Allegory and accommodation: Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film

16 Pages·3.573 MB·English

by  MacKay J.

Film History, Volume 18, pp. 376-391, 2006. Copyright ? John Libbey Publishing
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed inU nited States of America
and
Allegory
accommodation: vertov's
Three of Lenin
Sonys
(1934) as a Stalinist Film
John
MacKay
Until at least the late 1980s, most film historians I with pride, even (or especially) when he was com
in the USSR (ifn ot elsewhere) would doubtless pelled to apologize for his earlier "formalist"w orks.9
have identified Three Songs of Lenin (1934; Iwt as the one Vertov film singled out for attention by
silent version 1935; re-edited in 1938 and Ippolit Sokolov in his 1946 collection of reviews of
1970) as Dziga Vertov's greatest and most important Soviet sound films.10 During the Vertov revival of the
contribution to Soviet and world cinema.1 Although post-Stalin years, Three Songs was apparently the
its reputation has now been definitively eclipsed by first of his films to be publicly re-released (together
that of Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Three Songs with a very informative book).11 This new release was
was certainly more widely exhibited and unambigu part of the 1970 Lenin centenary, and took place only
ously honored than any of Vertov's other films during after the film was subjected to a most problematic
his lifetime.2A fter being briefly shelved during the first "restoration", carried out in 1969 by Vertov's wife and
half of 1934,3 the filmw as shown to great acclaim at co-creator Elizaveta Svilova, together with llya
the Venice Film Festival inA ugust 1934.4 Prior to its Kopalin and Seda Pumpyanskaya. It is this film,
general Soviet release inN ovember 1934,5 the film distributed by Kino Video on VHS and DVD, which
was exhibited inM oscow at private but publicized most of us know as Three Songs of Lenin.
screenings to both Soviet (Karl Radek, Nikolai Buk Despite all of this, and notwithstanding its
harin, Stanislav Kossior) and foreign (H.G. Wells, ready availability on VHS/DVD in the US and Europe,
Andr? Malraux, M.A. Nexoe, Paul Nizan, William Bul Three Songs has attracted remarkably littles cholarly
litt,S idney Webb) cultural and political luminaries as attention, at least until recently. Surely this neglect
early as July. Tributes to Three Songs by all of these has something to do with the political-ethical embar
figures were widely disseminated int he Soviet press.6 rassment now attendant upon both the film's ardent
For unknown reasons, the original sound ver rhetorical participation in the Lenin cult and its un
sion of Three Songs was withdrawn somewhere abashed celebration of the "modernization" of the
around 13 November from the major Moscow thea Muslim regions of the USSR and hymning of Soviet
ters where ith ad been playing, although itc ontinued industrial and agricultural achievement more gener
to be exhibited inM oscow and elsewhere, apparently ally. Iwt ould seem that, form any critics, Three Songs
ins ubstandard or fragmentary copies, for some time
after that.7 A silent version prepared especially for John MacKay is Associate Professor of Slavic and
cinemas without sound projection capability was Languages and Literatures at Yale University, and the
completed in 1935 and distributed widely in the author of Inscription and Modernity: From Wordsworth
USSR; both this version and the original sound Three to Mandefstam (Indiana University Press, 2006). His
Songs were re-edited by Vertov and re-released in bpouobkli shedo n tbhye Inlidfeia naan,d wiwllo rkb e coofm pDleztiegda Vbeyrt omv,i d-20t0o7 . be
1938.8 Vertov never ceased speaking of Three Songs Correspondence to [email protected]_
Allegory and accommodation: Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film 377
Stands in the same relation to Vertov's earlier films as
Alexander Nevsky (1938) does to Sergei Eisenstein's
experimental work of the 20s: a clear sign of that
regression intoa uthoritarianism and myth that came
to compromise both filmmakers as creative artists
and Soviet culture as a whole over the course of the
1930s.12 Meanwhile, the film's fraught history, involv
ing three major reedits and the consequent disap
pearance of the original sound and silent versions,
has no doubt made scholars rightlyw ary of investing
too much interpretive energy ins uch a dubious text.
The three versions coincide with three quite different
-
political moments specifically, the full-scale in
auguration of Stalin's "personality cult" (and thew an i1 EW15
ing of Lenin's) during the Second Five-Year Plan IIu|Z
(1933-37); the complete establishment of the Stalin
cult by the purge years of 1937-38; and the ongoing z
anti-Stalinist revisionism of the early "stagnation" pe
riod (1969-70).13 Given that the transition into (and
out of) "Stalinist culture" is the real issue here, it is
inevitable that the presence or absence of "Stalin"
and "Stalinism" inT hree Songs will figure centrally in
any interpretation of the film.
