Dziga Vertov I. Kinoglaz

Much is owed to the revolutionary thrust of the early Soviets in general and Vertov in particular for separating the cinema from older art forms. In 1924 the Jewish-born native of Białystok, from his position as editor of the first newsreel series in Moscow, issued a proclamation on film theory by way of an experimental "Non-Fiction Film Thing" (we would call it a documentary, mostly staged). Put forth under the invented term Kinoglaz — literally Cinema Eye — was the statement of a progressive dogma for the right purposes of the film camera and the proper language of motion pictures.

Lars von Trier pulled a similar stunt with the Dogme 95 movement, to name a recent and equally assholish parallel. But we need our assholes and should get to know them. We learn the most by studying extremes.

Actually while viewing Kinoglaz and skimming some of Vertov's writings I was more frequently reminded of Scott McCloud's invaluable treatise on sequential art, Understanding Comics — not in terms of scope (McCloud is far more catholic in his views on the theory of comics) but in the passion and urgency of Vertov's appeal on behalf of his medium as a distinct, valuable and respectable form.

I probably shouldn't be making comparisons to McCloud. He seems like such a nice guy, and Vertov is a lunatic. (Apologies, Scott.) Consider the fork of departure between Vertov and his only more famous contemporary, Sergei Eisenstein. Both were instrumental in advancing the significance of editing as the grammar of the medium, and both adhered to the constructivist principle that the purpose of art was to serve a social (Marxist) agenda, but while Eisenstein felt there was a future for dramatic fiction in film Vertov was vehemently opposed. As he saw it man could evolve no further by continuing to study invisible aspects of life: the emotional and psychological underpinnings of dramatic fiction. These Vertov did crazily assert “prevent man from being as precise as a stopwatch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine.” Kinship with the machine...I wonder if Cronenberg is a fan.

For Vertov the eye of the camera bears witness to an absolute and total worldview that encompasses physical motion and visible change to the exclusion of all else. The machine does not think or feel; it moves and effects motion. And that is all that matters to the camera, to Vertov, to the synthesis of man's eye and the kinoglaz.

One sees the utility of this dogma to communist propaganda. Kinoglaz, the film, documents the activities of the Young Pioneers, a Leninist youth organization engaged in camp-making, river bathing, providing charity services, proselytizing and endless endless endless postering. They are busy little beavers. Make yourself useful and do something. Anyone who isn't in motion — the homeless, tubercular, mentally ill, addicted and indolent drunk — is an opportunity for someone else to give a helping hand.

Then Vertov puts the medium to work, using camera techniques like extreme angles and editing techniques like reverse and slow motion to distance the viewer from the emotional content of the images, forcing one instead to regard the fact of motion, the visible process of change. Two lengthy sequences depict a favorite subject: the production of goods, namely bread and beef. But shown entirely in reverse. So you get to watch a beef carcass be given back its viscera and have its skin skillfully reapplied by knife, then be unkilled in the stocks before it trods its way backward into a cattle car bound for the feedlot, etc. Same deal for a loaf of bread making its way back to a field of rye. At first I thought Vertov was just using the old gimmick to astound Russian peasants who'd never before seen moving pictures, but surely his intended audience was more sophisticated. Showing a process to be reversible makes it seem mechanical.

About the postering. In addition to the sheets pasted on every wall from Magadan to Minsk the film is jammed with poster-like intertitles. (I sometimes fool myself into thinking I can transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet, but really there's only like three characters I consistently remember.) This doesn't have anything to do with motion, and indeed Vertov would phase out intertitles from some of his later work, but it would seem to be in line with a constructivist notion of text as image, imparting the functionality of one to the other. Think of the bare lines and stark shapes of Kandinsky as approaching the quality of glyph, and vice versa. (McCloud's "picture plane" says it all.) However in the last reel Vertov makes the connection by juxtaposing intertitles with cartoon schematics for a crystal radio receiver and other electric devices — static diagrams/text to illustrate the machines/principles of Russia's future.

This is the kind of thinking that led to Skynet.


PS. Come for the agitprop, stay for the silhouette animation: a brief sequence of backlit stop motion 2D puppetry à la Lotte Reiniger.