Vertov's Perspective

Dziga Vertov was the quintessential Soviet artist, or would have been if the Communist Party didn't morph into the very antithesis of artistic expression when Stalin consolidated his grip on political power in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, released in 1929, is an international masterpiece, much better, perhaps even much more important, than Eisenstein's more famous Battleship Potemkin example.

Man with a Movie Camera is relentlessly creative and equally intelligent. The film, edited by Vertov's wife according to the film historian who narrates Criterion's edition of the film, is the result of a marriage between sophisticated artistic theory and extremely capable technical experimentation. According to the director's introductory "inter-titles," Man with a Movie Camera is a film produced in opposition to theatrical aesthetics. As such, it purports to contain no plot, no set, and no actors.

Like Berlin Symphony, which borrowed from Vertov's earlier films in the same vein, Man with a Move Camera tells the story of the beehive as opposed to that of the bee. In other words, Vertov takes his viewer on a non-linear but spectacularly revealing tour of wide of swaths of Russian life in the late 1920s. With the insertion of a brilliant modern soundtrack--that Wikipedia says was added in 1996--the film is always engaging, dynamic, and provocative.

Movie Camera's only protagonist, apart of urban modernity, is the artist, the cinematographer. This "man with a movie camera" appears sporatically but repeatedly, and in dozens of unexpected contexts. At one moment he's in a mine shaft filming workers, at another he's on top of a building or a bridge, at another he's setting up shop at the bottom of a glass of beer--with the aid of one of Vertov's many ingenius camera tricks.

The point? Perhaps Vertov wanted to demonstrate that the artist's job is to be everywhere, film everything. Perhaps Vertov's point is that the artist is omnipotent, capable of recording every aspect of modern human endeavor, no matter how complex, how subtle, how secretive.

Of course, with the benefit of historical perspective, the visual metaphor of the man with a movie camera seems to indite modern authoritarianism as well. For the modern viewer isn't only amazed to see that the cameraman is able to capture live births, bloody accidents, and grooming women. He or she also realizes that the camera's eye eliminates the very possibility of privacy in the modern nation-date. Thus Vertov's tour de horizon depicts the poetry of everyday life, including the visual magic of tall buildings, massing crowds, moving trolleys, and speeding trains and ambulances. But it also lays bare the panopticon of modern life, in which every citizen is a part of a whole, for better or worse.

In many ways, Vertov's cinematic language fits perfectly with a socialist paradise. By eliminating sequence and plot, Vertov reveals the collective soul of society, as well its natural ties to the inorganic components of modern life, including, above all, productive machines. Man with a Movie Camera does displace the bourgeois mythology of individualism. In its wake, we see a massive social organism made up of thousands upon thousands of small, beautiful but inconsequential, moving parts--both human and mechanical.

There is no cast of characters in this film; there is a people on the move, inspired by Marx, Lenin, and the first five-year plan. The camera captures everything, and is especially interested in how the parts of the whole move. Accordingly, the camera notes how people shave, get manicures, get washed, shine shoes, wash clothes, sew, dress, recline, work (on assembly lines), jump, run, swim, play basketball, shoot (at Nazi targets), take trolleys, et cetera and so on.

Vertov's aesthetic vision, a vision that may have reflected the best of the Soviet Union's social theory, is, paradoxically, both supremely empathetic and supremely cold and detached. On the one hand, Man with a Movie Camera is profoundly interested in almost every intimate detail of the life of the people. On the other hand, the camera sees everything, marriage and divorce, health and sickness, without prejudice.

The Future in 1934

Dziga Vertov's 1934 non-narrative film, Three Songs About Lenin, is a cinematic triptych that glorifies the life of Lenin as well as the state he fathered. The film, which splits into three discrete popular songs about Lenin, tells the story of the founding father of Bolshevism through montage. As is to be expected from the maker of the highly innovative Kino Eye, Three Songs About Lenin provides the viewer with innovative propaganda and a non-linear description of the Soviet Union's accomplishments.