Although many questions remain unanswered
about the original 1934 Three Songs, archival evi
dence demonstrates rather clearly that Stalin's im
age was farm ore prominent in that original film than the front, near the film's conclusion, and Rokotov's Fig. 1. The
in the familiar Svilova-Kopalin-Pumpyanskaya reedit, comment strongly suggests that itw as in the 1934 photoo f the
which can be described, with only the slightest quali original as well. Certainly, the fact that Stalin's then "seated Lenin"
fication, as a "de-Stalinization" of the versions of the famous comment - "the idea of storming [capitalism] includedi nt he
1938 (and
1930s. Contemporary reviews, for instance, make it is maturing in the consciousness of the masses", possibly the
plain that Stalin and references to Stalin were con from his report to the 17th Party Congress (24 Janu 1934) versionso f
-
spicuous in the third of the three "songs". A critic who ary 1934) served as the film's concluding slogan is thep rologue to
went by the Gogolian pseudonym "Vij"w, riting about directly confirmed by Vertov's script for Three Three Songs.
H.G. Wells' viewing of the film (inM oscow on 26 July Songs Rokotov makes an even more intriguing From I.V. Stalin,
1934), indicated that "the writer saw Lenin at the reference inh is review to the film's famous prologue, O L?nine[ About
beginning and middle of the film, and Stalin in the with its image of the "bench" on which Lenin sat: MLeonloind]a. [iaM oscow:
middle and the end".14 Timofei Rokotov, who later
became well-known as the editor of the journal Inter ... a littled etail [that] says so much ... here is Gvardiia1, 932.]
the same bench, well-known because of the
national Literature, praised the film's conclusion int he
following terms inh is review of 4 November 1934: photograph, where the great Lenin and his
great student and comrade-in-arms Stalin sat
It's difficult to imagine a better ending to the and conversed - not so long ago, itw ould
film than that image of the super-powered train seem.17
"Joseph Stalin", rushing irrepressibly forward,
above which shine the words of our leader: Similarly, one V. Ivanov, in a review for Rabo
chaia Penza of 31 December 1934, describes the
"The idea of storming [capitalism] ism aturing
same section of the prologue as follows: The bench.
in the consciousness of the masses".15
The memorable bench. You remember the picture:
The earliest extant versions of Three Songs Lenin and Stalin inG orki, 1922'.18 Inc ontrast to the
(sound and silent) both contain the image of this 1970 reedit, which offers a photograph of Lenin sit
well-known train, with "Joseph Stalin" inscribed on ting alone on a bench, the 1938 versions present a
37?. ^ t ( _ John MacKay
Stalin" quite firmly established.23 Yet the question
remains: what effect should this knowledge have on
our reading of the film, inc ontrast to our necessary
efforts to establish a correct original text? That is,
what precise difference does the presence or ab
sence of Stalin make to our considerations of Ver
tov's artistic evolution and of the structure and
ideology of Three Songs, apart from what is already
apparent from the 1970 version? To be sure, the idea
of "Stalin" had become far more central to Soviet
culture by 1934 than ith ad been in 1930, for instance,
when Vertov made the film that preceded Three
Songs, Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass. And
even the lack of an authoritative version of Three
:?i Songs has not prevented those scholars who have
ventured to write on the film (invariably, the 1970
reedit) over the last 20 years or so to identify it,q uite
rightly inm y view, as marking a crucial turning point
-
inV ertov's artistic career specifically, the turning
Fig. 2. Peasant very famous and widely distributed image of Lenin point between the "avant-garde" 1920s and the "Sta
women dancing sitting together with Stalin. Clearly enough, the com linist" 1930s - though the evaluations of this water
'in the round', ments by Rokotov and Ivanov strongly suggest that shed moment differ significantly.
from Kino-Eye the portrait of Lenin with Stalin was the one displayed The critical consensus on the film - estab
(1924).
