The history of media has provided not only opportunities, but also obstacles, to the aspiring artist. To create a meaningful statement, an artist is only as capable as the technology of the time period his or her art is reflecting. For Dziga Vertov, one of the fathers of documentary film, primitive technology caused constant struggle in his work, but also provided the opportunity to push boundaries previously unexplored.
In examining the influences that helped to develop
Vertov’s style of filmmaking, the most influential experiences to examine
relates to his associations with the Moscow and Petrograd avant garde movements
and his early experiments with sound.
After trying unsuccessfully to work with audio because of technological
limitations, Vertov used his ideas of sound documentation and applied them to
film. The concept of montage editing,
previously used with acoustic events, was used in Vertov’s films with images
instead of sound.
Dziga
Vertov was born Denis Arkadievich Kaufman on January 2, 1896, in Bialystok,
Poland. It is only appropriate that he
was born within a year of the advent of cinematic film, the medium that would
shape his life. By the year 1912,
Vertov enrolled in the Bialystok Conservatory of Music where he learned piano and
violin, developing a taste for music and musical theory that would resurfaced
in his later work with sound and film.
According to Vertov, in Bialystok he started his first experiments with
the perception and arrangements of sound (Feldman2, 1-2). Before beginning to work with sound, Vertov
started his first experiments with montage with words. To make novels more interesting, he would
combine the literature of Jules Verne with facts from popular scientific journals. He explains that “the world in which I lived
at the time was not the real world, but a world derived from reading
books. The facts which I gleaned from
these novels, I perceived almost as documentary facts. I did not have access to the other facts of
these worlds”(Feldman1, 10). Also in
school, Vertov recalled in a 1935 speech, he would use poetic rhythm to reform
facts in a new order to aid in memorization.
The influence of this practice of reordering can be observed directly in
the way his later films were edited.
While in Bialystok, Vertov became interested in the montage of
stenograms, on which speech could be recorded as separate elements, and even
reordered to create new meaning, for the sake of experimentation (Feldman1,
10-11).
In 1915, Vertov and his
family moved to Russia, settling in Moscow, escaping the increasing Nazi
presence in their native Poland. While
in school in Petrograd, the young Vertov was introduced to the active Russian
avant-garde movement that included the anti-formalist Cubo-Futurists. In reaction to the exposure to these avant
garde movements, the first thing Denis Kaufman did was change his name to Dziga
Vertov. This name can be translated to
mean “Spinning Top,” or “Spinning Gypsy” in Russian. However, according to some sources, in 1934 Vertov thought of
“Dziga” as the sound film makes on the editing table and “Vertov” as the
rewinding of the film itself (Feldman1, 1-2).
By the time Vertov arrived in Russia, what was once a unified Russian
Futurist movement was by then split into numerous factions. One of the most prominent Futurists groups
were the Cubo-Futurists headed by David Burliuk. Two of the most important figures within this group were Velimir
Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who developed the concepts of the
“self-oriented word” and “transrational language.” The “self-orientated word” stressed the importance of the verbal
texture of a poetic work, and that this texture gives the words meaning rather
than the actual words themselves.
“Transrational language” used this idea to demand an end to the use of
words, and in their place pure sounds to be used (Feldman1, 11-12).
Vertov may have also gained
inspiration from the Italian Futurists led by F.T. Marinetti. The Italian Futurists were also
anti-formalists who wanted to highlight the relationship between man and
machine, but unlike the Russian Futurists, they glorified war and scorned
women. The Russian Futurists also
celebrated man’s union with technology.
As Vertov said, [We advocate] “not the hymning of technology, but its
control in the name of the interests of humanity.” To Vertov, men and women alike, and all ethnic groups fell under
the umbrella of communism and were all vital parts of the state. His allegiance to the politics of his
country became a direct element in his later films that were often used as
propaganda (Schaub). Another figure
associate with the Italian Futurist movement was Luigi Russolo. In 1913, Russolo wrote the Italian Futurist
manefesto “The Art of Noise.” This
remained the Futurists’ basic statement on the possibilities of sound. According to Russolo, “It is necessary to
break this restricted circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of
noise sounds.” Like Vertov, Russolo
wanted to arrange these sounds into new works, but lacked the proper technology
to record, edit, and amplify them.
