context makes it clear who is being referred to. In the same transcript, Vertov refers to his Kino-Pravdas 7, 12, and 14 as successful experiments in intertitle construction; the rotating titles for no. 14 were designed by Rodchenko. 83. “In the analysis of movement and of rates of change, the notion of the interval is applied to the ever divisible gap between two points along a defined continuum. For the practical significance of cal- culus lay in its use in the determination of motion through all moments of time. Its methods were applicable to all problems involving rates of change: to the motion of vibrating string, to that of the earth, to the flow of fluids and of electric currents, and to the behavior of particles in the subatomic world.” Annette Michelson, “The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval,” in Montage and Modern Life: 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 73. I would add that an analogy with musical-harmonic “intervals” is also important for Vertov (espe- cially in Man with a Movie Camera, originally subtitled “a visual symphony”), but seems in fact to co-exist with the “physical-mathematical” analogy identified by Michelson.

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claimed, entirely plausibly, that “at first [The Eleventh Year] had no titles.”84 The validity of Vertov’s position on titling is, needless to say, far from self-evident, even from the standpoint of an “experimental” cinema practice. Indeed, Viktor Shklovsky, Vertov’s main theoretical opponent on this issue, argued that intertitles were to cinematic narration what camera angle was to photography: another way of making the images “new.”85 More importantly from a historical point of view, the increasing emphasis on “planning” and control within the economy and soci- ety as a whole at the end of the ’20s—a society now engaged in building “socialism in one country”—made Vertov’s stand on verbal organization appear to many as intolerably atavistic: an anarchic, irrational, and sure-fire formula for chaos. The burden of Osip Brik’s criticism of The Eleventh Year—by far the most stinging of the reproaches offered, particularly in light of the One Sixth of the World debacle, and the one that most strained Vertov’s relations with Mikhail Kaufman— focused not on intertitles per se but on Vertov’s refusal “to place a precise, strictly worked out thematic script at the basis of the film.” A “thematizing” unity, claims Brik, is both what the film lacks as a product and what it lacked while in produc- tion; the absence of a script accounts for “the excessive poverty of the thematic tasks given to the cameraman” and the fact that “Kaufman did not know what theme he was producing his footage for.”86 There is indeed some evidence, out- side of Brik’s article, that suggests that Vertov’s scriptless working methods did generate confusion and tension during production of The Eleventh Year. Sometime between late October and late December 1927, while the film was being edited, Vertov fired off a half-page note entitled “Brief contents of the film in a transla- tion from the language of film into the language of the word (written down specially in order to pacify Kaufman and Svilova).” He offers a numbered break- down that corresponds basically to the structure of the finished film, starting with 1) the storming of the Dnepr, followed by sending the “white coal” (electricity) to 2) the village, 3) the factories, 4) the mines; then 5) the antiphonal “roll-call” [pereklichka] of village, factories, and mines, and finally: In the music of rivers charged with electricity, in the foam of waterfalls, in the roaring of machines, in the fire and glow of blast furnaces, the land of Lenin enters its second decade, the eleventh year since October.

End.

84. Vertov, “From the History of the Kinoks,” in Kino-Eye, p. 95. 85. Viktor Shklovsky, Motalka: O kino remesle (knizhka ne dlia kinematografistov) (Moscow and Leningrad: Kinopechat’, 1927), p. 32. 86. Brik, “Odinnadtsatyi Vertova”; trans. in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, pp. 310–11. On April 26, 1928, Vertov wrote an angry letter to Kaufman threatening him with ejection from the Kino-Eye group if he didn’t repudiate Brik’s article within twenty-four hours; see RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 289, and Lines of Resistance, pp. 311–14.

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Note: It’s all very insipid when expressed in words. On film, it’s a differ- ent matter. D. V.87 Finally, on January 1, 1928, Vertov worked out an elaborate schema of his own working method, with “theme,” “film reconnaissance,” “shooting,” and “montage” as the main headings astride many subdivisions of labor;88 both the complexity of this diagram and its timing suggest that the issue of planning and organization had become acute for Vertov and his group even before the release of The Eleventh Year. In other words, the central artistic issue of giving meaning and direction to “expended energy” had penetrated, and not in a merely analogous way, beyond the plans for the film into the structure of the Kinok working group itself. The group would soon break apart; what strategies would Vertov use to shape the “pure force and dynamics” of The Eleventh Year?

