DZIGA VERTOV

So now we know that the fame-name that David, later Dennis Kaufman chose for himself translates to "Spinning Top", words suggesting his busy mind and the excitement of setting forth in the new post-capitalist USSR. J. Hoberman in his April 13 Village Voice review of this MoMA series suggests another meaning: permanent revolution. Was Vertov already considering the odds against fulfillment of the socialist dream? Thomas Jefferson had come out for further revolution in USA -another and another- for whenever this country required the clearing out of gathering rot, the way a house must be cleaned and then cleaned again. If alive today he would at the least be demanding that Wall Street give back the money and would definitely be championing Wikileaks.

Stalin may have talked sense to Vertov, like a big brother. The enthusiast would be broken and would apologize -standing in the killing field- for his youthful experiments.

Is the title THE MAN WITH A MOTION PICTURE CAMERA or is it MAN WITH A MOTION PICTURE CAMERA? Big difference. One refers to the movie-lead we watch surmounting all physical challenges, always with the same shirt; the other speaks of mankind gifted with a new, revolutionary tool -no less than Guttenberg's press or the discovery of explosives. A tool of observation and memory, of thought construction and art and of much else, including mind control, distraction, surveillance. There's no end to it. A moving picture, life on the fly -captured- to an extent. Where does one go from there? We just saw photos of President Obama and staff watching live the assassination of Bin Laden. It could've been in 3D. Now John MacKay tells us the original Russian title (Vertov, a poet, chose his words carefully), is PERSON WITH A MOTION PICTURE CAMERA. Not so lilting in English maybe but already a revolution, acknowledging equality of women -worldchanger right there- but also speaking of, to and for the individual.

In his earlier KINO-GLAZ and later ENTHUSIASM the Constructivist impulse pictures people as robotic. The line of bent-over marchers, the reality of work (I had thought I knew work, then saw what it actually was, is). Yet glimpses of actuality can't save the individuals pictured from being parts of cinematic sentence-structure. They are encouraged to change religion from the old world-enslaving one to up and coming Communism but whether genuflecting or raising a fist, mass-mechanism prevails. Vertov considered himself an anarchist-individualist but there's little of the fellow-recognition one would expect this to prompt.   An idea of The People takes precedence, of Types in place of persons. PERSON WITH A MOTION PICTURE CAMERA is less of a poster-art. And it has the advantage over the other films in that, according to brother Mikhail, they ran out of raw stock during production and weren't allowed more. PERSON is incomplete and incoherent, less a statement therefore and more of a poem, with lines of development left flapping in the wind. I haven't seen LULLABY but I'm thinking this is the most engaging of Vertov's works.

Excitement over his discoveries had moved Vertov to be doctrinaire, which seems to have been the style then with manifestos pronounced on everything. It was not enough to clarify an art of one's own, Vertov knew he was onto something and his way had to be The Way. And that was nothing less than to, so he said, catch life unawares and then somehow structure this flapping and wriggling life without resort to theater, to jewel thieves and detectives and Cinderella stories as he put it. Un-selfconscious behavior was the quarry; very odd when you think about it. He was to literally put such behavior under the microscope and under attack by his own hyper-consciousness. Not for the first time in history -there had been Pieter Brueghel The Elder- was the normally unseen behavior of the everyday the focus of such blazingly intense scrutiny but now it was to become the raw material of the most organized cinema possible, down to decisions about placement of a single frame.

Others might film "on location", imbedding fantasy into reality; trafe! the equivalent of background music in documentaries. He put down his disciple Eisenstein for using images drawn from actuality, like the Odessa steps, to support fictions. And yet -duplicitous fellow- he himself was drawing on what he knew of music construction, of rhyming poetry and of course the results were also fictions. Real life don't got rhythm in the way he constructs. And the messages: we see a line of little kids, the smallest Marxists imaginable, enthusiastically pasting up signs reading Don't Buy From The Private Sector, Buy From The Co-operative. These little kids have a perfect understanding of the need to cut out middle-men, not that they can read.

Tell us another one, Dziga.

Surely no news to him that any black and white rectangular shot plucked from ongoing multi-dimensional reality is no longer what was filmed but, far from it, is an abstraction. Unaware passersby, drunks, people boarding trams are forcibly enlisted, wrenched out of their tracks via editing to advance the revolution. A sequence of flat screen-shots can be read, sequenced and re-sequenced to say or imply anything, as Vertov shows when shots of the very film we're watching are spread out on the cutting table! Like God stepping in front of His creation, his wife and assistant-editor Elizavita Svilova appears, at work! and how often do you think that happens? the movie telling you it's a movie?

But that's it: "It's only a movie." Meaning: put aside all thoughts of reality however muddled or misleading Vertov may have been about this. Yes, he preferred to work with fresh behavior instead of stage gesture. And still arrived at artifice. Selection! Placement! And as Peter Kubelka stressed regarding his sound-usage: arbitrary audio-visual juxtaposition. Vertov is as much into contrivance as Vladimir Nabokov. What's more, Tom Gunning says he wouldn't have denied it.

Let us step back a bit.