Russolo was able to sidestep this barrier by designing instruments to
create the sounds of the new world of machines and industry. His intonarumoris, or noise intoners, were
used along with other conventional instruments to create modern noise
symphonies (Feldman1, 14).
While
enrolled in the Petrograd Psychological Institute, Vertov built on his
interests in music and sound by developing a “ Laboratory of Sound” for his
human perception studies. With these
experiments, he was attempting to create new sound effects by means of rhythmic
groupings of phonetic units (Monaco). This concept is very similar to the
Cubo-Futurist’s ideas on “transrational language,” also called Zaum poetry. To create this “Laboratory of Sound,” Vertov
used gramophone, or phonograph, wax disks, most likely either a 1900 or 1910
Pathephone model. He established the
lab in his room in Petrograd, but used sounds outside as well as inside to
record. Vertov was interested in doing
two things with sound: (1) recording sound in a straightforward, documentary
manner, and (2) having the ability to break sounds down into the smallest
components and re-edit them into a new whole, or what could be considered a
composition. In essence, Vertov was
attempting to create the concrete symphonies later heard in his sound films
(Feldman1, 12). Along with his growing
interest in editing and montage, his recordings of sound also developed in him
a desire to document, or record non-staged reality. This became the single ideal that all his subsequent
documentaries were based on, and the legacy that future “cinema realite”
filmmakers looked to for inspiration.
This aesthetic ideal left Vertov unwilling to sacrifice the multitude of
sounds available to him outside for the better recording quality of what he
could produce in the studio.
“I
had the original idea of the need to enlarge our ability to organize
sound,
to listen not only to singing or violins, the usual repertoire of
gramophone
disks, but to transcend the limits of ordinary music.
I
decided that the concept of sound included all of the audible
world
(Feldman, 13).” – Dziga Vertov; April 5, 1935
Vertov’s experiments with the “Laboratory of Sound” were more than
likely the first use of a recording device to compose a musical work (Feldman1,
12). Although, the recording he
produced using the Panthephone could not have been of any decent quality. He did not have the benefit of a microphone
or magnetic tapes, both of which are technological innovations that arrived
thirty years after the fact. Only in
the 1940’s does such editing of sound become feasible for composers. These experiments undoubtedly left the young
Vertov very discouraged and frustrated.
It was around this time of sound recording that he began to look towards
film to fulfill his artistic ideas (Feldman2, 1-2). Although it is most likely that someone introduced Vertov to film
in the Russian avant garde, he offers a much more poetic reason for his
conversion to the new medium:
“And
once, in the spring of 1918, I was returning from a railroad station.
In
my ears, there remained the chugs and bursts of steam from a departing
train……somebody
cries out……laughter, a whistle, voices, the station
bell,
the chugging of a locomotive….whispers, shouts, farewells…And
walking
away I thought: there is a need to find a machine not only to
describe,
but to register, to photograph these sounds.
Otherwise one
cannot
organize or assemble them. They fly
like time. Perhaps a
camera? That records the visual. But to organize the visual world and
not the audible world? Is this the answer? And at this moment I met
Mikhail Kol’tsov who offered
me a job in cinema”( Feldman2, 2).
One
of Vertov’s associates, Aleksandr Lemberg, offered a less romantic, more
logical explanation for his move to film.
Lemberg, a newsreel cameraman, met with Vertov in a “poet’s café”
sometime in 1917, and they discussed Vertov’s laboratory of sound. In response, Lemberg pointed out cinema’s
many advantages in breaking down perception into its basic units and re-editing
them into a new whole. He went on to
demonstrate film and editing to Vertov.
In the summer of 1917, Vertov served his apprenticeship with Lemberg and
his father, learning the basic techniques of his future livelihood (Feldman2,
2). In 1918, Mikhail Koltstov, the head
of the Moscow Film Committee’ newsreel section, hired Vertov. The newsreel division was about to start
work on the first regular Soviet newsreel, Kinonedelia. The October Revolution had just taken place,
and Lenin and his government were looking for artists to propagandize against
their numerous enemies. The Communists
promised the Russian artists the opportunity to create a new future for their
country, something Vertov and all the Futurists were interested in already
(Feldman2, 3).