Metanarrative without Narrative

As I have said, a distinctive feature of much of The Eleventh Year as a text lies in the incessant way the editing is deployed to indicate, but also seemingly fore- cast, the circulation of energy from one place and form to another. I am tempted to coin a phrase and call this practice “energetic montage,” so focused is it on rep- resenting the traces of energy in exchange. In some cases, a sheer and relatively simple juxtaposition of images is meant to imply some passage or accumulation of energy. In one sequence in the film’s final reel, two forward tracking shots of two women pushing a cart full of ore or coal are juxtaposed, first, with the image of a giant crane tracking forward (of its own will!) in rhyme with the women’s motion, and then with a contrasting vertically constructed image of a worker climbing a ladder amid pounding factory machinery. Plainly enough, the logic of the sequence, which continues with the image of the crane as leitmotif, suggests that the disparate things represented in these images are part of a single circuit of energy; that the effort of the women, and the still-latent energy of the material they are moving, passes on into and is fully actualized in the form of productive industrial technology that will displace human energy from the circuit of exchange, enabling it to be expended in other ways.89 What is important here is that the relationships of energy exchange implied by these juxtapositions are to be taken not as mere figuration, but literally. The film asserts that the work of these women, inasmuch as it is part of an organized, developmental cycle of energy conversions—a cycle called “USSR,” in which all outlays of energy are

87. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 237, l. 26ob. 88. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 237, l. 39ob. “Film reconnaissance” essentially means “scouting locations.” 89. Those “other ways” are not on view in The Eleventh Year, needless to say; Vertov will reserve the last section of Man with a Movie Camera for his major representation of leisure.

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interconnected90—not only partici- pates in the industrial modernization of the country, but in the creation of the juxtaposed crane, a piece of advanced equipment whose fashion- ing is, after all, inconceivable outside a full-scale program of industrializa- tion. Because what is given in the shots “is always part of the totality that it represents,” the energetic model on the basis of which Vertov organizes his images here attempts to be an “organic” and indeed “sym- bolic” (as opposed to “allegorical”) one in Paul de Man’s sense of those terms, though with a special “scien- tific” inflection:91 The editing steers a specific passage along the traces of selected, interrelated expenditures within the vast continuity of energy exchange and movement. A more elaborate and particu- larly effective instance of energetic montage occurs over the course of the film’s first and second reels, as we observe the conversion of river water into an organized “river charged with electricity.” The rhetorical sequence, involving the careful interrelation of continuous and noncontinuous shots over many minutes, begins with the raging, rock-choked Dnepr and Conversion of human into machine moves rapidly downstream to the site energy in The Eleventh Year. 1928.

90. On several occasions, Vertov indicated that his individual films were to be regarded as parts of a single, monumental work (his Comédie Humaine as it were) called “USSR.” 91. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 191. De Man makes a distinction between the would-be “symbolic” sign as postulating “the possibility of an identity or identification”—in Vertov’s case, an identification on the level of energy—and the allegorical one as designating “a distance in relation to its own origin” (p. 207). For de Man, at least at this stage of his thought, the aspiration to “symbolic” unity is a deluded and ideological one, in contrast to the more sober and “authentic” allegorical mode. I mention the distinction not only because I think it helps us to understand Vertov’s own creative predicament (see below), but also because it might be worthwhile

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of the future Dnepr Hydroelectric Station. This first part of the film is constructed with brilliant deceptiveness. In poker-faced travelogue style, we get a brief interti- tle-laden tour of the most famous large rocks in the Dnepr—“Catherine’s Armchair,” the “Bogatyr” (a Russian folk hero), and the “Crag of Love”—culminat- ing in a shot of the ossified bones of a “2,000-year-old Scythian.” (These particular crags were doubtless selected for self-reflexive reasons—inasmuch as their names allude to the kind of ossified cinematic romance and historical drama that the kino-eye would overcome, much as the proletarian state would the actual stone.)92 After this bouldery prologue comes a remarkable, prolonged full-screen image of the river surface, no longer “rapids” but still trembling with undulations. This image of the river is out of keeping with what has preceded it—it is mere water, rather than a named historical site—and marks a transition to the rest of the mainly intertitle-less first reel with its depictions of the “storming” of the Dnepr and the reduction of the obstructing rocks to rubble. The genre of the film, if you will, moves from travelogue, with its dependence on existing conventions of differentiating the “important” from the unimportant sites, to a film about the ele- ments (including the human element) and their movements as such—leading, to be sure, to the creation of a new history and new conventions out of those raw energies, inscribed on that tabula rasa. A flashing image of the Scythian’s skull sets in motion the famous series of superimpositions of river water over the areas the future dam would inundate. These haunting images are ambiguous to the core: on the one hand projections of the wiping out of existing communities (specifically, the village of Kichkas or Einlage, a colony of German farmers),93 on the other they manage to imply, in an effect abetted by not naming the village depicted, that the energy unleashed through the creation of the dam will end up “rippling through” the peasant world more generally. That this is indeed Vertov’s intent here is confirmed by a number of working drawings for these “complex shots,” shots never realized but which clearly indicate that he conceived of these images of river water of visualizations of energy as such, available for industrial deployment. The sequence culminates with a rapid succession of full-frame images of water, devoid of any framing by river- banks or other conduits, undergoing transformation. A shot recalling the broad, vibrating surface of the river appears first, now clearly bisected into two contrast- ing layers, as though abstractly to suggest the difference in height or level required