Take God. We might imagine God saying "tree" and, instead of a word, the life of a tree over time, from its roots in the Big Bang to its dispersed molecules in a dissipating dustcloud, and perhaps all the lives its presence impinges upon in the way an actual life is leaned into and leans into others, issues from His mouth. We can imagine such a thing, sort of. But mortals can only beat about the bush pointing out aspects of reality, shaky snapshot approximations. Mortals are fated to be poets to one degree or another, alluding to reality. And PERSON WITH A MOTION PICTURE CAMERA moving along with its bursting energies and sense-defying sequencing of shots held together by little more than glue and rhythm is nothing if not sublime poetry. Cinema was Vertov's LSD. The Kaufmans realized some of what the sequential-frame camera could do and, with film brought into further focus by editing, they were lifted. Jews, kikes, mockeys, furtive Christ-killers, Clark Kent no more! Possibility was theirs. They would do nothing less than give artistic order to fugitive appearance, to the infinite sputter and smear of accident making up the everyday. The nerve of it. You have to go to Braque and Picasso for a comparable eruption of ambition, then jump to Pollock. Vertov and Svilova pick up on Griffith's cutting, accelerating, gathering, bringing the audience to spasm. In this case not to convince us of the redemptive power of the Ku Klux Klan but to present tawdry Odessa convulsing into The Future. Obedient to an idea.

And to the extent he does make a statement his art flies over most people's heads. This while delivering numbing poster-messages to those attuned to his art.

The camera behind the cameraman shows fearless Mikhail doing Harold Lloyd stunts in the course of capturing the city. A real hero compared to most actors. Yet Vertov refuses to acknowledge that actors can offer the camera more than stage clichés, that a smart actor will comment on the person he plays, a sort of essay on the run. Then there are semi-actors that can't help but bring their life experience to their roles. What a breath of air it would be to have Jean Harlow pass through one of his machine-epics! Or to have a young Marlon Brando pull spontaneous behavior out of himself under the sway of abstract expressionism. Jack Smith thrilled to the bad acting that could so reveal an individual, the screen skewering some hapless being in his or her exquisite pretensions, and I valued above all the mysterious territory of transition between behavior and performance, when the dancer offstage puts down her coffee cup and moves onstage and into her dance. I had wondered did Vertov give brother Boris a hard time for filming Jean Vigo's sublime theatrical films? the anarchist ZERO FOR CONDUCT, humanist L'ATALANTE? John MacKay says no, happily, that he appreciated the films.

One has to question Vertov: is this a mentality that -attaining power- could banish Laurel and Hardy? A mentality that has to qualify every moment of a film in its reach for greatness, leaving no place for whim? for divine meaninglessness? For perfectly useless mere existence on holiday from the driven cosmos.

We understand: impoverished war-demolished Russia was scrambling to survive, those that mock films extolling the tractor don't understand. There were real enemies at the gates. WW1 ends and Western armies including USA invade on the side of Jew-killing White troops, holy armies that would play a significant role in rousing the Nazis. (Churchill publishes statements saying the Revolution is Jew-directed.) And immediately following their enormous losses in The Great War the Russians must defend themselves from suddenly-united world capitalism. They do, but they will never be allowed to experiment free of threat and that threat will distort the entire enterprise so that Russians today hate the memory of the great experiment and seem to prefer their crooked oligarchs. It will distort Vertov's cinema. ENTHUSIASM for instance is a brilliantly contrived monstrosity, a humorless and airless powerhouse convincer. Work! Produce! Or we die. Which was in fact the case.

It is great and Vertov is great. And that's what's lousy about Vertov, too; why outside of PERSON he's hardly any fun. I've been warned against saying this but allow me to describe a baseless whim of a theory: I blame Vertov's personal problem, the need to be The Greatest -Eisenstein's fame just killed him- on the sperm. The sperm must contend and triumph over millions of its brothers in being first to reach the ova, the female egg. If successful, that same desperate thrashing of its tail instilled into all its being will operate beyond a successful birth. Men contend with each other -dismissing women as not even in the contest- to again be first, after their personal experience of triumph in overtaking the womb; that is, they contend with each other by force of habit. They will go through hell to be first, to stand apart as a great man instead of a miniscule nobody among the countless, exactly the original drama repeated in a larger and further life-dimension. Greatness is beyond morality, which changes according to circumstance. See how many American patriots converted to admitted torture practices in a day. Every listing of great men of the Twentieth Century will feature Hitler, still revered as fulfiller of Providence. Unthinking obedience to this built-in drive for individual or national (via identification) greatness will probably cut the human adventure on this planet short to the point that we may have ten years of history ahead of us instead of thousands, with the loss of all the scientific advances thousands of years would bring. In cinema what saves America's greatest movie is that it's about this sort of driven nut, Charles Kane. Griffith and Stroheim were similarily infected with bumptious greatness and used up their welcome. Most of us understand on some level that these great ones desire to fill all of space with themselves and that they must be deserted and abandoned if common life is to continue. They must be laughed off the scene, as Griffith was, as Stroheim was. MacKay writes that Griffith's unpopular masterpiece INTOLERANCE was a hit with Soviet intellectuals including Vertov. Eye-popping and unbearable, posturing and boring, it couldn't be greater. Infection set in in Moscow and Vertov had it bad.