in the original Three Songs lished perhaps firstb y Annette Michelson, and devel
Finally, some of the most telling evidence of oped further by Klaus Kanzog and Oksana
Stalin's presence in the 1934 film comes from Ver Bulgakowa - holds that Three Songs involves a rhe
tov's own notes and plans. Ina letter of complaint torical turn to "religious" or quasi "sacred" cinematic
dated 9 November 1934 to Mezhrabpomfil'm admin discourse (grounded, according to Kanzog's analy
istratorM ogilevskii about the bad quality of the print sis of the film's "internalized religiosity", in deep
of Three Songs being shown inM oscow's Taganka cultural memories of religious practice), whether
theater, Vertov notes that the shot of "Stalinw alking conceived as a passage from the "epistemological"
about the Kremlin" ism issing, among other absent to the "iconic" and "monumental" (Michelson), or
footage; again, this shot is present in the extant from the "documentary" to the "allegorical" (Bulgak
(1938) versions during the third song, though not in owa).24 Ina n essay that dissents from this "disconti
the 1970 reedit.20 Most strikingly, perhaps, a remark nuity thesis" while offering a newly positive evaluation
able set of instructions from 1934 compiled by Vertov of the film, Mariano Prunes stresses the continuities
for the film's sound projectionist indicate not only that between Three Songs and the 1920s visual practice
Stalin appeared throughout the film, but that Vertov of both Vertov and his contemporaries inp hotogra
generally intended the volume of the soundtrack to phy and film, arguing that the film incorporates and
take on "maximum loudness" when the dictator ap summarizes all the main streams of photographic
peared, as (for example) during the funeral se visual practice of the preceding decade (construc
quence.201 By contrast, the 1970 version mutes the tivist faktura, documentary factography, and emer
sound almost completely when Stalin appears at the gent Stalinist mythography), and in so doing
-
funeral of Lenin the only appearance he makes in "seriously brings intoq uestion the traditional view of
the film.22 Soviet art in the 1930s as absolutely intolerant of
In truth, one needs to acknowledge that even previous experimental practices".25 Accordingly,
a cursory examination of the Soviet press in 1934 Prunes does not regard the presence or absence of
should have alerted film historians to the improbabil Stalin in the 1970 version as especially important,
ityo f Stalin's absence from the original Three Songs suggesting at most that the 1934 filmw as perceived
of Lenin; Stalin's image was already ubiquitous by as paying insufficient homage to Lenin's "Succes
this time, and the notion of "the Party of Lenin and sor" (thus necessitating the 1938 reedit with its "sup
Allegory and accommodation: Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film 379
plementary material on Stalin").26 For their part, Some of the rhetorical specificity of Three
Michelson and Bulgakowa regard the "Stalin" of Songs of Lenin can be pinpointed through a com
Three Songs as a kind of structuring absence, as parative examination of the stylistic use made by that
prying open "[a] space inw hich the Beckoning Sub film of Vertov's own master-trope, namely, the great
-
stitute is now installed" (Michelson), or even as an revolutionary passage from the Old to the New
omnipresent but invisible quasi-divinity, "present cinematically conceived in his case not primarily as
only in m?tonymie indicators" (Bulgakowa).27 But narrative, but rather as sheer movement and sense
once again, Stalin was neither a structuring absence of movement, the making-visible of (as Deleuze put
in Three Songs nor actually absent: he was, simply, it inh is superb discussion of Vertov inC inema I) "all
explicitly part of the film's message and visual rheto the (communist) transitions from an order [that] is
ric. being undone to an order [that] is being constructed
To determine what that "part"a ctually consists ... between two systems or two orders, between two
inw ill first necessitate a reconsideration of the rheto movements".29 Vertov was fascinated by the cine
rico f Three Songs of Lenin, both in terms of changes matic representation of process, especially proc
within the trajectory of Soviet culture and in relation esses of long duration, whether natural or historical.
to Vertov's artistic response to those changes. In While working on One Sixth of the World (1926), his
what follows, Ih ope to show that both the "continuity" film about (among other things) methods of organiz
and "discontinuity" theses have importantm erits, but ing the exploitation of natural resources, he jotted out
that they need to be thought of in terms of the plans for exceedingly brief film-sketches, unfortu
concrete strategies through which the "avant-gard nately never produced, on themes of process, such
ist"V ertov reacted artistically to the new authoritar as "death-putrefaction-renewal-death". He planned
ian-populist imperatives of early Stalinism. Three one film that would begin by showing a woman
Songs of Lenin demonstrates that, as far as Vertov burying her husband, followed by the corpse's con
was concerned, the most important feature of Stalin sumption by bacteria and worms, the full conversion
era aesthetic doctrine as it evolved between 1932 of the body into soil, and the emergence of grass out
and 1936 was its sharp rejection of avant-gardist of the soil; a cow would eat the grass, only to be
complexity, anti-humanism and anti-psychologism, devoured in its turn by a human being, who dies, is
and its concomitant turn toward "character", simplic buried, and then isa bsorbed into the whole process
ity,a nd supposedly popular "folk"s entiment. In this again, although the eventual addition of manure into
essay, Ih ope to show how Vertov adapted two re the cycle is shown to generate a kind of productive
lated features of the new discourse of the 1930s - upward spiral. Another Beckett-like four-shot film
attention to individual experience, and textual ap would show a fresh-faced peasant girl - then one
- -
peals to "folk sensibility" (or narodnoe tvorchestvo: wrinkle on her face then a bunch of wrinkles and
-
'folk creativity') inw ays that, in Three Songs of finally a thoroughly wrinkled old woman.30 Another
Lenin, enabled him to fit into the new discursive order featured a man going bald, over the course of three
while continuing to pursue his old avant-garde con shots.31
cern with the representation of sheer change and The fine internalm echanism of any change is,
dynamism, with material process, and with cinema of course, notoriously hard to explain in any non-re
as a means of reconfiguring perception and spatial gressive way. But transition in Vertov's cinema is
temporal relations. At the same time, Iw ill suggest usually something to be sensed rather than articu
that "folk" poetic materials incorporated in Three lated or explained; and Vertov tries to generate the
Songsfunctioned forV ertov both as publicly verifiable required perceptual jolts or shifts by making transi
texts that could satisfy the growing institutional need tion as visually and aurally tangible as possible, as in
for some pre-verbalizing of the films, and as the opening of his first major feature, Kino-Eye
"sources" tow hich he could appeal ino rder to legiti (1924). The film is about members of the Young
mate his own directorial decisions. Itw as in Three Pioneers organization both from the village of
Songs of Lenin, wI ill argue, that Vertov found a way Pavlovskaia and from the proletarian Krasnopres
of accommodating the "populist" and centralizing nenskaia area of Moscow, and shows the youngsters
imperatives of the new 1930s cultural order within his engaged in philanthropic and leisure activities in
already fully formed, fundamentally constructivist ar various urban and rural settings. Kino-Eye begins, as
tistic worldview and style.28 so often inV ertov, with a sequence representative of
380 John MacKay
-
The transition to the New though we are still
-
very much in the village occurs across a gap,
without any "pivot point" whatsoever. Only an interti
tle ("with the village pioneers") signals any change.
