Dziga Vertov

7.2 Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

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Dziga Vertov cominciò ad interessarsi al montaggio di suoni all'età di vent'anni e alla fine della Rivoluzione aveva già appreso ad usare la cinepresa; si mette perciò a disposizione dei servizi di informazione e realizza brevi cinegiornali sulla guerra civile. Per tutta la durata della guerra continua a fornire, viaggiando in agit-train, serviiz di attualità, ma piano piano recupera le sue idee sul montaggio sonoro sonoro e tenta di applicarle alle immagini; nascono così i primi lungometraggi di montaggio, privi di didascalie.

A Polish Jew born David Kaufman who used the pseudonym Dziga Vertov learned montage technique while working in Moscow on the Soviet newsreel "Kinonedelia" (for which he had to collate scraps of footage coming from the fronts of the civil war). Dziga Vertov produced the newsreel series Kinonedelja/ Kino-week on the agit-trains and showed his first full-length film, Godovshchina Revolyutsii/ Anniversary of the Revolution (1918), on such a train.

Alla fine della Guerra Civile e dopo il varo della NEP, Vertov firmò un manifesto in cui, scagliandosi contro il cinema borghese di fantasia, e propugnando il cinema come arma rivoluzionaria, fondava l'ala radicale di Kinoki nell'ambito dell'avanguardia; il cinema occhio rinunciava alla messa in scena, alla sceneggiatura, alla recitazione artificiale e ai teatri di posa: suo unico obiettivo era la vita reale.

In 1922 Vertov, his wife Elizaveta Svilova and his brother Mikhail Kaufman began to release their "Kino-Pravda" ("cine-truth") newsreels, which they felt was a better way to employ the cinematic medium than making up dramatic or comic fiction. Vertov's ebullient manifesto "My" (“We”) in the first issue of the magazine Kino-Fot (1922) hailed the arrival of “the perfect electric man” and advocated "kinoglaz" (cinema-eye): "Hurrah for the poetry of machines, propelled and driving; the poetry of levers, wheels and wings of steel; the iron cry of movements, the blinding grimaces of red-hot streams."

Sovetskie Igrushki/ Soviet Toys (1924) was the first animated movie in the Soviet Union.

Shagai Soviet!/ Forward Soviet! (1926), esaltazione ritmata del lavoro e della macchina, gli procurò un po' di fama anche in patria, e gli permise di girare the travelogue Shestaya Chast Mira/ A Sixth Part of the World (1926), documentario universale in quanto abbraccia tutto il mondo.

Il poema e collage visuale Celovek s Kinoapparatom/ Man with a Movie Camera (1929), made in Ukraine, fu la sintesi di dodici anni di esperimenti. La videocamera e` uno dei personaggi del film. Il film e` autoreferenziale visto che ci fa vedere la videocamera che lo sta creando e il cameraman che la sta operando.

