the collegium papers VI the pordenone silent film festival sacile 2004 the fifth collegium 11 – 18 ottobre / october 2004 a cura di / devised by luca giuliani david mingay david robinson paolo cherchi usai © 2005 le giornate del cinema muto c/o la cineteca del friuli via bini, palazzo gurisatti 33013 gemona (ud) italia tel: +39-0432-980458 fax: +39-0432-970542 e-mail: [email protected] http://cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/ le giornate del cinema muto 2004 the collegium papers VI edited by david robinson luca giuliani contents vertov essays jon davies vertov nation 15 vincent bohlinger intervals in sound and silence: two versions of three songs of lenin 69 dong xinou from shanghai document to shanghai 24 hours: the city, the “sovkino expedition,” and montage complex 80 daniel pitarch fernández stride train, stride! or how it feels to be run over 90 michael müller from hodgepodge to masterpiece: vertov's man with a movie camera between failure and success 100 film and mortality giampaolo parmigiani dialogus de immortalitate imaginum and the persecution complex 120 jude cowan how was it for you? silent cinema and the past 140 national revaluation alyson hrynyk asquith rediscovered, or, in praise of hybrid films 145 kelly-anne robinson ‘the englishman is afraid of experience. he is suspicious of emotion’ 150 giornate reflections norie taniguchi music and silent film: time-travel and cinematic-experience 160 tan pin pin contemporary mediums resurrecting ancient shadows 165 thunnis van oort silent film audiences 170 partecipants and collegians 180 preface The sixth annual collection of “Collegium Papers” is, we feel, the best vindication to date of what we have set out to achieve in the concentrated experience of the Collegium, contained within the single week of the Giornate del Cinema Muto. The writers have all responded vitally and directly to the discoveries of the Giornate – most notably the revelation of Dziga Vertov. Several have managed to explore quite new paths of research. The writing throughout is direct, personal, lively, readable and liberated from cliché and jargon. In this respect it is noteworthy that seven of the twelve contributors are writing in a language that is not our own; and in every case the occasional echoes from a foreign idiom enrich rather than impair their expressiveness (after all, Joseph Conrad luckily never quite expunged the Polish accent from his English writing). Any reader will recognise one or two items at least which can be reckoned permanent additions to the literature of film. luca giuliani david mingay david robinson paolo cherchi usai jon davies vertov nation “Man with a Movie Camera is in consequence not a film at all: it is a snapshot album.” – John Grierson “A country without documentaries is like a family without a photo album.” – Patricio Guzman The Dziga Vertov retrospective at the 2004 Festival provided a perfect opportunity for a number of historians and scholars to reappraise and debate the work of one of the world’s most influential film artists. Viewing Vertov’s oeuvre chronologically gave spectators the chance to trace the development of his style and see how certain themes are elaborated throughout his career. In the very first Kino-Nedelia there is a scene that Yuri Tsivian draws our attention to in his programme notes1 that struck me as quintessentially Vertov. It also succinctly represents two kinds of subject/camera interaction, the dynamic that I believe forms the heart of Vertov’s work and these reflections on it. We see two merchants selling homemade wooden toys: one is in the background, occupied by customers, facing away from the camera and occasionally turning slightly to glimpse the action occurring behind him, where the second vendor is only partly visible in the foreground. This second vendor shows off several of the toys to the camera, acknowledging the presence of prospective buyers among the newsreel audience. While there are potential customers surrounding the merchants, this demonstration is aimed strictly at the camera. The hand-carved toys include a row of soldiers that move in unison, a horse pulling a sled, a mounted soldier and a dog biting a man’s bottom. The elements that give this scene such a joyful, eccentric air are that the first merchant’s back is turned to the proceedings, the whimsical quality of the toys on display, and of course the crowd of onlookers (who have their own range of interactions with the camera). Together, these details produce an unmistakable sense of mischievous play. Here we see two men, one either unaware or not acknowledging the camera and one not only aware of but performing to the camera, and the dynamic tension that exists between these two forms of interaction. I would like to take this opportunity to discuss some of the more memorable moments of subject/camera interaction in Vertov’s cinema with the goal of showing the depth and range