III.5.
Dziga Vertov’s Contribution to the Development of Documentary:
It
is time for a serious re-evaluation of the relative roles played by Grierson
and Vertov in the development of documentary. As mentioned before, with the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and the subsequent end of the Cold War, we now finally have
access to more of the films and the original writings of Vertov and his
contemporaries. These films, along with
his theoretical and practical writings provide proof that Vertov was developing
a documentary aesthetic and style in the Soviet Union at least a decade before
Grierson. Indeed, the Vertov documentary aesthetic and style have both withstood
the test of time far better than either that of Flaherty or Grierson.
A
brief look at Vertov’s professional career and achievements might be useful.
In
1918, a young man, then known as Denis Abel Kaufman, joined the newsreel
department of the Moscow Cinema Committee, and, in an overt homage to the
Futurist group led by the famous Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, he
immediately changed his name to Dziga Vertov,
meaning “ spinning gypsy.” He
initially worked as an editor, churning out newsreels on the war between the
Whites and the Reds, and developing his skills and style.
In
1919, he met Elizaveta Svilova, a colleague who became both his wife and his life-long
creative collaborator as editor. In 1922, his brother Dennis joined him and
became first cameraman. Inspired by the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, Vertov developed his first
original programs in 1922, the weekly Cine
Pravda. What distinguishes the Cine
Pravda from previous newsreels was the use of editorial themes rather the
mere recording of events, and the use of creative editing to express those
themes. Artistic or poetic expression to
convey political messages was accepted as the norm in writing and painting at
the time, and Vertov extended this approach to film, even using Constructivist
fonts for his intertitles.[1]
During
this period, he also wrote two of his most well-known manifestos on the cinema:
“We: Variant of a Manifesto” , and “Cine-Eyes: A Revolution”.[2]
These
manifestos reveal an awareness of the need to unite Constructivist theory with
the rapidly developing practice of film montage to convey a message and a story.
Vertov and his wife Elizaveta were soon arguably
the world’s first documentary editors. In the process, Vertov was quickly learning
what worked and what did not. For example, he soon understood that politically
stage-managed events were not cinematically interesting. In his instructions to
his cameramen, he wrote,” Temporarily
avoid photographing parades and funerals (we’ve had enough of them and they’re
boring) and recordings of meetings with an endless succession of orators (
cannot be conveyed on the screen)[3]”
While
most contemporary documentarians would agree with Vertov’s opinion on the
soporific quality of filmed parades, Vertov’s dislike for artifice went much
further; he regularly denounced all dramatic film as “theatrical” and therefore “ bourgeois”
– and, therefore, by implication, counter-revolutionary. In the Soviet
Union of the 1920’s calling or even implying that, someone was a
counter-revolutionary was serious business, and, by doing so, Vertov made many
enemies among his colleagues, including most notably, Sergei Eisenstein. This
alienation of colleagues was to subsequently cost Vertov dearly, as shall be
been.
Nontheless,
Vertov’s theoretical documentary concept of Kino-
Eye (Cinema-Eye) has been adopted by subsequent generations of socially
engaged documentarians inspired by statements like this one, delivered at a
Vertov lecture in Paris in 1929: ‘The
history of Cinema Eye has been a relentless struggle to modify the course of
world cinema, to achieve in cinema a new emphasis on the unplayed film over the
played film, to substitute the document for the mise--scene, to break out of
the proscenium of the theater and to enter the arena of life itself.”[4]
In
terms of current documentary technique, there can be little doubt that, in
terms of camerawork, editing and his pioneering concept of visual literacy,
Vertov was decades ahead of both Flaherty and Grierson. His body of work, ranging from silent features
like “One Sixth of the World” (1926),
“The Eleventh Year “(1928), and the previously mentioned “The Man With the Movie Camera” (1929),
are all widely recognized today as examples of cinema craft and artistry.
Dziga
Vertov also succeeded in making a seamless transition to sound more
successfully than most of his peers. His sound features “Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas” ( 1931) and “Three Songs of Lenin “( 1934) are
also appreciated today for their creative use of music, location recorded sound
and interviews at a time when many others were content to merely record a
talking ( or singing) head.
Ironically,
it was Vertov’s very dedication to the development of the documentary language
and form that got him into ideological trouble as Stalinization of the Soviet
arts scene ushered in an aesthetically regressive period in the late 1920’s.
