A PATCHWORK OF TAKES is all it took for Dziga Vertov to create one of cinema’s enduring masterpieces, Man with a Movie Camera (1929; full video below). His influence endures, too, as fortunate New Yorkers will be able to verify: Vertov screenings run at the Museum of Modern Art for the rest of this anxious spring. Vertov inspires – not only other filmmakers since, but modern viewers still. Here are some still-fresh comments made several years ago by Jonathan Dawson, a scholar and a critic with a few enduring qualities of his own.
By JONATHAN DAWSON [Senses of Cinema] – Dziga Vertov, of course, considered his films to be documentaries, records of actuality, but all his work reflected his very personal, highly poetic vision of Soviet ‘reality,’ a vision he maintained throughout his life, long after the dustbin of Soviet history had claimed him, too. Very early on, Vertov was attracting unfavourable comment and attention from party hacks, with his strange camera angles, fast cutting, montage editing, and experimentations like split screen, multi layered supers and even animated inserts. By the mid 1920s, Vertov was acquiring the reputation of an eccentric, a dogmatist who rejected everything in cinema except for the Kinoks’ own work. Fortunately Vertov, like Eisenstein, received the close attention and support of the European avant-garde. His feature-length Kino-Eye – Life Caught Unawares (1924) was awarded a silver medal and honorary diploma at the World Exhibit in Paris, and that success led to two more films commissioned by Moscow: Stride Soviet! (1926) and A Sixth of the World (1926).
But the central authorities were also becoming fed up with Vertov’s experiments, and they refused to support his greatest and still most rewardingly complex film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Given the difficulties in getting the film made at all, Vertov must have looked back nostalgically at his Kinok checklist of essentials for a Kino-Eye filmmaker:
1. rapid means of transport
2. highly sensitive film stock
3. light handheld film cameras
4. equally light lighting equipment
5. a crew of super-swift cinema reporters (etc)…
This all looks like a shopping list for a post 1960s Direct Cinema crew and indeed filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers and Fred Wiseman all acknowledged the conceptual debt to Vertov’s ideas and practices so many years before.
Continued at Senses of Cinema | Vertov screenings at MOMA, New York, today through 4 June 2011
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