DZIGA VERTOV FILM RETROSPECTIVE
Of all the masters of Soviet cinema - most notably Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Aleksandrov - Dziga Vertov (né Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman, 1896–1954) is arguably the one whose still-radical experiments in image and sound, and enduring influence among an astonishing range of contemporary filmmakers and artists, from Jean-Luc Godard to Richard Serra to Steve McQueen, have yet to be fully appreciated or celebrated.
"Isn't Vertov a classic of film history?"
John MacKay questions this in his article "A Revolution in Film" on the cinema of Dziga Vertov (Artforum, Aril 2011). Certainly, MacKay regards Vertov as Soviet cinema's greatest innovator of nonfiction films. Especially in Vertov's early-1920s works in which he drafts the cinema as the Kino-Eye (kino-oko in Russian), his experimental nonfiction filmmaking can be understood as "nothing less radical than a Communism of film".
In close collaboration with the Austrian Cultural Forum New York and the Austrian Film Museum, MoMA launched this retrospective, the most comprehensive ever assembled in the United States, with an extensive selection of Vertov’s silent films, sound features, and related work by collaborators and rivals in what Vertov called his “factory of facts.”
11 programs of Vertov’s silent films, drawn primarily from the Austrian Film Museum’s unparalleled collection, including the premieres of fourteen Kino-Week films from 1918–19, were screened at the MoMA. The retrospective continued with all of his extant Kino-Pravda films from 1922–25, and with such masterworks as Stride, Soviet! (1926), A Sixth Part of the World (1926), The Eleventh Year (1928), Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1930), Three Songs of Lenin (1935/38), and other sound films.
Vertov’s exhilarating body of work must be seen not as a succession of individual films, but as one continuously evolving movie; “free of the limits of time and space,” he wrote, it would lead to “a fresh perception of the world” and a revolutionary passage from the Old to the New.
This comprehensive retrospective of Vertov's films created an important impact on the future appreciation, as stated by MacKay in the Artforum article: "The future - that is, future artistic and critical responses to Vertov - will no doubt remember him in new ways, as we learn more about his work, its influence, and the time and place in which he lived."
On April 8, 2011, Dennis Lim reviewed the Dziga Vertov Film Retrospective for The New York Times:
"It can be startling to realize just how many roads lead back to Vertov, who straddled the expressive peak of silent cinema and the inchoate excitement of the early sound era. His genius for rhythmic montage and his interest in perceptual processes mark him as a founding father of experimental film. His fantasy of the camera as an all-seeing panoptic tool anticipates our age of total surveillance. His self-reflexive bent — “Man With a Movie Camera” is ultimately a film about its own making — foreshadows the postmodern tendencies of what we now call meta-cinema. The Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka noted that the bold use of found sound in “Enthusiasm” predicts the audio collages of John Cage."
Read the full New York Times Review here.
Images of John MacKay's article (click to enlarge):