However, the material sense of transition is stressed
inc lassic constructivist fashion by a sudden prepon
derance of rectilinear shapes and movements: be
ginning with the siding on the building, then the
poster pasted on by the Pioneers, the picket fence,
the waterfall (falling, rolling streaks of water is one of
Vertov's favorite images of revolution), and the
IBflHH
straightforward movement of the marching pioneers
(Fig. 2). The series culminates with a nearly abstract
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sage would seem to be: force previously wasted on
Fig. 3. ofS wtrateear,k s t(hmea iOnlldy): wohmereen, wthheo 'veju bihlaandt ,a bbeisto tttoeod mudcha nctino gd rinokf the inscription of drunken circles is re-channeled
geometricalf orm during a church holiday. Visually, a dominant circular (cinematically) into a progressive and architectural
and forward motif is established gradually but very assertively: rectilinearity; and Vertov hopes to make this "point"
movement circularity links the spinning movements of the by provoking the spectator's perceptual entry into
(Kino-Eye). these two differently patterned spaces.
women, the circle of the "round dance" itself, and
objects like the pot, tambourine, and even the faces The same topos is found, ina dizzying variety
of the women themselves. The ecstatic twirling is of permutations, inn early all of Vertov's films.32 Thus
both exhilarating and enervating, and, after a while, at the end of the prologue to Man with a Movie
its tarts to suggest that the women are trapped within Camera (which contains several such transitions) we
see the sudden passage from the stasis of an or
what Russians would call a llzamknutyi krug" (closed - -
chestra a traditional kind of artistic collective
circle), although Vertov would resist such aggressive
thrust into a new kind of motion by the activation of
translation of his visual formulae intow ords. Clearly
Fig. 4o.fm Tionhddee usrisnrteirtniya l woentohmoeureg,n h ,r episeh ctooitwmioepnve ewlrle,i tdh inth teor eiepnnesotcirrtmiiobnoeu, osc nree aetcniinregcrlg ey a anf toefir m aatnghe e etfinhinrcegse t.W firleiemn e lpt fhorinoef d jEef acinl tmtovhre)u, r tsyhi aaisnsttm wariue:k g iunhSrgaay vVtmieen prgaht olorvtnehiayaed n yf io ltmfsr ta at(nhrfsoteier tDdi to ohnwne baaitauncshd tsh i e
[Enthusiasm). of encompassed and squandered vitality.
(1930), a film that can be seen as a grandiose rewrit
ing of Kino-Eye ina number of respects. Enthusiasm
begins with a polemical alternation between scenes
-
of drunken behavior and religious devotion religion
as "opiate of the masses" is the intended message
-
with the camera mimicking both the repetitive mo
tions of prayer and the aimless stumbling of brawling
alcoholics (Fig. 3). The sense of thudding stagnation
intended here is underscored by repeated shots of
..
church bells, shots themselves saturated with repeti
...*
.. I I - tive movement and sound. Suddenly, an industrial
siren blares, its nearly vertical plume of smoke tran
..... I... sected by parallel power lines and garnished by a
splash of spontaneous, natural growth (Fig. 4).33
This siren was apparently shot and recorded
using documentary sync sound; thus, the shot
serves as a pivot point between old and new, an
Allegory and accommodation: Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film 381
nouncing at once the arrival of socialist construction
and (on the cinema front) documentary sound film.
And once again, this siren blast, seemingly a purely
arbitrary cut into the mobile but unprogressive texture
of everyday life, is succeeded by the geometrically
inflected patterns of a Pioneer parade, now accom
panied by documentary sound, with the orderly lines
and sharp angles formed by the youngsters matched
graphically by the trolley-car tracks across which
they march (Fig. 5).
