Under the Spell of Dziga Vertov’s 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 Vertov’s 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 Vertov’s 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 Vertov’s 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 Vertov’s 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 viewer’s 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 Vertov’s 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 1920’s 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 Vertov’s 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).

 

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