Reviewer
biography
Current
Reviews
Review
Articles
Book
Reviews Archive
|
Under the
Spell of Dziga Vertovs Kino-Eye
and Kino-Ear: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto,
23rd edition
Sacile, Italy
9-16 October 2004
Conference Website: http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/default.html.
Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
University of Newport, Wales
lichtgestalten@hotmail.com
(The following review gives a partial
account of a very rich and valuable early
film festival with a restricted focus
relevant to the constituency of Leonardo.
For more information on the festival,
please visit their website as noted above.)
The discussions of the convergence of
art and technology, which have become
especially evident with the so-called
digital revolution and the emergence of
electronic arts, resonate in contemporary
research into early cinema as both a new
technology and emerging art form a hundred
years ago. More particularly, in order
to understand the complex aesthetic mechanisms
in place in the interactive electronic
arts, there is a growing tendency to revisit
particular developments that shaped the
discourses in the avant-garde with regard
to film as art form [1]. In October 2004,
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in
Sacile, Italy offered an extraordinary
chance to view a broad retrospective of
the Russian avant-garde filmmaker Dziga
Vertov. Not only did this provide an opportunity
to revisit his silent work of the 1920s,
but it also offered a fascinating insight
into form and technological development
in their historical context.
In the 23rd edition of Le Giornate
del Cinema Muto [2], the Cineteca
del Friuli, (the organizers), put
together its most ambitious and challenging
program yet, including a major retrospective
of the silent film oeuvre of Dziga Vertov
in a collaboration with two major Russian
film archives, the Gosfilmofond in Moscow
and the Russian State Archive of Kino-
and Photo Documents at Krasnogorsk. With
additional contributions from international
archives, the festival presented a collective
of Vertovs work, comprising 19 ninety
minute programs of silent documentaries
made in Soviet Russia between 1918 and
ca. 1930, most of them rarely shown before.
It included the early Kino-Nedelia, experimental
Kino-Pravda newsreels, some State-Kino-calendar
reels, feature length documentaries [3],
as well as films by his followers, several
contemporary documentaries, and an exhibition
along with some publications. Vertov proclaimed
that his films should not be seen as individual
works of art but could only be understood
in the full context of the kinoki
[4] movement, as a consequence the festival
screened the work with the usual piano
accompaniment in a chronological sequence
beginning in 1918 (although there is no
suggestions that Vertov wanted musical
accompaniment. This mode of presentation
offered considerable insight into the
kinoki movement and revealed a collective
whose aim was to oppose cinematography
with its economical and fictional structures
to kinoculism, It offered a worldview
of the mechanical eye, a more perfect
perception of the world, to create a new
universal language of cinema, a cinema
of facts, in Vertovs words a "factory
of facts" (qtd. in Vertov in Tsivian,
Lines of Resistance, p.81).
During the re-establishment of cinema
as a dominant art form in the after-math
of the First World War and the "October
Revolution", both the Bauhaus in the West
and the Constructivism in Russia proclaimed
the machine as the engine of new art forms.
Against this background Vertovs
enthusiasm is evident in his first published
manifesto "WE" (1922), in which he declared:
"O, Our path leads through a poetry of
machines, from the bungling citizen to
the perfect electric man" (qtd. in Tsivian,
Lines of Resistance, p. 159). What
this meant for Vertov, most explicitly
is evident in his editing style, which
reveals a crisis of the subject unresolved
in a tension between an idealization of
the mechanical process and a constant
humanist concern in capturing "life as
it is."
In Vertovs work we see an anticipation
of the understanding of technology as
extension of our human perception. It
drove him to creatively invent inexhaustible
new perspectives, using cameras attached
to all sorts of moving machines and devices,
as part of a continuous exploration in
the "factory of facts." His development
from Kino-Pravda (kino-truth) to Kino-Eye
where the machine liberates the human
eye towards a rather symbolic editing
style in his later work, also called "kinetic
icons" was revealed by the festivals structure
of a full retrospective [5]. In Stride,
Soviet! (1926), for example, we see
the spinning part of a machine tool turn
into a sort of workers electric helmet.
At the same time, the extreme close-ups
and specifically the use of the sudden
freeze frame in midst of fluent motion,
as in The Man with a Movie Camera
(1929) supercede the dimensions of time
and space and create "time-images," turning
sensory-motor-links into pure affect.
As Vertov says, "The Eleventh Year is
calculated actively and entirely on the
viewers reception, on visual thinking.
This is resonant of contemporary philosophy
associated with Deleuze (especially his
theory of cinema), but in the 20ís,
certainly in the view of the Russian socialist
government, these ideas constituted an
alienated worldview for the Communist
agenda. While Vertov never joined the
Communist Party, he did conform to the
Leninist ideological agenda. In his artistic
approach he set the Kino-Eye movement
against the idealistic, romanticized art-forms
typified in what he called the "factory
of dreams," and, indeed, he opposed any
form of representational and "acted" cinema
with the same force. His films show a
constant struggle between his artistic
freedom and his ideological conformism
and not surprisingly they were not welcomed
by the Party and either censored (as in
the case of Stride, Soviet!) or banned
after the first release. In the end this
struggle cost him his job at the Moscow
Film Committee in 1926, when his extraordinary
film A Sixth Part of the World
(1926) was released.