Four years after Enthusiasm, and ten years
after Kino-Eye, with the opening of the first of the
"three songs of Lenin", we see something new
emerging inV ertov's art of transition. The first song
opens with what are probably shots taken ina city in
Uzbekistan, possibly Tashkent or Bukhara, showing ^?.*" >_:' _^_J^^m
women wearing the paran]! and chachvon veils. It is blind itsw earer in fact, the sequence clearly linksv eil Fig. 5. The
not unimportant here that it is impossible to tell if the wearing to blindness, and therefore (in Vertovian Pioneersb ringing
women are looking at the camera or not, and that logic) powerlessness. (visual)o rdert o
their gazes are withdrawn. For Vertov, the ability to The second shot seems to be a camera-simu chaos
(Enthusiasm).
see isv irtually tantamount to the ability to understand lation of the motions of prayer, reminiscent of the
and to confront one's oppressor: tantamount to pos "drunken camera" in the last reel of Man with a Movie
session of power, ins hort. Its uffices to recall how, in Camera, the "praying camera" in Enthusiasm, and
the famous satire on European colonialism in the first other moments of camera mimicry inV ertov. The lens
reel of One Sixth of theW orld, we get an unforgettable inscribes a circular movement of rising and prostra
depiction of an African woman "confronting" (though tion that is intended to elicit the idea and the feeling
false continuity) her class enemy; or the great se of dull repetition, entrapment, and mindlessness, an
quence in Vertov's next film, The Eleventh Year impression retroactively confirmed a few shots later
(1928), where at one moment the female "comrade when we get an overhead view of men praying.35 In
from India" becomes the exemplary witness of the some of the succeeding shots, one might read the
revolutionary collective as a whole. In shaping the essentially illegible gestures of the veiled women
rhetoric of Three Songs, Vertov could also rely on passing laterally across the screen as evasive, hos
-
existing Soviet discourse on the veil discourse well tile, or indicative of possible interest in the camera.
established even before the hujum ("assault" on (Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown how impor
traditional Central Asian customs and taboos) of tant the rhetoric of "tearing off the masks" was during
1927 - which represented the veil as a kind of im the first 20 years or so of Soviet power; to be sure,
posed blindness. For Soviet agitators (as Gregory Vertovian kino-pravda ("film-truth")p articipates in its
Massell puts it), own way in this unmasking project.36 Yet these par
ticular veils, of course, were masks thought to have
the implications of freeing a Moslem woman been clamped onto the women against their will by
from her veil were farm ore dramatic than the
a male-dominated Islamic society.) A shot of men
mere reversal of a physically undesirable con apparently leaving some kind of domicile, perhaps
dition. Iwt ould mean, ine ffect: to liberate her
- taken from an implied female point of view, stuck
eyes "toe nable [her] to look at the world with back in the house, is followed by some classic "as
clear eyes", and not just with unobstructed
sociative" montage rhetoric incorporating shots of
vision; to liberate her voice, a voice "dead
male prayer and of a blind, half-paralysed woman
ened" by a heavy, shroud-like cover... to free stumbling down a road. Taken together, the se
her from [being] a symbol of perpetual "deg
quence definitively links the veil with blindness, with
radation", a "symbol of ... silence, timidity ... ignorance and non-enlightenment, with empty ritual,
submissiveness ... humiliation".34
and with misery.
Thus, although (of course) the veil does not What happens next is truly remarkable within
382 John MacKay
the two movements of the passage from the Old to
the New, as opposed to the raw leaps characteristic
of his earlier films. Within the rhetoric of the se
quence, that is,G asanova occupies the same place
that the impersonal, mechanical siren did at the
-
beginning of Enthusiasm but not without inflecting
the sense of the "Old-New" topos ina new, subjec
tivizing direction. The activist becomes arguably the
closest thing to a "character" to be found ina ny major
Vertov film, inasmuch as we are offered a repre
sentation, briefly but powerfully sketched, of her daily
and emotional life:39w e later see her on her way to
the Ali Bairamov club forw omen, still laterh er intense
participation ina Lenin memorial at the club. This new
psychologism was noted, not without smugness, by
critics at the time of the release of Three Songs, who
recalled the director's early-1920s comments on the
"absurdity" of the "psychological Russo-German
Fig. 6. The Vertov's corpus, though imt ay not appear so at first. film-drama - weighed down with apparitions and
activistm aking The cut to the next shot, accompanied on the sound childhood memories".40 At a preview on October 27,
her notes, linking track by a shift from Uzbek music to a proletarian 1934, critic V. Bartenev noted how Vertov's old "LEF