to entertain the idea that the “energeticist” doctrine, which promulgates a notion of all levels of being as part of the same substance, may have acted as a discursive support for that late nineteenth-century hegemony of “symbolic” thought identified and denounced by de Man (p. 189). 92. Indeed, we can extend the metacinematic analogies here: the film’s intertitles, after all, largely disappear with the boulders, implying that intertitles present the same sort of obstacle to the emanci- pation of cinematic language as the boulders do to the full liberation of “productive forces” within the USSR. 93. See Deriabin, Dramaturgicheskie Opyty, p. 120.

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to mobilize the water’s energy.94 Rapidly and with an absolutely captivating dynamic power, the water is presented as plunging in a vertigo-inducing arc down some apparent precipice, crashing at the bottom and swiftly reassembling in a pro- longed image of sheer, streaking downward movement that indeed seems as perfect a materialization of “pure force and dynamics” as documentary cinema can realize. Again, it is crucial that Vertov depicts these changes as elemental and absolute—the sequence of falling water seems detached from the preceding sec- tion on the station’s construction—and within no spatial frame apart from that of the screen itself. What we get instead is a representation of the raw material process of energetic passage from latent to active, across the surface of a single element. A process, that is, rather than a narrative or story. To be sure, the sequence has some of the circular logic characteristic of narrative sequencing: the early shots of river water can only be fully read as representing latent force in light of the later activation—for all that Kaufman’s photography manages immediately to capture that evidence of energy on the water’s surface—just as the sense of passage

94. See Doane’s comment, in her discussion of time and thermodynamics, that “usable energy— that is, energy capable of producing work—is...defined in terms of the critical presence of differ- ences. The gravitational energy in water is usable—it will turn the wheel of a mill, for instance—only if there is a difference of levels so that the water falls from one height to another. The gravitational ener- gy in a body of water—a lake or the ocean—is unusable without these differences” Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 117.

A drawing by Vertov of a proposed “complex shot,” incorporating 1) the word “Dneprostroi” (Dnepr Hydroelectric Station) imprinted on the shot, 2) silhouettes of human figures (workers), and 3) a small industrial locomotive. The rippling lines on the drawing indicate superimposed water; the Russian letter on the left (“v”) stands for “voda,” water. Obviously, the planned superimposition of water here was meant to suggest not submersion of the workers and the locomotive, but rather that the hydro-energy of the river has been fully harnessed to be used in construction. Source: RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 237, l. 10ob.

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and process as such is only possible on the basis of the contrasting features of the indexical registrations of water that make up the sequence. Yet a sheer passage from latency to activity has no meaning in itself, for all the sensuous charge it car- ries as spectacle; these are merely different energy states, as magnified by camera and projector. What of “socialist construction,” and of the specific contributions made by its protagonists? At least three additional features of the sequence, one of them rather diffi- cult to detect, are crucial to keep in mind. First, the passage depicted here involves the editing together of two entirely different spaces: the “latent” water at the outset is of the Dnepr, while the footage of the later “electrified” stream was taken at the already-built Volkhov Hydroelectric Station near Leningrad (the Dnepr station would not be completed until 1932).95 In other words, the specific process of hydro-energetic conversion depicted at this point in The Eleventh Year was in fact impossible, or rather, possible only as projection. This strategy was no “falsification” on Vertov’s part; virtually all contemporary spectators would have been aware of these two distinct hydroelectric projects (both eventually named in the film, though not here) and therefore of the “splice.”96 There is something vaguely uncanny about the way the sequence both offers us the representation and sense of a raw material process and, wordlessly and probably only in retrospect, implies that that process, so apparently absolute and self-contained, is linked to some futurity or outside destiny, project, or purpose—almost as though we were suspended at the cusp between unmeaning material existence and the emergence of signification as such.97 To be sure, Vertov finds ways to make the sequence yield a less ambiguous payoff, not least through the use of a single, climactic intertitle, “electric power rises,” that attempts to name that indiscernible energy of which the image of falling water is a trace. A more important anchoring effect is provided slightly later on in the same reel, when the full stretch of the Volkhov station’s waters are shown, first alone and then with a superimposed bust-like picture of Lenin, like a specter looking approvingly over the achievements of his successors. In his book on cinematic “figurations of absence,” Marc Vernet has shown the various ways in which superimpositions are used to visualize strictly absent and unfilmable

