Editing Dziga Vertov (section)

====''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>