old and new fanfare, yields the hooded face of a young woman type 'thing-ism' [veshchizm] was overturned by this
(ThreSe ongs of jotting something down by a window; she needs the film", and that inT hree Songs "we even see - horror
Lenin). sunlight, for apparently her home has not yet been of horrors! - human psychological experience":
"electrified" (Fig. 6). We are now inB aku, not Uzbek "from empiricism [Vertov] has moved to a subjective
istan, and the woman (not named in the film) is sensation of the world".41
almost certainly one Aishat Gasanova, a Party activ To be sure, neither Vertov nor his critics were
istw ho worked among women in her native Azer working within a discursive void; as Sheila Fitzpatrick
baidzh?n and later in Daghestan.37 Perhaps not has shown, the celebration of ordinary "working
immediately, we realize that the "documents" we class heroes", involving the dissemination of many
have just seen are flashbacks or meditations, "inte photographic portraits and interviews, became a ma
rior" to Gasanova's consciousness, and in the proc jor feature of Stalinist culture from the early 1930s
ess of being converted into text by the writing hand onwards.42 And it is no accident that the majority of
of Gasanova herself. That we are within the realm of Vertov's later films (whether produced or not) focus
subjectivity is soon confirmed, when the classic Ver on the life stories of exemplary Soviet citizens
tovian device of false match-shots -in this case, (women, mostly), thereby contributing to this large
through a window that opens onto a Utopian image scale proliferation of biographical celebrations of the
of young Pioneers marching through a lush forest "little man and woman".43 In neither Kino-Eye nor
next to a stream.38 From imagining the Old inU zbek Enthusiasm is anyone included in the diegesis as a
istan, Gasanova turns to the New, still figured by subjective guarantor of the transition from Old to
marching young people but (importantly) in a pas New; the implication is that, by the time of Three
toral rather than industrial setting. As inK ino-Eye and Songs, there are such guarantors around, people like
Enthusiasm, though less assertively, Vertov orches Gasanova who have "made" or can imaginatively
trates a geometrical contrast with the preceding sec articulate the passage across the developmental
tion. The upright bodies rhyme with the birch trees, gap.44 Yet it is clear enough that, on the level of style,
even as the panning camera stresses lateral dyna the insertion of this new psychological "pivot" en
mism as well as forward movement: all is linear, lucid abled Vertov to continue his exploration of dynamics
and forward-directed, as opposed to the clutter and - the purely visual materialization of process - in
repetition of the previous sequence. sublimated form.45
What is new here forV ertov is the unobtrusive Much the same can be said about the mediat
inclusion of a subjective, psychological pivot linking ing function performed by the "folk"m aterial utilized
Allegory and accommodation: Verto 383
in Three Songs, although Iw ould argue that this sense, except that it's far more time-consum
material performed an important institutional function ing and complex than actually putting the film
forV ertov as well, inasmuch as it involved the use of together. It'sa pity Ih ad to do this.47
written texts. Three Songs was apparently the last film In truth, Vertov had drafted a variety of plans,
on which Vertov was able tow ork at least part of the
ifn ot exactly "scripts", for the film; the early ones had
time in his notoriously loose, improvisational, "un a biographical character and would have brought
scripted" manner. As isw ell known, Vertov through
Vertov to many of Lenin's European haunts (Z?rich,
out the 1920s took a principled stand against the Paris, London and so on) while emphasizing Lenin's
pscrrei-pstcsr iptiinnhgi biot fs omfilem s,m uorsue allayu tohne nttihcael lgyr oucnindesm attihca t role as leader of the international proletariat.48 As it
turned out, improvements in sync sound recording
mapapterroiaacl.h Thtios stthaen do ragragnuizaabtliyo n leodf h ivmis uianlt o eavnedn msoonriec enabled Vertov to incorporate some directly re
corded testimonial material by workers, peasants
trouble than his notorious taste for quarrel and po
and engineers, thereby partially circumventing the
lemic: he was famously fired from the Central State need for script. At the same time, the core of the
Cinema Studio inM oscow (Sovkino) inJ anuary 1927
scenario that Vertov finally did produce became
in large part because he refused to present studio three so-called "folksongs" about Lenin, selected
chief llyaT rainin with a scr-i pt for the "scriptless" film from among a large number of mostly anonymous
he was then working on a project that eventually Lenin-dedicated verses produced in the Central
became Man with a Movie Camera, ultimately made
Asian republics (Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan, Kir
at the VUFKU (Ukrainian) studio and released in
ghizstan and Uzbekistan) ina nd around 1924.
1929.