95. For the history of its construction, see Anne D. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 96. Indeed, in an awkward but oddly affecting rhetorical gesture in the penultimate reel, Vertov actually prints the word “Dneprostroi” on a moving panorama shot of the construction site. It is worth noting that the important documentary director Iakov Posel’skii had included a similar and striking (though less artfully constructed) “Dnepr” sequence in his even earlier film about the planned hydro- electric dam, The Link of Energetics [Zveno Energetiki] (1926); it is possible that Vertov was here borrow- ing from and developing a trope introduced by Posel’skii. 97. Here I think also of Siegfried Kracauer’s comments on the great pre-workday sequence in Man with a Movie Camera: how “the secret of that strange time” is “revealed to the Surrealist artist who listens to the conversation that life’s disparate, inanimate aspects conduct with the living.” “Der Mann mit dem Kino-Apparat,” Frankfurter Zeitung, May 19, 1929; trans. in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, p. 358.

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The thought of Lenin in The Eleventh Year. 1928.

“thought, memory, mind”;98 in this case, we seem to have an effort to signify at least two thoughts at once, namely Lenin’s dream of electrification—the Leninist formula “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire coun- try” was taken by Vertov as a “basic [conceptual] orientation” for The Eleventh Year 99—and the dream-memory of Lenin among Vertov’s contemporaries. The third thought would be that of Communism as such, of course, or rather the metanarrative of “the construction of socialism” that presumably subsumes and absorbs all of the swirling energy in The Eleventh Year into itself. Yet as Vernet bril- liantly observes in relation to superimposition generally, this effort to open the film up to a deeper, hidden reality of desire, this “second level of verisimilitude,” has the inevitable effect of reducing the three-dimensional reality of the photo- graphic image(s) of which it is composed.100 Though we still see the “electrified river” behind (or through) Lenin, the shot has been subtly derealized, jolted out of the rhetorical sequence of material conversions, to become heterogeneous and (in de Man’s sense) allegorical. Another brief example will help to illustrate the “extraneous” and allegorical character of Vertov’s figuration here. A major motif in The Eleventh Year, starting in

98. Marc Vernet, Figures de l’absence: De l’invisible au cinema (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1988), p. 64. At a Kinok meeting of June 1, 1923, Vertov’s group had discussed superimposition of a face onto a shot as a means of realizing on film what Vertov called a “dramatization of human thought” [instsenirovka chelovecheskoj mysli]. RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 390, l. 1ob. 99. See Deriabin, Dramaturgicheskie Opyty, p. 119. 100. Vernet, Figures de l’absence, p. 64.

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The motif of the “pole-relay point” in The Eleventh Year. 1928.

the second reel, is that of the “pole” or electrical relay point. Several versions of the pole, more or less identical in function, together make up a series of shots cul- minating in a shot of a set of loudspeakers on a pole addressing a crowd outside the Kremlin. This pole-emblem serves frequently as a marker of transition (as when moving from representations of the work of peasants to that of workers in reel 2) or as a stand-in for the Leninist electrification project itself (as in the third reel, when it appears following the intertitle “under the banner of Lenin”). As it appears and reappears, however, amid all the “roaring of machines,” we start to sense that the pole emblematizes nothing less than “organization” itself—the sheer assurance, that is, that the chaos of energy represented in the film in fact relates to some kind of coordinating center. This intuition would seem to be at least partially confirmed by Vertov’s working diagrams, which show that he regarded these “poles,” on view repeatedly during the last half of the film, as something like a tonal center around which the rest of the footage would swirl. Again, the idea or motif of coordination, rather than a story about how the coor- dination occurs, is inserted into the mass of details showing energy exchange among humans, water, coal, and machines in the most variegated ways.

