Editing Dziga Vertov (section)

==Biography==
===Early years===
Vertov was born David Abelevich Kaufman into a [[Jew]]ish family in [[Białystok]], [[Congress Poland|Poland]], then a part of the [[Russian Empire]]. He [[Russification|Russified]] his Jewish name and [[patronymic]], David Abelevich, to '''Denis Arkadievich''' at some point after 1918.<ref>Early Soviet Cinema; Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda by David Gillespie Wallflower Press London 2005, page 57</ref> Vertov studied music at Białystok Conservatory until his family fled from the invading [[German Army (German Empire)|German Army]] to [[Moscow]] in 1915. The Kaufmans soon settled in [[Saint Petersburg|Petrograd]], where Vertov began writing [[poetry]], [[science fiction]], and [[satire]]. In 1916–1917 Vertov was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and experimenting with "sound collages" in his free time. He eventually adopted the name "Dziga Vertov", which translates loosely from [[Ukrainian language|Ukrainian]] as 'spinning top'.<ref>Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction: A Very Short Introduction by Patricia Aufderheide; Oxford University Press, 28 November 2007, page 37</ref>

===Early writings===
Vertov is known for many early writings, mainly while still in school, that focus on the individual versus the perceptive nature of the camera lens, which he was known to call his "second eye".

Most of Vertov's early work was unpublished, and few manuscripts survived after the [[World War II|Second World War]], though some material surfaced in later films and documentaries created by Vertov and his brothers, [[Boris Kaufman]] and [[Mikhail Kaufman]].

Vertov is known for quotes on perception, and its ineffability, in relation to the nature of qualia (sensory experiences).<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://dziga-vertov.journal-of-life.com/#!biographies|title=Dziga Vertov|access-date=2 January 2018|language=en}}</ref>

===After the October Revolution===
After the [[Bolshevik Revolution]] of 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for ''Kino-Nedelya'' ({{lang|ru|Кино-Неделя}}, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia), which first came out in June 1918. While working for ''Kino-Nedelya'' he met his future wife, the film director and editor, [[Yelizaveta Svilova|Elizaveta Svilova]], who at the time was working as an editor at [[Goskino]]. She began collaborating with Vertov, beginning as his editor but becoming assistant and co-director in subsequent films, such as ''[[Man with a Movie Camera]]'' (1929), and ''[[Three Songs About Lenin]]'' (1934).

Vertov worked on the ''Kino-Nedelya'' series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on [[Mikhail Kalinin]]'s [[agit-train]] during the ongoing [[Russian Civil War]] between [[Communist]]s and [[counterrevolutionary|counterrevolutionaries]]. Some of the cars on the agit-trains were equipped with actors for live performances or [[printing press]]es; Vertov's had equipment to shoot, develop, edit, and project film. The trains went to battlefronts on [[agitprop|agitation-propaganda]] missions intended primarily to bolster the morale of the troops; they were also intended to stir up revolutionary fervor of the masses.

In 1919, Vertov compiled newsreel footage for his documentary ''Anniversary of the Revolution;'' he also supervised the filming of his project ''The Battle for Tsaritsyn'' (1919).<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Dziga Vertov : defining documentary film|last=Hicks, Jeremy.|date=2007|publisher=I.B. Tauris|isbn=9781435603523|location=London|pages=55|oclc=178389068}}</ref> in 1921 he compiled ''History of the [[Russian Civil War|Civil War]].'' The so-called "Council of Three," a group issuing manifestoes in [[LEF (journal)|LEF]], a radical Russian newsmagazine, was established in 1922; the group's "three" were Vertov, his (future) wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother and [[cinematographer]] [[Mikhail Kaufman]].<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://archive.org/stream/filmtillnowsurve00roth#page/167/mode/2up|pages=167–170|author=Paul Rotha|title=The film till now, a survey of the cinema|year=1930|publisher=[[Jonathan Cape]]|author-link=Paul Rotha}}</ref> Vertov's interest in machinery led to a curiosity about the mechanical basis of [[film|cinema]].