It isw ell known that a great deal of "folk" (or
With the ascension of the pragmatic anti "pseudo-folk") culture was generated as the result of
avantgardist Boris Shumyatsky to the top of the cin
official sponsorship in the various national republics,
ema ministry in 1929, and the liquidation of with an intense burst occurring after 1933-34, after
semi-independent artistic groupings in 1932-33 (and narodnost' ("national content", or "folk sensibility")
the attendant bureaucratization and centralization),
had become a valued dimension of the socialist-re
it became impossible for Vertov to maintain this
principled anti-script position.46 Itw as with Three aalliosnt g tewmitphl atteh.e4 9s yTnch e soiunncdo rpoinrtaetriovnie wosf, w"efroelk m parteecriisaell"y,
Songs of Lenin that Vertov made his last real attempt
the aspects of Three Songs that made the greatest
to produce a "scriptless" documentary or, as he
pcroemferprelad ined to pluot udliyt, utnop lasyteud dio oar dmnoinn-aisctterda tors filma.b oHuet tiom mpraekses ion recoounr see arly toa u"dfioenlkc"e s.m aterialsI n facto, nlVy ertoavt thbee gavner y
demands for a script even after finally turning in a end of 1932, nearly midway through the production.50
scenario at an advanced stage in the production (on There was no small irony in this "experimental" film
- maker, previously associated (ifo nly informally)w ith
23 August 1933 the filmw as essentially finished by
the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), attempting to make
mid-January 1934):
his art more accessible by making it "folksier", since
This is the first time I've had to explain a mon LEF had been deeply hostile to folk art, seeing in it
tage construction inw ords. And when itc omes (in Frank Miller's words) "aw orthless remnant of a
to a film like this one, this is a truly thankless patriarchal society, a cart that should be replaced by
task. ... I have tried to overcome my own a truck".51 In later years, Vertov repeatedly spoke of
objections today, in light of your persistent folk material as opening up his personal path to
requests. And so I renounced visuals, sound, socialist realism, with Three Songs as his inaugural
the mutual interaction of montage phrases success in this area. In an unpublished talk "On
with one another, tonal and rhythmic combina Formalism" that he gave on 2 March 1936, he iden
tions, expressions of faces and gestures ... tified "folk creation" as the central weapon in the
that all develop visually and aurally, organically struggle for "the unity of form and content" against
linking together intoa n ideaw ithout the help of "formalism and naturalism". Theoretician P.M. Ker
intertitles and words. ... To write out each shot zhentsev was right, Vertov opined, to suggest that
-
in detail, one after the other, link after link, "the composer Shostakovich" recently pilloried in
-
montage phrase after phrase, would make Pravda for his Lady Macbeth of theM tsensk District
384 John MacKay
ought to "travel around the Soviet Union collecting style, as the vast, nearly unmoving expanse of the
the songs of the people", to discover that "founda Kara-Kum desert, rippling with suppressed energy,
-
tion, on the basis of which [he] might grow crea gives way to motion and flow catalysed by Lenin's
tively".52 mausoleum (the "tent");w hat was frozen and locked
It has been claimed that much of the "folk" in suddenly becomes a multi-branched stream link
jw riting produced in the Soviet period was more-or ing marchers, mass produced texts (specifically,
less pure fabrication, done by professional writers copies of Lenin's works rolling off the assembly line),
working inM oscow and the republic capitals. Ver and eventually irrigativew ater as such. Now, how
tov's "songs", however, seem to have a more banal ever, the formal representation of change is moti
origin: most likely, they were penned in the mid vated, perhaps even justified, by the "people's" own
1920s by young people associated with workers' or words.
women's clubs or the Komsomol (Young Communist We have already suggested historical reasons
-
Youth League) organization that is, in settings for Vertov's adoption of character and folklore in
where Lenin was frequently commemorated, and the Three Songs. Two final and, It hink, related questions
production of memorial verses and songs was en concern the respective places of Lenin and Stalin in
couraged (one might look to our own "essay con the film, and how we might account for the film's
tests" linked to various national or state holidays for actual appeal (repeatedly attested by early viewers)
an analogue). These poems were collected, and to its contemporary audiences. No?l Burch was cor
sometimes appeared on the pages of major central rect, I think, when he wrote that, "among the Soviet
newspapers likeP ravda.53 masters, Dziga Vertov alone advocated an uncom
Thus we needn't spend much time worrying promising tabula rasa".56 I interpret this phrase to
about the authenticity of these "folk"p roductions as mean not only that Vertov was (as Malevich saw)
folk productions; clearly, the important thing is that drawn to a cinema of near-abstract dynamism in
they were examples of anonymous, "na?ve" poetry, contrast to more theatrically-based contemporaries
and could thus at once be presented as documents likeE isenstein, but was committed to a translation of
of popular sentiment while cohering (inasmuch as politically revolutionary radicalism into cinema, a
they were documents) with Vertov's own kino-eye translation thatw ould require not only a purgation of
"life-as-it-is" precepts.54 As scripts or components of literary and theatrical dross but a rebuilding of cin
scripts, they were texts bearing "folk" legitimacy that ema from some presumed ground-level of percep
could be presented to studio administrators to give tion. (Perhaps the destruction of the Civil War,
them a sense of his direction; they were also collec leading to very palpable "levelings" of all sorts,