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A working drawing by Vertov indicating the rhetorical function of the image of “the crossing of wires over the factory, with wheel” as connecting such disparate things as “going to the city,” “waterfall + Lenin,” “wheel,” “levers,” “regulators,” and “connecting rods.” Source: RGALI f. 2091, op. 2, d. 237, l. 16.

What this all points to is a feature of Vertov’s cinematic rhetoric important in most if not all of his films, but unusually clearly visible in The Eleventh Year. The sequences of “energetic montage”—conceptually grounded, I have argued, in some version of transcendental materialism—either alternate with or are punctuated by figural juxtapositions (sometimes single images, sometimes “complex shots”) lying outside the logic of the main sequential representations of energy flow, but still required in order to anchor those sequences in a justificatory meaning. To be entirely clear, let me stress that I am not claiming that the larger ideological “mes- sage” of The Eleventh Year—centrally, the need to mobilize all the country’s human and natural resources for industrialization—is left ambiguous. After all, we later see “train after train” and “machine tool after machine tool” emerging from the facto- ries, intertitle assertions that the country is “growing toward socialism,” and so on. I am speaking, rather, about a tension at the heart of the film’s structure as a text, one reflected, albeit uncomprehendingly, in the critical volleys delivered against its “chaotic” nature on the one hand, and its “cheap symbolism” on the other. “Energetic montage” is at once a negative attempt to avoid thinking about change in terms of what for Vertov were the dated and restrictive conventions of narrative fiction—stereotyped individuals undergoing predictable adventures and affective experiences—and a positive effort to put revolutionary film practice on a truly materialist basis. For Vertov that basis, in my view, is at least as energeticist as it is Marxist.101 Yet these renovations and purgations, taken in tandem with Vertov’s

101. Although the two “worldviews” can be seen as partially overlapping (see Rabinbach, The Human Motor, pp. 69–83), the fundamental Marxist categories of class conflict and mode of production— which, unlike energetics, are historically and not mechanically materialist concepts—play a difficult-to- discern role in Vertov’s work, one that cannot be addressed in any satisfactory way here. On the contrast

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obsessive temporal focus on a present under construction, tend toward an evacua- tion of moment-by-moment significance and its replacement by a rhythmically highly organized, somatically exhilarating representation of process. Abjuring the narrative devices of intertitle and plot, Vertov risks the loss, across long stretches of his film, of that chain of meaningful relations linking each event to the larger project under way, to the metanarrative of Communism: Story forms . . . represent an armory of relational models by which what would otherwise be nothing but chains of mechanical causes and effects can be translated into moral terms. . . . Story forms not only per- mit us to judge the moral significance of human projects, they also pro- vide the means by which to judge them, even while we pretend to be merely describing them.102 In place of story, Vertov inserts emblems of his “moral terms” and teleologies themselves: of the evolution of humans into something greater through the revo- lutionary reconfiguration of nature (the workers on the mountain), of the relation between electrification and the building of a socialist society (Lenin at the Volkhov station), and so on. Again, Vertov’s rejection of the past, not only in terms of the tools it offers but also as subject matter, is part of what leads to this sense of distance between his local sequences and their larger meanings—indeed, to the sense that those meanings are located outside of the world of material transformation with which the film is for the most part preoccupied.103 In the historically gauged work of Vsevolod Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and (at least sometimes) Sergei Eisenstein, the passage to revolution—though not to Communism itself—can be represented through the vicissitudes of a character or characters as they “live through” the dialectic that leads to revolutionary con- sciousness. Vertov’s presentist, anti-literary, and energeticist biases preclude this

between historical and mechanical materialism, see Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), pp. 200–10; and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 45–46. 102. Hayden White, “The Narrativization of Real Events,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 253. 103. Hayden White perfectly expresses the structure of this “distance” in the following passage: “We can comprehend the appeal of historical discourse by recognizing the extent to which it makes the real desirable, makes the real into an object of desire, and does so by its imposition, upon events that are represented as real, of the formal coherency that stories possess. . . . The reality that is represented in the historical narrative, in ‘speaking itself,’ speaks to us, summons us from afar (this ‘afar’ is the land of forms), and displays to us a formal coherency that we ourselves lack. . . . In this world, reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience. Insofar as historical stories can be completed, can be given narrative closure, can be shown to have had a plot all along, they give to reality the odor of the ideal. This is why the plot of a historical narrative is always an embarrassment and has to be presented as ‘found’ in the events rather than put there by nar- rative techniques.” Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in On Narrative, p. 20.

