The Oxford History of World Cinema by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Author:Geoffrey Nowell-Smith [Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780198742425
Amazon: 0198742428
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

films of 1926-28 Vertov the poet emerges through profuse titling, particularly convoluted

in One Sixth of the World ( 1926) with its editing controlled by Whitmanesque intertitles:

'You who eat the meat of reindeer [image] Dipping it into warm blood [image] You

sucking on your mother's breast [image] And you, highspirited hundred-years-old man',

etc. While some critics declared that such editing inaugurated a new genre of 'poetic

cinema' ( Viktor Shklovsky went so far as to see in the film traditional forms of the

'triolet'), others found it inconsistent with the LEF (Left Front) doctrine of 'cinema of

facts' to which the 'kinoki' formally subscribed.

Original poster for The Man with the Movie Camera ( 1929)

In response to these Criticisms, Vertov ruled out the use of all intertitles from his filmic

manifesto The Man with the Movie Camera ( Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929), a tour de

force which results in what appears to be the most 'theoretical' film of the silent era self-

confined to the image alone. Documentary in material but utopian in essence (its setting

was a nowhere city, a composite location of bits of Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and a coal-

mining region of the Ukraine), The Man with the Movie Camera summarized the thematic

universe of the 'kinoki' movement: the image of the worker perfect as the machine, that of

the film-maker as socially useful as the factory worker, together with that of the super-

sensitive spectator reacting to no matter how complicated a message the film offers to his

or her attention. In 1929, however, all these quixotic images were hopelessly out of date --

including the master image of the film, that of the ideal city in which private life and the

life of the community are harmonized and controlled by the infallible eye of the movie

camera.More personal in style but less original in imagery, Vertov's post-'kinoki' films of

the sound period revolved around songs and music, images of women, and cult figures,

past and present. In Lullaby ( 1937) liberated women sing praise to Stalin, much in the

spirit of the earlier Three Songs of Lenin ( 1934), while Three Heroines ( 1938) shows

women mastering 'male' professions as engineer, piolot, and military officer. These three

films stem back to a project of 1933 carrying the generic title 'She', a film that was

supposed to 'race the working of the brain' of a fictional composer as he writes an

eponymous symphony of womanhood across the ages.Under Stalin, Vertov's feature-

length documentaries were largely suppressed: although never arrested, he was

blacklisted during the anti-Semitic campaign of 1949. He died of cancer on 12 February

1954.

YURI TSIVIAN SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Kinonedelia ( 1918-19); Boi pod

Tsaritsynym ('The Battle of Tsaritsyn'); Istoriya grazdanskoi voiny ('History of the Civil

War') ( 1921); Kino-Pravda ( 1922-25); Goskinokalendar ( 1923-25); Kino-glas ( 1924);

Shagai, Soviet! ('Stride, Soviet!') ( 1926); Shestaya chast sveta (One Sixth of the World)

( 1926); Odinnadsatyi (The Eleventh Year) ( 1928); Chelovek s Kinoapparatom (The Man

with the Movie Camera) ( 1929); Entuziazm -- simfoniya Donbassa (Enthusiasm --

Symphony of the Donbas) ( 1930); Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs of Lenin) ( 1934);

Kolybelnaya ('Lullaby') ( 1937); Sergo Ordzonikidze ( 1937); Tri

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