It
was in this atmosphere of change at the Moscow Cinema committee that Vertov
began to really learn and develop his ideas concerning film, and apply his
previous experiences with sound and the audible to film and the visual. For almost two years, Vertov worked on the
Kinonedelia newsreel, utilizing the principle of recording non-staged reality
that he initially used with sound. From
this idea he developed his theory of “Life Caught Unawares,” or catching life
as it unfolds with having staged any action or without letting the one filmed
know about the presence of the camera (Feldman2, 7). According to Vertov, “the
camera is an instrument much like the human eye, that is best used to explore
the actual happenings of real life” (Britannica) Vertov would not be able to
fully realize his artistic vision while at the Moscow Cinema Committee. The newsreel department’s main concern was
just maintaining production (Feldman2, 7).
In 1919, Vertov, his future wife Elisaveta Svilova, and other young
filmmakers created a group called the Kinoks, which translates as the
“cinema-eyes.” The group rejected
“staged cinema with its stars, props, plots, and studio shooting. Vertov and his colleagues believed that the
cinema of the future was a cinema of fact, newsreels recording the real
world. The Kinoks proclaimed the
primacy of the camera, the kino-eye, over the human eye. To Vertov, the camera lens is a machine that
can be perfected infinitely to grasp the world in its entirety, and organize
visual chaos into a coherent, objective picture. The Kinoks also emphasized that the kino-eye was a communist
method of deciphering the world. Vertov
was a strict Marxist, and to him the camera lens was the only objective and
scientific tool of analysis to examine the world (Monaco). According to Vertov, “the connected
authentic details lose their specific features and make a more meaningful,
beautiful and expressive whole,” because “such combinations can show even those
details the human eye cannot see.” The
Kino-eye theory further states that “both the recording of sound and image
impose certain ideas about an object or an event, which are analytically
recorded, broken down, in order to be given a new significance through the
editing synthesis. The editing is the
essence of the principle of conceptual construction preceded by the sound
analysis of nature, whose final outcome is a new reality”(Ristovic).
The
Kinoks also developed the theory of the radio-eye. Vertov envisioned the advent of sound cinema before the
technology was available through this theory.
According to him, cinema could be conveyed in a purely aural
manner. This “cinema of sound” could be
broadcast on radio, utilizing sound to create image, to give workers the
ability to not only simultaneously see each other, but also hear each
other. This concept of radio-eye was
very abstract when first developed, and was met with much criticism (Vertov,
91).
Because of the limitations
of sound recording, Vertov sought out to use film and the arrangement of images
to create a rhythmic and musical effect purely with the visual. Many avant garde filmmakers in the silent
era were interested in the idea of creating musical sensations by purely visual
means. Vertov had the extra incentive
because of his earlier experiments with sound recording to create this
aesthetic with images. Vertov was
interested in interacting shots, through editing, the same way as notes in a
musical composition. He also was
interested in the acceleration and deceleration of motion to create the same
effect. In one of Vertov’s more famous
films and also his last silent feature, 1929’s The Man with the Movie Camera, the examples of edited montage
sequences that evoke aural sensation are all throughout the film. In one sequence, the “Traffic Controller and
Automobile Horn,” a close up of a horn is inserted twelve times among long
shots of traffic and medium shots of the cameraman shooting traffic on the
street. The rhythm of these shots,
along with the visual symbol of the horn, naturally signifying the sound of
“honk,” provide the audience with an aural sensation by only using visual
stimuli. Most likely the most “aural”
sequence of images in The Man with the
Movie Camera is “Musical Performance with Spoons and Bottles.” This sequence uses one hundred and eleven
shots of a man playing a number of plates, bottles, cups, and other kitchenware
with spoons, along with other shots of ears, radio speakers and other sound
signifying images. As the shots are
shown, the montage is edited to a climax, with each subsequent shot shown for a
shorter period of time to give the effect of a musical crescendo (Petric,
176-177).
The Man with the
Movie Camera became the fulfillment of all of the Kinok’s theories and
concepts. Along with the aural
intentions put into the images and editing of the film, Vertov also carefully
planned the musical score. In another
one of Vertov’s last silent features, A
Sixth of the World, he again experimented with montage editing to create
aural sensation. In this film he
discovered a substitution for the human voice.