Considering early film was invariably
exhibited with a musical accompaniment
it was to be expected that sound should
be celebrated at the festival, although
this year there was even greater attention
paid to silent cinema and the special
place of sound in this respect emphasis
on Vertovs engagement with sound
was especially significant. Perhaps not
surprisingly given his enthusiasm for
technology, he always considered sound
as an important issue and experimented
with it as early as in the late 1910ís
before starting his film-career. In the
late 1920s after the successful
European reception of Man With a Movie
Camera, Vertov emphasized the convergence
of the mechanical eye with the mechanical
ear, and in his lectures he pointed out
that Man With a Movie Camera is
exemplary since it was edited to match
a virtual sound composition. Further evidence
of his wider fascination with technology
can be seen in a lecture in Paris in 1929
for example, in which he envisioned future
developments in which radio and visual
performance were transmitted synchronously.
This visionary approach to the new chimed
with a widespread popular obsession with
technology as an assault on the material
realm including various ideas for the
teleportation of sound and image. But
Vertov anticipated television as proletarian
vision of future communication or rather
communion: "the theoretical and practical
work of the kinoki-radiocs have run ahead
of their technical possibilities and for
a long time have been awaiting a technical
basis, the advent of which will be late
in relation to kino-eye; they await of
the sound-cine and tele-vision." (Tsivian,
Lines of Resistance, p. 355) At
the time the film industry had just introduced
synchronized sound to control the film
production and exhibition in cinemas,
however for this vision to become reality,
the kinocis still had to wait another
20 years.
Kinoki was Vertovs life; his radical
and rigorous thinking has provoked at
the time and, even though still underrated,
survived into most recent discussions
in documentary film practice and theory
[6]. Yet Vertov has more to offer, as
the retrospective suggested, and a revision
of his oeuvre, conserved in several
film-archives (and hopefully visually
accessible to the public in the future),
can stimulate broader discussions on technology,
art and politics, by teleporting his visions
into the present and re-evaluating them
in both, their historical context and
contemporary relevance.
References:
Yuri Tsivian (Ed.), Lines of Resistance:
Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. (Sacile/Pordenone:
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004).
Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia
and its Cultural Reception (New York
and London: Routledge, 1994).
Klemens Gruber and Aki Beckmann (Ed.),
"Der Kreiselnde Kurbler. Dziga Vertov
zum 100. Geburtstag. Band 2. Vorträge
und Gespräche." In Maske und Kothurn.
Internationale Beiträge zur Theaterwissenschaft.
(Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau
Verlag, 2004).
[1] Filmmakers and avant-garde painters, writers, etc.
discovered mutual influences and started
a most productive mutual exchange in
the 1920s. Filmmakers, such as Walter
Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Germaine Dulac,
Jean Vigo, Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein,
have been celebrated by the avant-garde
at the time and remained icons for both
technological and aesthetic innovation.
[2] Whereas Il Cinema Ritrovato
in Bologna in July puts a strong specialist
emphasis on film restoration by establishing
a forum for exchanging technological implications
and innovations in film preservation,
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto has
since ever been the sanctuary for film
historians in close encounter with the
specialized world of film preservation
and archiving professionals. For Il
Cinema ritrovato, Bologna,
see: http://www.cinetecadibologna.it/programmi/05cinema/programmi05.htm
[3] Kino-Glaz (1924);
Stride-Soviet! (The Moscow Soviet
in the Past, Present, Past and
Future) (1926); A Sixth Part of
the World (1926); The Eleventh
Year (1928); Man with a Movie Camera
(1929); Three Songs of Lenin (1935-38).
[4] Kinoki was founded
at the end of 1919. After Vertov's brother
Mikhail Kaufman returned from Civil War,
Vertov took him on as cameraman for the
Kino-Pravda newsreel, for which he was
in charge of since 1922. Mikhail Kaufman,
an excellent cameraman and later director,
also became a member of The Council
of Three, which constituted together
with Dziga Vertov and Ivan Beliakov the
ruling body of the kinoki collective
and was soon joined by Vertov's future
wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova whose
experience was a major influence on his
work and resulted in a lifelong collaboration.
[5] See Annette Michelson
and her analysis of Three Songs of
Lenin: 'The Kinetic Icon in the
Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the
Analysis of a Textual System', transl.
from October 52, Spring 1990,
p. 17-39, in: eg Gruber and Beckmann,
p.49-71.
[6] Vertov's approach
to the cinematograph as human's mechanical
eye and ear has been taken up by the
tradition of direct cinema or cinema
veriṭ, most notably by Jean Rouch,
who described his own style as follows:
'I was the viewer, so my improvisation
was that of a viewer, and the staging
was carried out almost without me. With
the camera to my eye, I am what Dziga
Vertov called the mechanical eye; my
microphone-ear is an electronic ear.
With a cine-eye and a cine-ear,
I am a cine-Rouch in a state of cine-trance
in the process of cine-filming.
So that is the joy of filming, the cine-pleasure.'
In: Steven Feld (Ed., trans.), Cine-Ethnography
Jean Rouch. (Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003),
p. 150.
|