Dziga Vertov

• 1. Introduction

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  Dziga Vertov was born David Abelevich Kaufman in Białystok, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family that would eventually scatter across continents and history. When he finally chose his working name, it was a Ukrainian phrase that translates loosely as "spinning top". That restless, centrifugal quality would define everything he made. He studied medicine and wrote poetry, but what absorbed him most was the question of what a camera could see that a human eye could not. By the time critics in 2012 voted his 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera the eighth-greatest film ever made, the question he had spent a lifetime asking had become foundational to documentary cinema itself. How did a Jewish kid from a provincial city become the theorist of the mechanical eye? What did he believe the camera could do that no human observer ever could? And why did the Soviet state he devoted his art to eventually silence him?

• 2. The Name He Chose

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  Białystok Conservatory was where the young David Kaufman first studied music, before his family fled the German Army's advance and made their way to Moscow in 1915. The Kaufmans soon settled in Petrograd, and David began writing poetry, science fiction, and satire. By 1916-1917 he was enrolled at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg, studying medicine while secretly experimenting with what he called "sound collages" in his spare time. The experiments were a kind of rehearsal for something he had not yet named. He Russified his given name, David Abelevich, to Denis Arkadievich at some point after 1918. Then he took a step further. "Dziga Vertov" carried no family history, no Jewish patronymic, no visible origin. It was a pseudonym built for speed and spin, like the toy it evoked. His early writings, mostly composed while still in school, kept returning to a single preoccupation: the individual set against the perceptive nature of the camera lens, which he called his "second eye". Most of those manuscripts did not survive the Second World War, though traces of their ideas resurfaced in films he and his brothers would later make.

• 3. Agit-Trains and Actuality

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  At the age of 22, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series and the first newsreel series in Russia. The series first came out in June 1918. It was here he met the woman who would become his wife and closest collaborator: Elizaveta Svilova, then working as an editor at Goskino. She started as his editor and grew into assistant and co-director. Working on Kino-Nedelya also placed Vertov in the middle of the Russian Civil War. He helped establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin's agit-train, a mobile propaganda unit traveling to battlefronts. Some cars on those trains carried actors for live performances or printing presses. Vertov's car was different: it held equipment to shoot, develop, edit, and project film on the spot. The trains' mission was to bolster troop morale and stir revolutionary feeling among civilian populations. In 1919, Vertov compiled newsreel footage into his documentary Anniversary of the Revolution and supervised the filming of The Battle for Tsaritsyn. By 1921 he had assembled History of the Civil War. From these years of agitation work, he developed a conviction that organized fragments of actuality could reveal truths invisible to the naked eye. The "Council of Three" - Vertov, Svilova, and his brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman - formalized this conviction by issuing manifestoes in LEF, a radical Russian newsmagazine, beginning in 1922.

• 4. The Basement on Kino-Pravda

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  "The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow," Vertov explained. He called it damp and dark. There was an earthen floor and holes one stumbled into at every turn. The moisture, he said, prevented their lovingly edited reels from sticking together properly and rusted their scissors and splicers. This was the unglamorous workshop behind one of the most significant film series of the early twentieth century. Kino-Pravda, which launched in 1922 and ran for twenty-three issues over three years, took its title directly from the government newspaper Pravda. "Kino-Pravda" translates literally as "film truth". Each issue ran about twenty minutes and usually covered three topics. The stories were typically descriptive rather than narrative: vignettes showing a trolley system renovation, the organization of farmers into communes, a trial, and in one stark episode, starvation inside the nascent Communist state. Vertov and his collaborators sometimes used a hidden camera, filming marketplaces and bars without asking permission. Reenactments were generally absent, though the series was not without staged moments - the scenes showing people selling and reading newspapers about the Social Revolutionary trial were both set up for the camera. Propagandistic tendencies appeared too, but sometimes with a deft touch: footage of the Tsar's tanks helping lay a construction foundation was given the intertitle "Tanks on the labor front". By the fourteenth episode, critics were calling the series "insane". Vertov replied that the critics were hacks cutting down revolutionary effort, and promised to "explode art's tower of Babel". He freely admitted the series had a limited release, but he never conceded that this was a flaw.

• 5. The Mechanical Eye

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  In a 1923 credo, Vertov wrote: "I am the Cine-Eye. I am the mechanical eye. I the machine show you the world as only I can see it. I emancipate myself henceforth and forever from human immobility. I am in constant motion... My path leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I can thus decipher a world that you do not know." His concept of Kino-Glaz, or Cine-Eye, was first formulated in the 1919 manifesto "WE: Variant of a Manifesto". It rested on a specific claim: that the camera was not just a recording device but an instrument capable of pushing human perception toward something more precise and machine-like. Vertov compared ordinary humans unfavorably to machines, writing that "in the face of the machine we are ashamed of man's inability to control himself". This was not a metaphor for him. He believed the Cine-Eye would help contemporary humanity evolve "from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man". Where Sergei Eisenstein used montage to produce emotional and psychological effects on audiences, Vertov wanted his montage to act on the actual evolution of the species. He surrounded himself with others who shared these convictions - the Kinoks collective - and used his newsreel platforms to extend the ideas further. Vertov believed that literature, theater, and music had made film too "romantic" and "theatricalised", and that psychological film-dramas "prevent man from being as precise as a stopwatch". In May 1927 he moved to Ukraine, and the Cine-Eye movement broke up.