His statement "We: Variant of a Manifesto" was published in the first issue of [[Kino-Fot]], published by Aleksei Gan in 1922. It commenced with a distinction between "kinoks" and other approaches to the emergent cinematic industry:
:"We call ourselves kinoks – as opposed to "cinematographers", a herd of junkmen doing rather well peddling their rags. 
:We see no connection between true kinochestvo and the cunning and calculation of the profiteers.
:We consider the psychological Russo-German film-drama – weighed down with apparitions and childhood memories – an absurdity."<ref name="We variant">{{cite web |url=https://monoskop.org/images/6/66/Vertov_Dziga_1922_1984_We_Variant_of_a_Manifesto.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140423005848/http://monoskop.org/images/6/66/Vertov_Dziga_1922_1984_We_Variant_of_a_Manifesto.pdf |archive-date=23 April 2014 |url-status=live |title=We: Variant of a manifesto |website=monoskop.org |access-date=15 December 2018}}</ref>

====''Kino-Pravda''====
In 1922, the year that ''[[Nanook of the North]]'' was released, Vertov started the ''[[Kino-Pravda]]'' series.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Rt0Wwjs4zyYC&pg=PA44|title=A New History of Documentary Film: Second Edition|last=McLane|first=Betsy A.|date=5 April 2012|publisher=A&C Black|isbn=978-1-4411-2457-9|page=44}}</ref> The series took its title from the official government newspaper ''[[Pravda]]''. "Kino-Pravda" (literally translated, "film truth") continued Vertov's agit-prop bent. "The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow", Vertov explained. He called it damp and dark. There was an earthen floor and holes one stumbled into at every turn. Vertov said, "This dampness prevented our reels of lovingly edited film from sticking together properly, rusted our scissors and our splicers.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Leyda|first=Jay|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=a989DwAAQBAJ&q=%22This+dampness+prevented+our+reels+of+lovingly+edited+film+from+sticking+together+properly%2C+rusted+our+scissors+and+our+splicers.%22&pg=PA162|title=Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, With a New Postscript and a Filmography Brought Up to the Present|date=21 August 1983|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-00346-7|language=en}}</ref>

Vertov's driving vision, expounded in his frequent essays, was to capture "film truth"—that is, fragments of actuality which, when organized together, have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye. In the ''Kino-Pravda'' series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first. Usually, the episodes of ''Kino-Pravda'' did not include reenactments or stagings. (One exception is the segment about the [[1922 Moscow Trial of Socialist Revolutionaries|trial of the Social Revolutionaries]]: the scenes of the selling of the newspapers on the streets and the people reading the papers in the trolley were both staged for the camera.) The cinematography is simple, functional, unelaborate—perhaps a result of Vertov's disinterest in both "beauty" and the "grandeur of fiction". Twenty-three issues of the series were produced over a period of three years; each issue lasted about twenty minutes and usually covered three topics. The stories were typically descriptive, not narrative, and included vignettes and exposés, showing for instance the renovation of a trolley system, the organization of farmers into communes, and the trial of Social Revolutionaries; one story shows starvation in the nascent [[Communism|Communist]] state. Propagandistic tendencies are also present, but with more subtlety, in the episode featuring the construction of an airport: one shot shows the [[Tsar]]'s tanks helping prepare a foundation, with an intertitle reading "Tanks on the labor front".

Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series—in the final segment he includes contact information—but by the 14th episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as "insane".{{Citation needed|date=March 2021}} Vertov responded to their criticisms with the assertion that the critics were hacks nipping "revolutionary effort" in the bud, and concluded an essay with a promise to "explode art's [[tower of Babel]]".<ref>Vertov 1924, p. 47</ref> In Vertov's view, "art's tower of Babel" was the subservience of cinematic technique to narrative—what film theorist [[Noël Burch]] terms the [[institutional mode of representation]]—which would come to dominate the [[classical Hollywood cinema]].

By this point in his career, Vertov was clearly and emphatically dissatisfied with narrative tradition, and expresses his hostility towards dramatic fiction of any kind both openly and repeatedly; he regarded drama as another "opiate of the masses". Vertov freely admitted one criticism leveled at his efforts on the ''Kino-Pravda'' series—that the series, while influential, had a limited release.