He used various prints in the intertitles, and by rhythmically
alternating the phrases with images, he achieved the illusion of off-screen
narration (Monaco).
After the release of The Man with the Movie Camera, Vertov
went on a tour of the Western European countries to promote his new movie. After his return to Russia in the summer of
1929, P.G. Tager and A.F. Shorin were perfecting the first ever Soviet sound
equipment. This was the moment that
Vertov had been waiting for since his early experiments with sound
recording. This new equipment would
allow Vertov to record sync sound with the images on film. In early 1930, Shorin’s assistants
demonstrated the variable area sound track to Vertov in a series of experiments
in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov. Two
of the technicians would stay with Vertov and help him on his next film and
first sound feature, Enthusiasm, or
Symphony of the Donbas (Feldman2, 13).
The movie was to be about the lives of coal miners in the Donbas region
of Russia who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the five
year plan. The crew liberated the sound
equipment from the studio and shot on location, just like with Vertov’s early
sound recordings. These recordings were
probably the first location recordings done in the USSR. They recorded everyday sounds and wove them
into what can only be described a symphony (NYFA). They recorded at the Donbas mines and factories to capture the
sounds of the industry that was transforming the traditional Russia. At each location the crew had to install a
bulky central recording station which collect sound from remote microphones
that were fed into it. Vertov described
the process as extremely difficult (Feldman2, 13). In the film, Vertov used sound, voice, and music as montage
elements in association with his images.
At one point in the movie, the music builds to a crescendo as a worker’s
tool falls twice. The first fall is
synced with what sounds like an actual crash, and the second is synced with the
sound of a gunshot. This use of sound
and image is used in this way to highlight the workers struggle and the tyranny
of their supervisors (Feldman2, 37).
The style of this film’s
soundtrack is analogous to a sub-genre called “city symphony” that emerged amid
the rapid urbanization and modernization of the 1920’s. The new rhythms and movements of the Modern
City, lots of trams, switchboards, factory machinery, etc. characterize this
use of sound. The objective of “city
symphony’ was to capture a day in the life of a city framed by the experience
of cinema, and in this case cinema sound.
In Russia, not all critics were supportive of Vertov’s new movie. Most of them thought the soundtrack was too
cacophonous, or harsh and discordant.
Overseas in America and England, the film was celebrated as a
groundbreaking departure from silent film.
One such supporter was Charlie Chaplin: “Never had I known that these
mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating
symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga
Vertov is a musician” (NYFA)
Dziga Vertov’s ground
breaking work with sound and film has provided countless inspiration to
filmmakers and artists alike. Composers
and musicians such as John Cage and Brian Eno have more than likely fed off of
Vertov’s theories on sound recording and composition to create their modern
masterpieces. Vertov’s influence has
also found itself into the world of anthropological documentary. Filmmakers such as Jean Rouch and Edgar
Morin have adopted Vertov’s theory of “life caught unawares” in making an
honest document on film. For Rouch, the
idea of capturing tiny units of perception and placing them together to create
a whole have greatly influenced his work in anthropological documentation
(Stoller, 102). Vertov’s influence can
also been observed in the French New Wave movement with filmmakers such as
Jean-Luc Godard with the use of “cinema verite,” or reality cinema. Godard’s use of unstaged film and sound,
along with the use of staged action, directly points to his inspiration, Dziga
Vertov (Dixon, 197).
Comm141
April 24, 2001
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997
Feldman, Seth R. Dziga Vertov: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G.K.
Hall and Co., 1979
Feldman, Seth R. Evolution of Style in the Early Work of Dziga Vertov. New York:
Arno Press, 1977
Monaco, James et al. “Dziga Vertov.” Baseline’s Encyclopedia of Film. Perigree, 1991
Petric, Vlada. Constructivism in Film. London: Cambridge University Press, 1987
Ristovic, Sava. “Creative Sound: The 8th Art.” www.rastko.org.yu, 1995.
Schaub, Joseph. “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: an Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s
Kino-Eye.” www.muse.jhu.edu/journals
Stoller, Paul. The Cinematic Griot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
The New York Film Annex. www.nyfavideo.com. 1998
Vertov, Dziga. Ed. Annette Michelson. Kino-Eye. Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1984