• 6. Man with a Movie Camera

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  The Ukraine State Studio hired Vertov to make what became his most celebrated work. His statement of purpose was precise: he was fighting for "a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature". Man with a Movie Camera, filmed in Ukraine and released in 1929, was the culmination of everything the Kino-Pravda years had been building toward. It was to be made without a scenario. The film attracted immediate criticism for staging: the scene of a woman rising and getting dressed was obviously arranged, as was a reversed shot of chess pieces being swept off a board. Vertov's collaborator and brother Mikhail Kaufman addressed this directly in an interview, drawing a distinction between what his brother meant by his two guiding credos. Scholar Yuri Tsivian, in his commentary for the film's DVD release, explained the difference: "life as it is" meant recording life as it would unfold without the camera present, while "life caught unawares" meant recording life surprised or provoked by the camera's presence. Mikhail explained that the slow motion and fast motion and other techniques were a way to dissect the image - "to be the honest truth of perception". He gave an example from the film: two trains shown almost melting into each other. Vertov was not distorting reality but portraying how two passing trains actually look. The film's ambition went beyond aesthetics. Mikhail described Eisenstein as someone who "came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads". What Vertov wanted, Mikhail said, was "an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism". The film's deeper purpose was to make Soviet citizens more efficient in their actions by showing them their own movements slowed down and analyzed. Vertov had lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, possibly because he had criticized Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a film the Communist Party warmly endorsed. The Ukraine State Studio gave him the resources to proceed.

• 7. Sound, Stalin, and Silence

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  Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass, released in 1931, was an examination of Soviet miners that pushed into new sonic territory. Sound was recorded on location, and the mechanical sounds of the mine were woven together to produce what observers described as a symphony-like effect. Soviet critics largely rejected the film. Critics abroad praised its sonic experimentation. Three Songs About Lenin followed in 1934 and looked at the revolution through the eyes of Russian peasants. Vertov had been hired for the project by Mezhrabpomfilm, and finished the film in January 1934 to mark Lenin's anniversary. It spent months in limited private screenings before its Soviet public release in November 1934: among the viewers at those private screenings were H. G. Wells, William Bullitt, and unnamed high-ranking Soviet officials. The film was also screened at the Venice Film Festival in August 1934. Four years later, a revised version appeared with a longer sequence added to reflect Stalin's achievements and with footage of unnamed "enemies" cut out. With the official rise of socialist realism in 1934, Vertov found the space for his personal artistic vision closing fast. He was gradually reduced to editing Soviet newsreels. Lullaby, released in 1937, is regarded as possibly the last film in which he was able to maintain his own artistic vision. Dziga Vertov died of cancer in Moscow in 1954. A 1970 reconstruction of Three Songs About Lenin was assembled by his wife Yelizaveta Svilova, who had collaborated with him across three decades.

• 8. The Legacy He Left

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  In 1960, Jean Rouch used Vertov's filming theory when making Chronicle of a Summer. Rouch's partner Edgar Morin coined the term "cinéma vérité" to describe that film's style, taking the phrase as a direct translation of Vertov's Kino-Pravda. The debt was explicit and acknowledged. The Free Cinema movement in the United Kingdom during the 1950s, the Direct Cinema movement in North America in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Candid Eye series in Canada in the 1950s all carried Vertov's influence into postwar filmmaking without always naming it. The Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative that worked from 1968 to 1972, borrowed his name directly. The Situationist Guy Debord drew on his independent, exploratory approach. Vertov's rehabilitation in the Soviet Union arrived alongside this international revival: in 1962 the first Soviet monograph on him was published, followed by the collection "Dziga Vertov: Articles, Diaries, Projects". In 1984, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death, three New York cultural organizations mounted the first American retrospective of his work. New media theorist Lev Manovich later named Vertov one of the early pioneers of database cinema, arguing that his method of organizing fragments anticipated digital media logic. Vertov's brother Boris Kaufman eventually worked with Elia Kazan and won an Academy Award for his cinematography on On the Waterfront. Mikhail Kaufman's directorial debut, In Spring, appeared in 1929. In 2018, film historian Nikolai Izvolov found and restored Vertov's 1918 film Anniversary of the Revolution from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive - only twelve minutes had been known to exist before.