By the end of the ''Kino-Pravda'' series, Vertov made liberal use of [[stop motion]], [[freeze frame shot|freeze frames]], and other cinematic "artificialities", giving rise to criticisms not just of his trenchant dogmatism, but also of his cinematic technique. Vertov explains himself in "On 'Kinopravda' ": in editing "chance film clippings" together for the Kino-Nedelia series, he "began to doubt the necessity of a literary connection between individual visual elements spliced together.... This work served as the point of departure for 'Kinopravda' ".<ref>Vertov 1924, p. 42</ref> Towards the end of the same essay, Vertov mentions an upcoming project which seems likely to be ''[[Man with a Movie Camera]]'' (1929), calling it an "experimental film" made without a scenario; just three paragraphs above, Vertov mentions a scene from ''Kino Pravda'' which should be quite familiar to viewers of ''Man with the Movie Camera'': the peasant works, and so does the urban woman, and so too, the woman film editor selecting the negative... "<ref>Vertov 1924, p. 46</ref>

====''Man with a Movie Camera''====
{{Main|Man with a Movie Camera}}
[[File:Человек с киноаппаратом (1929).webm|thumb|thumbtime=55:15|''[[Man with a Movie Camera]]'' (1929)]]
With Lenin's admission of limited private enterprise through the [[New Economic Policy]] (NEP) of 1921, Russia began receiving fiction films from afar, an occurrence that Vertov regarded with undeniable suspicion, calling drama a "corrupting influence" on the proletarian sensibility ("On 'Kinopravda' ", 1924). By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of [[Sergei Eisenstein]]'s ''[[Battleship Potemkin]]'' (1925). ''Potemkin'' was a heavily fictionalized film telling the story of a mutiny on a battleship which came about as a result of the sailors' mistreatment; the film was an obvious but skillful propaganda piece glorifying the proletariat. Vertov lost his job at [[Sovkino]] in January 1927, possibly as a result of criticizing a film which effectively preaches the line of the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Communist Party]]. He was fired for making ''A Sixth Part of the World: Advertising and the Soviet Universe'' for the State Trade Organization into a propaganda film, selling the Soviet as an advanced society under the NEP, instead of showing how they fit into the world economy.

The Ukraine State Studio hired Vertov to create ''Man with a Movie Camera''. Vertov says in his essay "The Man with a Movie Camera" that he was fighting "for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature".<ref>Vertov 1928, p. 83</ref> By the later segments of ''Kino-Pravda'', Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés (and receiving criticism for it); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of ''Man with a Movie Camera'', which was filmed in [[Ukraine]]. Some have criticized the obvious stagings in this film as being at odds with Vertov's creed of "life as it is" and "life caught unawares": the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot that films Mikhail Kaufman riding in a car filming a third car.

However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as [[Yuri Tsivian]] comments in the [[audio commentary (DVD)|commentary track]] on the DVD for ''Man with the Movie Camera:'' for Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera.<ref>At 16:04 on the commentary track.</ref> This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera". All of these shots might conform to Vertov's credo "caught unawares". His slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Mikhail Kaufman stated in an interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. For example, in ''Man with a Movie Camera'', two trains are shown almost melting into each other. Although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail spoke about Eisenstein's films as being different from his and his brother's in that Eisenstein "came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads". "We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism", Mikhail explained. More than even film truth, ''Man with a Movie Camera'' was supposed to be a way to make those in the Soviet Union more efficient in their actions. He slowed down his movements, such as the decision whether to jump or not. You can see the decision in his face, a psychological dissection for the audience. He wanted a peace between the actions of man and the actions of a machine, for them to be, in a sense, one.

====''Cine-Eye''====
[[File:Kino Eye (1924) by Dziga Vertov.webm | thumb | ''Kino Eye'' (1924) by Dziga Vertov]]
"Cine-Eye" is a montage method developed by Dziga Vertov and first formulated in his work "WE: Variant of a Manifesto" in 1919.