For
Russian Futurists like Vertov, Mayakovsky, and author Yevgeny Zamyatin, inability
to change led to biological entropy, which, in turn, eventually to the death of
the biological system. This Futurist philosophy helped make them enthusiastic
supporters of the Communist Party and the Russian Revolution in its early stages;
however, after Lenin’s death in 1924, however, the same worship of change set
them on a collision course with Stalin and his supporters, since Stalin’s
priority was consolidation of power with an absolute minimum of change – in
short, the very state of cultural entropy the Futurists abhorred.
Like
Lenin, Stalin took a great interest in the Soviet film industry. It was soon clear
though his recorded comments that he did not like documentary in general. There
were several reasons for this dislike.
First
of all, Stalin wanted to create a cult of personality around himself, and
unstaged documentary portrayals of him would be far too revealing and intimate,
and not project the iconic image he desired. Accordingly, Stalin soon realized
that it was far more effective propaganda if he were portrayed by a suitably
attractive actor in a well scripted fiction film with a carefully tailored
message.
There
was also the cost factor; documentary productions had an unavoidably high shooting
ratio, often of 20:1 or more, and were therefore expensive to produce. To make
matters even worse, quality film stock was hard to find in the Soviet Union. A
well -scripted fiction film, on the other hand, might have a shooting ratio of
as low as 2:1. The communist party finally reached the conclusion that the only
value of any film was its ideological content and all other aesthetic considerations
were, at best, secondary, if not completely irrelevant. All documentary production was to be
terminated
In this context, it is a bit ironic that the
Soviets’ bitter ideological rivals, the National Socialists of Germany, reached
very similar conclusions regarding their own propaganda efforts. While Leni
Riefenstalhl’s controversial films “Triumph
of The Will” (1934) and “Olympiad “(1938)
achieved international acclaim for their extraordinary cinematic quality , the
Nazi leadership ultimately decided to focus on commercial entertainment cinema
as their primary vehicle for propaganda. In Germany, with the Agfa factory
producing quality film stock, it appears that cost was not an issue; it seems
that both Hitler and Goebbels, like Stalin, were also big fans of Hollywood,
and they all seemed to agree that the ideal vehicle for propaganda and communicating
political messages to the general population was the fiction entertainment film,
rather than documentary.
In
the Soviet Union, it was sadly predictable that, by 1931, documentarians like
Vertov were being referred to by the pejorative term documentalists , and that obedient communist party ideologues called
for the complete destruction of documentalism,
which was accused of being both “Formalist”
and “Trotskyist”, which were potentially fatal epithets in those days. Undaunted,
Vertov made a brave defense of his documentary
aesthetics in his essay “On Documentary
and Documentalists” (1931):
“Question: What is the
difference between newsreel, Cine-Eye, documentary and unplayed film?
Answer: There is no
difference. These are different definitions of one and the same branch of
cinema production: it is ‘newsreel’, which points to its continuous link with
the accumulation of the current material of newsreel; it is Cine-Eye, which
points to the recording of this newsreel material armed with the cine-camera,
the Cine-Eye; it is documentary, which points to it being genuine, to the
authenticity of the accumulated material; it is unplayed, which points to
actors being unnecessary, to acting being unnecessary in the production of this
kind of film.”[5]
Vertov’s
last major work was “Three Songs of Lenin”
(1934), ostensibly an homage to the legacy of Lenin using 3 different musical movements; an homage to Lenin provided him with some
stout ideological camouflage, and Vertov managed to make the first song a very
powerful statement celebrating the demise of chador, or the veil, in the new Soviet republics to the South,
which were predominantly Muslim. This was also his second feature using
synchronized sound, and he revealed a freedom and flexibility with audio
montage that were also far ahead of his time.
However,
the film was not well received by the party hierarchy; Stalin objected to the
portrayal of Lenin for some vague ideological discrepancy; in retrospect, it seems
likely that Stalin’s real objection was way too much Lenin in the film, and
nowhere near enough Stalin. As a result,
there was blood in the water, and even
former colleagues and supports like Sergei Eisenstein joined the party chorus to
denounce Vertov for having ‘ formalist and
documentalist tendencies”.
The
greatest Soviet documentarian was forced to return to where he began - producing
pedestrian newsreels until his death in 1954.[6]