I stress Vertov's Jewishness as well as his great-man hangup even though going from David Kaufman to Dziga Vertov says it pretty thumpingly. Elevation to supreme cinema artist was to be liberation from victimhood in the Pale. From witness when a child to church-led pogroms in Bialystok to his parents' murder by invading Germans during WW2, he was not to forget for a moment his perilous marginality and the insult of outsider status. When the Party he had so invested his hopes in ultimately accused him in the postwar years of "Cosmopolitanism" he was defeated; the man who had gone through everything was done in. The motion-picture camera had in fact failed to lift him beyond 2000 years of one-sided mythic holy-war. And now, condemned again as rootless, it was clear that even the chimneys had not been the end of it.  

After rejection of half a dozen film-ideas he withdrew from the field and died, a sick and beaten old man before he was old.

A word on propaganda. I read a book on the subject. It said smart propaganda doesn't lie, it marshals truth selectively, like a successful and well-paid lawyer, a goniff. Griffith had been painstaking in furbishing his racist propaganda with exacting replicas of places referred to, supposedly supporting his argument with fidelity to actuality. President Woodenhead Wilson spoke of THE BIRTH OF A NATION as "history written with lightning", this from the President who figured he could double the US army by dividing it into one black and one white. We know the movie can only be evidence of itself, of movie-making, and not of any history beyond itself. THE BIRTH OF A NATION is an illustrated argument pulling on emotion rather than logic for a union of white Christian men, the glorious nation, to arm against engulfment by supposedly less-than-human others seeking retribution, compensation, and the white bodies of their women. (Tom Gunning speaks of the eradication of the Neanderthals by Homo Sapiens as the first genocide.) The average white, trapped in a grotesquely lopsided economy then as now, is meant to obsess over a threat to his fictitious racial purity and to his manhood. BIRTH OF A NATION is a picture in the same way that its companion piece TRIUMPH OF THE WILL seemingly documents reality but in fact is opera, ornately staged. We naturally struggle towards a picture of reality -see how every baby pushed in a stroller is all eyes and deep concentration- and the movies offer pictures for the taking, expertly pre-assembled. Unfortunately, realism in movies is more often damn lie-ism, counterfeit-ism, and even reality itself, constrained via editing to convey messages whether ill or well-intended, is bull.

After John MacKay's stunningly detailed lecture the thought occurred that Dziga Vertov's story was an essence of 19th and 20th century aspiration. After all he saw and experienced, war, starvation, and small minds determining who can make a film, even Stalin's take-over of the revolution, he could still generate hopefulness; that's a gift. Realizing his editing inventions with his beloved Svilova had to be joyful but beyond that, what a fix to be in. Jonas Mekas also has this gift, which I can only assume goes back to copious mothers' breasts. It can't be anything rational.  

My own mother's parents emigrated from Odessa. They escaped my grandfather's 20 year induction, as a Jew, into the Czar's army. Could they have recognized their former hometown in this wild picture? The streets are there, many startlingly candid shots of daily life, but whence this feverish excitement? The cameraman dares anything, films anything. A baby being drawn from a woman's open vagina, wow! and not by Brakhage fearing for his life while making WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING and barely able to screen it until the 'Sixties, one of the forbidden films initiating Underground Cinema. No, this cameraman is out there in 1929 inviting us all to leave the dark ages and acknowledge the facts of life. Double wow.  

That birth to my thinking is the central shot of the movie. The movie in its entirety restates the event and could have been named THE BUNDLE OF JOY IN OUR FUTURE. Its very presentation of women as full persons proclaims the new era; consider only Svilova's role at the editing table instead of serving at the dinner table. And yet.... foolish movie, foolish Soviets, thinking to defy capitalism! Eat Thy Neighbor-ism. The acquisitive impulse that led to convincing faceless others that smoking was harmless and relaxing and tells them today there are no consequences to planetary pollution. The movie, so exuberant, so inventive, inspiration to so many film-artists everywhere yet so thoroughly defeated in its social ambitions, for even thinking to escape capitalism deserves the irony of presentation in this Rockefeller-endowed institution. (From Trump or Bush one can expect bupkis.)

I would say more, about Bradley Manning, about my own civic hopes to erect a monument to the shit-eating grin, but I'm afraid of the Patriot Act. See what Morris Berman says about it in DARK AGES AMERICA, page 227.

Ken Jacobs greatly assisted by Flo Jacobs, NY MoMA 5.12.11

3D films, videos and Nervous Magic Lantern performances by the artist are being presented this week starting tomorrow, May 13 at Anthology Film Archives.

OPTIC ANTICS The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, is published by Oxford Press.

The 440 minute STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH starring Jack Smith is available from MoMA's bookstore or at starspangledtodeath.com; "Best Independent/Experimental Film 2004", Los Angeles Film Critics.

Other works available at Tzadik.com, Electronic Arts Intermix, Re-Frame, Film-Maker's Co-op.

Ken Jacobs