of the human community on view in his films and how these moments contribute to building a global network of proletarian/peasant spectators. This paper is a small attempt at appraising the status of the human – “caught,” represented, by the cinema machine, of course – in Vertov’s work. If one were to go by one of Vertov’s earliest manifestos, “WE: Variant of a Manifesto” from 1922, one would be led to believe that the human subject had no place in the Kinoks’ practice: “The ‘psychological’ prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch; it interferes with his desire for kinship with the machine. In an art of movement we have no reason to devote our particular attention to contemporary man. The machine makes us ashamed of man’s inability to control 1 “Do not miss the close-up of a handsome homemade mechanical toy which a boy toy-vendor demonstrates to prospective buyers” (30). himself, but what are we to do if electricity’s unerring ways are more exciting to us than the disorderly haste of active men and the corrupting inertia of passive ones? […] For his inability to control his movements, WE temporarily exclude man as a subject for film. Our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electric man. […] The new man, free of unwieldiness and clumsiness, will have the light, precise movements of machines, and he will be the gratifying subject of our films” (in Michelson 8-9). We may initially scoff at this condemnation of “man” when some of the most loved and affecting scenes in Vertov’s career are of people, in all their imperfections. However, the first thing we must remember is that this was written in his Kino-Pravda days; Ian Christie warned me that we must be lenient with the inconsistencies in Vertov’s rhetoric, not taking the Kinok manifestos literally as this was an era of “factions and polemic.” Also, as Oliver Gaycken pointed out to me, this statement is not so much a denunciation of the “bungling citizen” as the announcement of a plan of action for transforming humanity through the cinema, that most astounding of machines. Here he plans the union of the very elements that make his cinema so compelling: rigorous non-fiction formal and technical experimentation and the “unwieldy,” “clumsy” ordinary people that make up life-as-it-is. Much of the impact of Vertov’s portraits, if you will, comes from their stubbornly normal, mundane and everyday qualities, their imperfect, lumpy, embodied humanness rather than any kind of perfection, precision, control or order as embodied by the camera. Over the course of Kino-Eye, Annette Michelson’s collection of Vertov’s writings, we can see a marked transformation in Vertov’s appreciation of the importance of the human subject for his filmmaking practice. Delving into Michelson’s collection past “WE,” we increasingly find the “psychological” creeping in, despite Vertov’s frequent polemics against its predominance in fiction filmmaking. It is impossible not to detect the traces of psychological investigation in this diary entry from March 22, 1941: “The joy of truth, but not of apparent truth. The joy of seeing in depth, through makeup, through acting, through a role, through a mask. To see weeping through laughter, through pomposity – paltriness, through bravery – cowardice, through politeness – hatred, through a mask of contemptuous indifference – the concealed passion of love. The joy of doing away with ‘appearance,’ of reading thoughts and not words” (238). No matter how much Vertov may wish to stick to a materialist view of the world, by condensing our attention, by selecting one face or gesture for our contemplation, his camera cannot help but open up the human subject to psychological and emotional interpretations. In fact, the final document in Michelson’s collection (though not the latest, chronologically), “Little Anya: A Film Portrait,” written in 1943 according to Vlada Petric´, could easily pass as a fiction film script detailing the experiences of a young girl during the Great Patriotic War, although I’m sure it would bear no resemblance to the illusionist fakery Vertov constantly derided. Finally, in a piece plainly titled “About Love for the Living Person” from 1958, he claims that “everything I have done in cinema was connected, directly or indirectly, with my persistent effort to reveal the thinking of the ‘living person.’ Sometimes that person was the film’s author-director, not shown on the screen” (in Michelson 156). What can we glean from this shift in Vertov’s rhetoric? Seth Feldman has characterized this change as a moving away from one artistic movement towards another: “it is the difference between an avant garde artist still linked to conventional Italian Futurism and a Soviet artist who, with a grasp of the principles of Constructivism, is applying his medium’s potential not only to a technological interpretation of society but also to its social structuring” (Evolution 130).