Wednesday, September 11, 2013

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE - DIGITAL NEWSREEL #10


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]



[1] Hicks ( ibid) p.14
[2] Hicks ( ibid) p.14
[3] Dziga Vertov (On the Significance of Non-Acted Cinema) 1923, in Kino-Eye, p. 51; from Hicks ( ibid) p.15
[4] Barnouw (ibid) p. 61
[5] Dziga Vertov (RGALI 2091/2/174), from Hicks, ( ibid),p.84
[6] Barnouw (ibid) p.65

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE- DIGITAL NEWSREEL #9


III.3. Grierson and Flaherty:

 Nichols and other Anglophone cinema historians generally attribute the first use of the term documentary to John Grierson, the Scot who created the famous British Empire Marketing Board Film Unit; Grierson reportedly first used the term to describe Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) in a review written in The New York Sun:” Of course, Moana, being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value.”[1]

In the Anglophone world, the evolution of documentary aesthetics began during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and the British documentarians, led by  Grierson, soon began to express an ambivalence towards the work of the man they had previously lionized as a pioneer only a few years before.

In his book, “Documentary Film” (1935), the first known history of documentary,  Grierson protégé Paul Rotha set the tone when he accused Flaherty of having romanticized the lives of his subjects:” Surely we have the right to believe that the documentary method, the most virile of all kinds of film, should not ignore the vital social issues of this year of grace.”[2]

Grierson himself had initially hailed Flaherty as the father of documentary in the 1920’s, but, with the advent of the Great Depression in the 1930S, he and his colleagues seemed to grow increasingly disenchanted with the Flaherty.
With the advent of synchronized sound, Grierson and his colleagues developed their own style of documentary; they began to rely heavily on the unseen omniscient narrator – a technique Grierson called direct address narration.


Since Flaherty abhorred narration of any kind, this reliance on Direct Address led to even further creative schism. In 1934, Flaherty’s “Man of Aran” won a first prize at the Venice Film Festival, and was praised by many to be Flaherty’s finest work. However, rather than acknowledge his colleague’s achievement, Grierson rather ungraciously sniffed that he hoped that ‘the neo-Rousseauianism implicit in Flaherty’s work dies with his own exceptional self.”[3]

There is little question today that John Grierson was the dominant figure in the early development of the documentary in the Western world.  His key positions as first head of the Empire Marketing Board, and, later, as founder of the National Film Boards of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, provided him with a platform to define documentary as he chose, at least in the Anglophone world.  [4]

This ascendancy of the Griersonian aesthetic over Flaherty, not to mention Soviet documentary pioneers such as Dziga Vertov and Esther Shub was due to several factors:

First, and perhaps most important, Grierson held positions of power at the most important government-supported institutions in the Anglophone cinema world in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia during a period when film became the dominant medium for mass culture. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Indian government’s Films Division, one of the world’s largest producers of documentary films, as well as United Nations Television. In short, John Grierson managed to create a global platform for his documentary aesthetic, with no oversight from commercial sponsors, of whom there were none.

Indeed, for many people around the world, a Grierson-formula film with the institutional, direct address narration, became synonymous with documentary.  

The Grierson influence is still noticeable today in former colonies of the United Kingdom and France, such as India and most African countries. The direct address narration assures institutional control of message, often attempting to compensate for poor visual material, and makes life easier for government administrators, enabling them to show their bosses they are parroting the party line, while impeding the development of modern media communications skills among both practitioners and consumers alike. Since many of these same administrators appear themselves to have no awareness or comprehension of modern media techniques, this phenomenon is self-perpetuating, resulting in the production of mediocre material , of interest to few other than the VIPS depicted.


As a result, today the Grierson direct address narration technique is often referred to disparagingly among documentarians as The Voice of God; it is hard to assess the impact of this technique when it was most prevalent, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and was associated with newsreels popular in England and the United States, like “The March of Time”. However, today, most contemporary documentarians see it as patronizing and antiquated, and avoid it altogether, if at all possible.

While Flaherty enjoyed early commercial success, and had many admirers, he was never able to articulate his own aesthetic and ideology in words; he let his films speak for themselves. Flaherty died in 1951, and his widow Frances attempted to protect his legacy through the creation of the Flaherty Seminars in 1955, which were held yearly in upstate New York.  However, as more embarrassing facts surrounding the shooting of “Nanook of the North” became known, Flaherty’s stature as a documentary pioneer became seriously tarnished.

 Internationally, his reputation has yet to recover from the withering ideological critiques during the post-Colonial era of the 1960s, when his man-versus-nature theme was vigorously denounced as a “romantic fraud”[5] by Third World critics and others.  One critic, Fatimah Tobing Rony, went so far as to describe Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” as,” a cinema of romantic preservationism, dedicated not to anthropological knowledge but to the production of indigenous people as trophies and to the capture of their ways of life in nostalgic fiction.”[6]

Today, one might fairly say the ethnographic documentary owes the biggest debt to the pioneering attempts of Flaherty to document traditional lives of indigenous peoples. However, his well-established penchant for re-enactment, not to mention outright fabrication of non-existent events in the lives of the peoples whose stories he was supposedly documenting, have caused him to be regarded as something less than a role model for aspiring documentarians today.



[1] Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A, MacLane (A New History of Documentary Film)Continuum, 2005. P.3
[2]  Barnouw ( ibid)  p.99
[3] Aufderheide ( ibid), p35
[4] Barnouw ( ibid),p99
[5] Aufderheide ( ibid),p.32
[6] Gaines ( ibid) p.6