"The subjective camera in Vertov's LULLABY (1937)"

An inquiry into the historical association between Dziga Vertov's "kino-pravda" (film-truth) and "cinéma-vérité."

Largely forgotten during the last 20 years of his life, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) has occupied a singular and often controversial position over the past sixty years as a founding figure of documentary, avant-garde, and political-propaganda film practice. Creator of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), perhaps the most celebrated non-fiction film ever made, Vertov is equally renowned as the most militant opponent of the canons of mainstream filmmaking in the history of cinema. This book, the first in a three-volume study, addresses Vertov's youth in the largely Jewish city of Bialystok, his education in Petrograd, his formative years of involvement in filmmaking, his experiences during the Russian Civil War, and his interests in music, poetry and technology. Learn more & purchase here: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/browse-catalog/dziga-vertov-vol-1

Transcultural Studies, 2014

This paper traces the history of an iconic Socialist Realist image—that of the worker, peasant, soldier, or leader viewed from below whilst gazing heroically into the symbolic dawn of a Socialist future—from its origins in mid-1920s Soviet Russia through its use on three banknotes in Communist China’s first renminbi series of 1949 to its effective dissolution in the iconography of Deng-era currency. It argues that this iconic type—familiar not only from Stalinist but also from Italian Fascist and German National Socialist imagery—arose initially as a consequence of the legitimation crisis provoked in the USSR by Lenin’s death in January 1924, and that it may have originated in cinema before spreading from there to photography and poster art. An examination especially of the film work of Dziga Vertov shows that the icon encodes in its visual syntax techniques of political, technological, and media pedagogy meant both to form the “new Soviet man” and to orient populations within a chain of symbolic identifications supporting the charismatic authority of their leaders. It is suggested that Mao’s documented decision to use this image on renminbi instead of his own otherwise ubiquitous portrait reflects a perception of the propagandistic value of this visual syntax, and that both Mao’s posthumous reappearance on Chinese currency and the icon’s transformation on fourth-series renminbi from class pairs gazing upward to ethnic pairs gazing laterally reflects, among other things, the Deng-era shift from a hieratic semantics of charismatic legitimation to a more sober strategy of legitimation by political and economic rationalization.

This project investigates the appearance of intervals, shots and frames in the work of three filmmaker/theorists: Dziga Vertov, Stan Brakhage and Rose Lowder. Each chapter includes a close Interval Analysis of a film sequence by each of the filmmakers, examined frame-by-frame. The close analysis prompts practical experimentation and then rigorous analysis of the resulting films in order to identify and apply a distinctly intervallic approach to editing. The final chapter analyses the films made as part of this project and the application of the thesis proposed. The intervals are located in the spaces between the 24 frames that make up a second of filmic time. The interval is also a kinetic event: the gap between two frames filmed concurrently represents the omission of an image of that fraction of time, the two frames differ slightly – it is this difference (created by wind on sunflowers in a field for example) that, when the frames are projected in succession, gives the impression of continuous movement. Werner Nekes defined the smallest unit of cinema as the Kine: the two-frame unit. Whereas Eisenstein had championed the importance of the photogram - the single frame - Nekes, and Peter Kubelka, insisted that ‘the film frame & the interval between two frames’ (Weibel, 1979: 111) were necessary to observe the distinct mechanism of cinema. Vertov defines the interval as the transition between shots, and states that these connections are more important than the shots themselves in bringing the film to a ‘kinetic resolution’. Vertov’s definition stresses the importance of the intervals in connecting the individual movements (contained in the shots) and bringing together the shots and sequences that make up the film. There is an implication of rhythm here, the intervals connect the rhythms contained in each shot into larger phrases and then sequences and form part of the structure of the film as a whole. This study aims to demonstrate how with particular attention to the intervals between frames and shots, there can be identified a distinctly intervallic approach to editing, evident in the work of these three filmmakers. It also claims that investigation, analysis and application of this intervallic approach can have an impact on digital video editing practices.

As cinematic stylists, contemporaries Dziga Vertov and Buster Keaton had little in common, yet they shared a remarkably homologous vision of the cinema’s unique role in interpreting the sometimes overwhelming condition of modernity. This article offers a comparison of Keaton’s The Cameraman and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, released within one year of one another, as complimentary testaments to the active interpretive power of the cinema in the face of modern social and industrial forces. Through this comparison, the article aims to illuminate the artistic and ideological motivations behind Vertov’s unique combination of documentarian footage and avant-garde cinematographic technique and link his filmmaking to Keaton’s efforts in the United States. Composed in the face of strenuous resistance and criticism from Hollywood executives and Soviet elites, respectively, and fortified by a commitment to the camera’s powers of analysis and arrangement (derived, in Vertov’s case, from his engagement with Marx’s The German Ideology), both The Cameraman and Man with a Movie Camera make a lasting case for the documentary power of the cinema as an instrument of interpretation uniquely conditioned to the social and political challenges of the modern age.

This article explores the collaboration between Aleksandr Rodchenko and Dziga Vertov on the intertitles for several issues of Vertov’s Kinopravda. While some Kinopravda issues (7, 13 and 14) are known to have been designed by Rodchenko, others offer clues to Rodchenko’s influence on, if not active contribution to their design, since they are distinct from the later intertitles created by Ivan Beliakov. Rodchenko used a range of materials and designs to make the titles interactive, engaging with constructivist design of the period. He allowed Vertov to focus on the word by turning it into an object of the cinematic world captured on film, and using it as within a visual rhythmical structure.