tions of images, often (at least in the examples se helped condition this attitude as well.) Inp art, this is
lected by Vertov) images of very physical, elemental, what accounts forw hat critics at the time decried as
seasonal character, and thus adaptable to his estab Vertov's "infantilism", his frequent reinventings of the
lished faktura practices. An example is this anony wheel, carried out as though all the established re
mous "KirghizS ong", the main text in the third of the sources of cinema had to be accumulated again and
three songs: reconfigured.57 And Vertov seemed truly to believe
that these sorts of renovations of vision would have
InM oscow, ina big stone city, a virtually immediate political effect:
Where those chosen by the people gathered,
There is a nomad's tent on a square, Gradually, through comparison of various
And in itL enin lies. parts of the globe, various bits of life, the visible
Ify ou have great sadness, world is being explored. ... Millions of workers,
And nothing comforts you, having recovered their sight, are beginning to
Go up to this tent, doubt the necessity of supporting the bour
And look upon Lenin, geois structure of the world.58
And your woe will disperse likew ater But with the move to full-scale "socialist con
And your sadness float away like leaves ina n
struction" in 1929 and the massive production of
aryk [stream or canal].55 "Soviet" subjectivities, more efficacious, less impla
InT hree Songs itself, this movement from sad cably corporeal mechanisms for configuring the
ness to "flow"a nd dispersal occurs in the best Vertov "revolutionary passage" for Soviet citizens was re
Allegory and accommodation: Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film 385
quired. For Vertov, these new mechanisms were
precisely the subjective trajectories of biographical
individuals and the lure of folk authenticity, into
whose vocabularies the raw material-perceptual WOriG- ^^^^H^B Seat, /'rfo<r iS^pe>cil?>l
transitions and leaps of earlier avant-garde faktura Premiere ^^^^^K TONIGH8,T45
aconudl dn ebwe thtraatn hsaladt edp.r evNioouws,l y pabseseang esr eprbeestewneteedn oinlda TOMUMM tf I ^"^i^f^f^ ^L ^ JVotf? fi Safe ol
non-"humanist" (or even "non-human") manner were Cm*, front 9 ?. M. ^^^L **?* ?^ice
recoded in terms that invited sympathy and subjec
tive investment; the material relationship between the 3 SONGS at?
static and the active slowly mutated intoa narrative
figural one, like the relationship between promise
and fulfillment. IfV ertov's work of the 1920s had
mobilized material dynamics as both a figure for and
L-G-nin
a way of effecting (on a perceptual level) revolution, X?#fl*fc rifle?
the films of the 1930s, typified by Three Songs, insert Soviet Russia's Solemn Tribute to a Great Leader
two additional mediating levels: revolution as a per H. 6? WEILS: "One of the grrtirst filmt ? k&ve seen."
sonal, biographical trajectory (or what medieval LONDON OBSERVER: "X?mm7 best film of the year.?
Christian hermeneutics would call the "moral" level MOSCOW N?WS: ". . . * stroke of ge*fas*SP
AMBASSADOR BUIUTT: "Thr fUm is suficrb."
of interpretation), and a new base-stratum of presen
timent of revolution, as expressed in folksong (or CAMETOH EATR4E2r, i STREE\&T AT
what those same medieval allegorists would call the
"literal" level). This new "machinery for ideological find a rather painful example of Vertov's own alle Fig. 7.3 Songs
investment", to use Fredric Jameson's phrase, is gorizing in a article he wrote about Three Songs in AboutL enin
thus arguably more complex as an ideological struc 1935, where after noting that he structured one sec opens inN ew
York.F romt he
ture than what we find inV ertov's work of the 20s; a tion of the "second song" in accord with the ca New YorkT imes,
diagram of its significant layers, in accord with the dences of folk poetry ("through fire/yet they go/they 5 November
fourm edieval exegetical levels, would look like this:59 fall/yet they go/they die/yet they go/the masses who 1934, p. 22.
won the Civil War/that is Mich-Lenin"), he goes on to
Anagogical (collective, historical destiny; com argue that precisely the same passage from defeat
munism) to victory characterizes "the revolution in the con
Moral (the individual process of becoming sciousnesses of the workers on the White Sea Ca
"new", "Soviet": psychology) nal".60T his canal project, in fact a brutal Gulag-style
forced labor enterprise built between 1931 and 1933,
Allegorical (the perceptual-somatic revolution; was widely publicized as - and indeed, thought by
modernizing of the senses) -
many to be a grand reform-through-work venture,
Literal (here, folk poetry and music, with its a disciplinary mechanism for the creation of Soviet
Utopian imagery: narodnoe tvorchestvo) citizens.61
These grim motifs bring us back, at long last,
In other words, the desires for change ex to the role of Stalin in the film, and, by extension, that
pressed in folk poetry ("yourw oe will disperse like of Lenin. Its eems best to assert that the Lenin of
water": the historically prior or "literal" level) can also Three Songs functions as a kind of guarantor of the
mean a desire forw orld-historical socialist transfor ultimate mutual inter-translatability of the four levels
mation (the anagogical level), a desire which can indicated above. Lenin is at once the exemplary
also be expressed in terms of individual progress revolutionary person (moral), the great theorist of
toward revolutionary consciousness (the moral communism and founder of the USSR (anagogical),
level); and all of these levels can find representation, and a folk hero to the "people" (literal); as the great
if properly articulated, in the "pure dynamics" of "electrifier" or modernizer of the country, he can be
cinema (the allegorical level). assimilated to the more properly Vertovian "allegori
Unsurprisingly, such figurative reading was in cal" level as well.62 But what of Stalin, who, as we
deed characteristic of the discourse of the '30s. We know, was prominently on view throughout the film?