The titles inform us that it is Vertov's intent to coin a truly international language of cinema, as independent of theater and literature. We then see a cameraman setting his camera on top of a giant camera that looks like a head. He then walks inside a movie theater and prepares to show a film while the audience walks in, welcomed by chairs that automatically lay down. We then see a sequence of unrelated still images of ordinary life in the city, including machines, posters and the close-up of a typewriter. A car picks up the cameraman and drives him to a railway where he lies down to document the train coming towards him and it feels like he's going to be run over. Then we see a woman getting up and getting dressed. Then the camera films men who are taking a nap. a square, the woman washing her face, aviators pulling their planes, trams coming out of the deposit. We see the cameraman on top of a structure filming the trams. We see a tram passing by a woman who is sleeping on a bench. We also see close-ups of the camera itself as it is shooting these scenes (clearly impossible). We see the eye inside the lens of the camera. We see traffic in the streets, workers in factories, a worker climbing a smokestack, other workers pulling carts, and crowds. We see a doll with a sewing machine in the window of a shop, and a mannequin on a bicycle in another shop window. A split screen shows us the same scene taken at two different angles. We see the cameraman in a car filming the passengers of other cars. Then another sequence of still images, mostly of faces. Some of them are on photographic film and a woman is cutting them, and then we see those images moving (still images becoming moving pictures, i.e. cinema). We see panoramas of big squares, then a funeral, a suffering man in bed, a woman giving birth... And more splits screens showing the same scene from two different angles. The film accelerates and it gets difficult to tell what is being shown, and we keep seeing an eye flashing among the rapidly changing images. Then the speed returns normal and we see a wounded man in an ambulance and fire trucks coming out of the fire station. Later we see a cash register, a printing press, a female worker on an assembly chain, switchboard operators, a typewriter, and another rapid-fire sequence of images hard to recognize. The cameraman enters a mine to film a miner (we see the cameraman in the mine). At one point the focus is on the trams of the city, shows on a horizontal split screen, and then the cameraman in the middle of the traffic of trams. But then we see details of other machines, moving parts that we cannot identify, perhaps of a lynotype machine. Suddenly we are at the port where a ship is sailing out. People are bathing at the beach. A man prepares a "workers wall newspaper" (a collage of pages). Female and male athletes. The images slow down, even freeze when some runners are jumping and a horse is galopping. Women exercisizing and suntanning at the beach. A magician performing in front of children. More sports, from football to motorcycle racing (juxtaposed with the rides of a county fair). The man with the movie camera as a giant standing on the roof of a building. The cameraman coming out of a glass full of beer. People playing chess, a woman shooting at targets, musicians playing their instruments inside a loudspeaker, a comic performance by a musician who plays bottles with spoons that turns into a visual cacophony. And then we are back into the movie theater among the audience. The camera is on stage performing a ballet. The film gets blurred but the audience keeps watching. The screen splits in four quadrants to show us a pianist and dancers. Another collage of trams, but also a collage of typists (with the face of a typist superimposed to the image of her typewriter), and a collage of trains. We see the train projected on the screen of the theater from the vintage point of a spectator (the camera is among the spectators showing us what the camera filmed before and people watching it). After a few more minutes of scenes of ordinary life, we see a giant image of the cameraman in the middle of a crowd of thousands of people, another wild split screen, the audience watching this senseless images, sped-up traffic, and sped-up pedestrians. The train running into the screen of the theater like in the Lumieres' famous short. The collage becomes frenetic and ends with the eye inside the lens of the camera staring at us.

Servendosi di tutti i trucchi appresi, Vertov non solo realizzò un film d'avanguardia; il livello di indirettizza, la candidcamera e l'inversione attorespettatore, parte attivaparte passiva rappresentano conquiste fondamentali per il cinema non solo documentario e non solo militante.

Odinnadtsatyi/ The Elevenths (1928)

L'avvento del sonoro gli consentì di combinare montaggio visivo e montaggio sonoro (cineocchio e radioorecchio); Simfoniia Donbassa/ Symphony of the Donbass (1930) è una fusione fra documentario (sulla zona industriale di Donbass) e una colonna sonora "concreta" (rumori delle officine) e Tri Pesni o Lenine/ Three Songs about Lenin (1934, documenti d'archivio sonori e visivi su Lenin) ebbe grandi successo e influenza tanto in Francia quanto in Germania.

Ma la sorte di Vertov era già compromessa: inviso alle gerarchie della cultura stalinista, venne esautorato ed emarginato, acquistando soltanto negli anni sessanta la statura di profeta incompreso.

Vertov si pose con chiarezza l'obiettivo di definire un linguaggio specifico del cinema perché concepiva, altrettanto lucidamente il cinema come mezzo di diffusione della cultura storica, soprattutto nel caso dello sconfinato territorio russo, con zone ai limiti della civiltà che rischiavano di rimanere emarginate; tecnico prima ancora che artista (materialista come uomo, futurista come creatore), pone il materialismo storico alla base del far cinema e giunge per deduzione al documentario al montaggio, al cinema verità; al contrario il cinema borghese è visto come fumo negli occhi del proletariato. Il cinema dev'essere realtà, non finzione; ma Vertov violava in realtà questa legge nel momento in cui sfruttava la cinepresa come mezzo di propaganda (non più soltanto cineocchio); il rifiuto vertoviano dell'arte deriva dal ruolo sociale che egli attribuisce al cinema: metodo di partecipazione diretta del popolo alla vita collettiva.

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