Dziga Vertov believed his concept of ''Kino-Glaz'', or "Cine Eye" in English, would help contemporary "man" evolve from a flawed creature into a higher, more precise form. He compared man unfavorably to machines: "In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man's inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people [...]"<ref>Vertov 1922, p. 69</ref> As he put it in a 1923 credo, "I am the Cine-Eye. I am the mechanical eye. I the machine show you the world as only I can see it. I emancipate myself henceforth and forever from human immobility. ''I am in constant motion...'' My path leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I can thus decipher a world that you do not know."<ref>{{Cite book|title=The film factory : Russian and Soviet cinema in documents|date=1994|publisher=Routledge|others=Taylor, Richard, 1946–, Christie, Ian, 1945–|isbn=041505298X|location=London|pages=93|oclc=32274035}}</ref>

Like other Russian filmmakers, he attempted to connect his ideas and techniques to the advancement of the aims of the [[Soviet Union]]. Whereas [[Sergei Eisenstein]] viewed his [[montage of attractions]] as a creative tool through which the film-viewing masses could be subjected to "emotional and psychological influence" and therefore able to perceive "the ideological aspect" of the films they were watching, Vertov believed the [[Kinoks|Cine-Eye]] would influence the actual evolution of man, "from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man".<ref>Vertov 1922, pp. 69–71</ref>

Vertov surrounded himself with others who were also firm believers in his ideas. These were the Kinoks, other Russian filmmakers who would assist him in his hopes of making "cine-eye" a success.

Vertov believed film was too "romantic" and "theatricalised" due to the influence of literature, theater, and music, and that these psychological film-dramas "prevent man from being as precise as a stopwatch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine". He desired to move away from "the pre-Revolutionary 'fictional' models" of filmmaking to one based on the rhythm of machines, seeking to "bring creative joy to all mechanical labour"<ref name = "Vertov 1922, p. 71">Vertov 1922, p. 71</ref> and to "bring men closer to machines".<ref name = "Vertov 1922, p. 71" />

In May 1927 Vertov moved to Ukraine, and the Cine-Eye movement broke up.<ref name=":0" />

===Late career===
[[File:Плакат к фильму «Энтузиазм (Симфония Донбасса)».jpg|thumb|''[[Enthusiasm (film)|Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass]]'' (1931)]]
Vertov's successful career continued into the 1930s. ''[[Enthusiasm (film)|Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass]]'' (1931), an examination into Soviet miners, has been called a 'sound film', with sound recorded on location, and these mechanical sounds woven together, producing a symphony-like effect. Many Soviet critics did not receive the film positively, but critics abroad lauded its sonic experimentation.<ref>  Kendall, Matthew. Boisterous Utopia: Soviet Sonic Culture and Dziga Vertov's. The Russian Review: An American Quarterly Devoted to Russia Past and Present. Vol. 81, 2022.
</ref> 

Three years later, ''[[Three Songs About Lenin]]'' (1934) looked at the revolution through the eyes of the Russian peasantry. For his film, Vertov had been hired by [[Gorky Film Studio|Mezhrabpomfilm]]. The film, finished in January 1934 for Lenin's obit, was only publicly released in the Soviet Union in November of that year. From July 1934 it was shown at private screenings to various high-ranking Soviet officials and also to prominent foreigners including H. G. Wells, [[William Christian Bullitt Jr.|William Bullitt]], and others, and it was screened at the [[2nd Venice International Film Festival|Venice Film Festival]] in August 1934.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Russian Avant-Garde and Radical Modernism: An Introductory Reader|last=MacKay|first=John|publisher=Academic Studies Press|year=2012|isbn=9781618111425|editor-last=Ioffe|editor-first=Dennis|pages=420|chapter=Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film|editor-last2=White|editor-first2=Frederick}}</ref> A new version of the film was released in 1938, including a longer sequence to reflect Stalin's achievements at the end of the film and leaving out footage of "enemies" of that time. Today there exists a 1970 reconstruction by [[Yelizaveta Svilova]]. With the rise and official sanction of [[socialist realism]] in 1934, Vertov was forced to cut his personal artistic output significantly, eventually becoming little more than an editor for Soviet newsreels.{{Citation needed|date=September 2018}} ''[[Lullaby (1937 film)|Lullaby]]'', perhaps the last film in which Vertov was able to maintain his artistic vision, was released in 1937.

Dziga Vertov died of cancer in Moscow in 1954.<ref>{{Cite web |last=MacKay |first=John |date=2011-04-01 |title=A REVOLUTION IN FILM: THE CINEMA OF DZIGA VERTOV |url=https://www.artforum.com/features/a-revolution-in-film-the-cinema-of-dziga-vertov-197128/ |access-date=2024-09-19 |website=Artforum |language=en-US}}</ref>