The first film makes the mostly visual assertion that Lenin's example and creed had a profound impact on people throughout the USSR, and indeed the world. It makes this argument by focusing on communism's allegedly beneficial influence on a rural, Islamic culture. Although the camera "demonstrates" that Muslim peasants are clearly allowed to maintain their ethnic dignity, especially in terms of their traditional dress, it also suggests that Lenin's creed has brought modernity to every nook and cranny of a vast empire. Muslim women, in particular, seem to be benefiting from contact with Leninism. They are going to school, studying the works of the great man, and getting jobs in the new economic order, i.e., the factory. They are, apparently, also freeing themselves from religion.

The second film portrays the dead Lenin in all his majesty. The preserved body is clearly the epicenter of Soviet secular idolatry. Stalin and countless other faces mourn the loss of the great man.

In the third film, Lenin's vision of a powerful, modern, highly organized society is carefully articulated. Stalin has fulfilled his mentor's dreams. The director takes his viewers on a frenzied tour of the future that includes the magnificent Russian capital, the Dnieper hydro-electrical damn, oil and coal production facilities, modern locomotives, mammoth steel works, the Volga Canal, modern agricultural machinery, an impressive air force, the nation's powerful armed forces, and other masterworks of Stalin's highly-touted five year plans, including Magnitovsk. As the film maintains through the words of "ordinary" Russians: Lenin himself would be impressed by the country's progress.

Of course, Russia's triumph is the product of a mobilized citizenry. Accordingly, dozens of frames demonstrate that Russian workers are on the move. They sing, wave flags, celebrate the famous month of October, tell stories of progress, venerate the memory of Lenin, work, drill, and mobilize to bring the future ever closer to the present.

Young Pioneers on Film

Dziga Vertov's silent film, Kino Eye, is revolutionary in its technical as well as social dimensions. The film is one long sequence of innovative cinematographic maneuvers. It's subject matter is twofold: first, early Soviet society, taken as a whole; and second, the beneficent activity of the Communist youth association, the Young Pioneers.

What does the naked eye of the camera reveal about the Young Pioneers? They are, quite simply, selfless, helpful, healthy, ubiquitous, and progressive. The Young Pioneers, the junior of the two official Communist youth organizations--the other being the Komsomol-represent the future of Russian society twice over. First, the Young Pioneers are, of course, future Communists. Second, even as youngsters, they are actively reshaping Russian society according to Marxist principles.

The camera's eye catches the Young Pioneers celebrating new Communist holidays, demonstrating Communist enthusiasm by marching in quasi-military marches, teaching drunkards about the negative consequences of drinking and smoking, putting up propaganda posters related to public health and the merits of buying from economic cooperatives (the First Red Supermarket is cheaper than private enterprise), exercising or grooming, helping widows with their agricultural work, making tin implements for needy villagers, and drilling for the coming conflict with capitalist warmongers. As one woman remarks in text, "...they aren't going to church, but I'm happy anyhow."

The camera's eye depicts the essential role of the Young Pioneers in building Russian socialism. But its canvas is broader than that. Kino Eye takes the viewer throughout urban and rural Russia, depicting technological triumphs such as trolleys, light bulbs, telephones, and radio receivers, realistic scenes such as T.B. sanitariums and mental health institutions, and complex, multi-step economic processes, such as bread making and slaughterhouse activity.

At times, the film's subjects seem to have been chosen purely for their suitability for the medium. How else can we explain an elephant's trip to the zoo, a record player's movement, or a Chinese magician entertaining a crowd? But overall the film retains a visual idea: Communist Russia is complex, forward-looking, and actively overcoming a traditional heritage in the interest of progress. This isn't a simple approach to agitprop; the director shows us drug addicts, vagabonds, alcoholics, seemingly backward-looking peasants, and insane people. Nevertheless, these honest scenes of ugliness only highlight the accomplishments of the Young Pioneers and the worthiness of the Communist project.