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kind of narration, even while the processes he delineates need to be oriented toward a comparable culmination. (Only in Man with a Movie Camera, perhaps, does Vertov take the alternative, fully energetic conception of someone like Bekhterev at its word, by implying that the consolation offered by the universality and permanence of energy exchange and “evolutionary monism” might actually provide an adequate foundation for signification.)104 His film-texts of the ’20s are thus unusual in that they tend to offer us metanarrative without narrative: a dis- cursive fact that might help account for the tendency of later critics to regard him as either a “mere” propagandist for Communism, or as a precursor of later, non- narrative experimental cinema.105 And how could it have been otherwise? For what is absent here is nothing less than the story of how one reaches a true socialist society, and no one, to be sure, has managed to write that narrative in the interim. Meanwhile, in 1928, deci- sions were being made that would indeed largely determine how socialism would be built, and what a dominant conception of what a Soviet subject—a protagonist in socialist society—would be. For his part, Vertov continued finding ways to align his own interests in the materiality both of the world and of film with the society- building project in which he was an enthusiastic participant: first in Man with a Movie Camera, by using the widespread obsession with production processes dur- ing the early years of the First Five-Year Plan as a pretext for his own self-reflexive exploration of cinema-in-process; then in Enthusiasm, by yoking the “industrial breakthrough” rhetoric of the time to his own extraordinary breakthroughs in sound-image montage. It was only in Three Songs of Lenin, with its deft though hard-wrought allegori- cal linkage of energetic process with both the transformation of individual subjectivities and the “seasonal” tropes of folk poetry, that Vertov finally managed to expand his rhetoric in ways that could satisfy the thirst for comprehensible nar- rative meaning within the terms of his existing style. Indeed, The Eleventh Year may be said to presage a few features of that mutation of the early 1930s. The ossified Scythian in the first reel was a primitive warrior, of course—the bones of his steed, buried beside him, are clearly visible in one shot—and the film can be read

104. “Technology’s veiled assurance of compensating for the limitations of the body, that is, its fini- tude, would be synonymous with a hope of conquering death. But to the extent that . . . [the] image cannot speak its own relation to temporality, narrative proved to be a more effective and surer means of assimilating the unassimilable by conferring on death a meaning. . . . Technology and narrative form an alliance in modernity to ameliorate the corrosiveness of the relation between time and subjec- tivity.” Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 164. 105. I should not overstate my case: we could maintain that the conclusion of The Eleventh Year— involving a celebration and, arguably, a marriage (of workers, peasants, and national minorities world- wide)—could be read as quite conventionally narrative. Certainly, the trope of the passage from Old to New is absolutely crucial for Vertov as for other Soviet filmmakers, although, yet again, Vertov tends to depict it in figurative and/or elemental-processual terms. For a discussion, see my “Allegory and Accommodation.”

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as suggesting that his energies are stirred back to life by his successors, the warrior- builders of socialism.106 The concern with showcasing “individuals” and “individual achievement” so characteristic of the discourse of the ’30s can be dimly sensed in The Eleventh Year in the way that a plethora of faces, gazing with intensity and approval, acts as an affective-discursive affirmation of the activities onscreen.107 More remarkably, repeated viewings of the film reveal what seems to be a mini-nar- rative of individual advancement. A striking shot in the third reel shows a large number of male workers ascending and descending a staircase shot from below. A single female worker descends, only to be pinched by a male comrade, whose attentions she clearly finds unwelcome. As it turns out, this shot acts as the pivot point for the turn in the third reel to representations of women’s labor; by the time we reach the final reel, we get another shot of the staircase—now filmed from above—as it is ascended by a large group of female workers, accompanied by a single male. And in this same final reel, we get a close-up of the same previously humiliated female worker—she is the woman on the right in the image on page 66—shown at a culminating point in the film and ennobled (from Vertov’s stand- point) by her absolutely equal participation in socialist construction. It was this kind of stress upon the transformative stories of individual characters, captured in

106. Yuri Tsivian relates the trope of the Scythian to the revolutionary folklorism of Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (1928); see Lines of Resistance, p. 292. 107. On this emphasis upon the “extraordinary achievements of ordinary people” in the ’30s, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 74.

An encounter on the stairs in The Eleventh Year. 1928.

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some cases in documentary sound, that during the 1930s came to thicken, human- ize, and indeed narrativize Vertov’s long-standing, relatively non-personalized concern with process. After this point, Vertov’s own narrative of participation in the development of Soviet cinema was basically curtailed, and his still-formidable creative energies condemned to twenty years of frustration and inertia. As with the Scythian, his reawakening would be, alas, entirely posthumous.

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