Summer Research Essay
Dziga Vertov is a Russian Soviet documentary filmmaker and a newsreel director from the 1920s. He is also known as a cinema theorist whose practices in the film and theories are used as references by modern-day filmmakers. His style and methods have influenced Cinéma verité from 1922 to 1968.
What stands out in Vertov’s film making is that he has used the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects that are hidden behind crude reality. This is known as Observational Cinema, Michelson (1984) This was the first-time soviet cultures have seen this type of cinema. Furthermore, Vertov and his collaborator Aleksandra Medveadkin created a new non-fiction genre which pushed the boundaries to the point where it was life-threatening.
German expressions (1920) evoked people emotions with strange nightmare like visions and settings, they were heavily stylized and extremely visible to the eye.The French impressionist cinema crafted the essence of cinematography as it shot case the medium invented by the Lumiere Brothers.
Vertov’s Cinema Montage shared similarity to the German and French cinema movements in the 20s and created famous film editors known as the Kino-Eye affect. Vertov is different from German filmmakers in the 20s and that he didn’t use actors in his films, but he just filmed everyday people going about their daily lives.
Vertov’s most popular works of film were Man with The Movie Camera and Three Songs about Lenin. Before 1917 and after the Bolshevik revolution Vertov was a newsreel editor for Kino Nedelya a cinema committee film series shown in Russia. Lenin’s often quoted in 1922 that film is the most important of all the arts probably surprised contemporaries, not because he ranked film first, but because he included it among the arts at all. This distinguished early Soviet film from movies elsewhere in the world and helps to explain both early innovation and subsequent stultification. The Soviet Union was the first country to insulate domestic filmmaking from the give and take of market-based consumer demand. This is not to say that movies were not shown to make money. Although the Bolsheviks were in power, film was presented in several conflicting views of art, Brooks (1991)
Vertov liked to compile his newsreel footage into a documentary style. This made him interested in the mechanical basis of cinema. He liked to film the public in secret as though he was the eye off the camera. Vertov’s main filming techniques is montage. This means selecting and editing scenes to piece together to form a continuous whole. This was a very popular method used in silent films in the 1920s. Vertov’s main idea behind the Kino Eye was that the eye of the camera saw life more accurately than the eye of a human. The man with a movie camera is an excellent example of the Kino Eye effect and is considered as one of Vertov’s masterpiece. Vertov’s film shows complexity in both filming and editing without voiceovers or titles. It uses visual language to tell the story of the Soviet Union in 1929.
By watching the film Man and the Movie camera I was inspired to try out Vertov’s film techniques and his effects. I was impressed by the three main cinematic effect he used, and I wanted to achieve and explore them in my short film. These are the Dissolve, Split Screen and Double Exposure which bring dynamism in the film and are presented in a visually playful nature.
The way I did my film was that I took my canon camera with two zoom lenses picked three London locations that had a top-rated tourist attraction. This method enabled me to film the public secretly as though they were actors in a film. The central locations I picked were Waterloo, Trafalgar Square and Great Portland street Station. Although my short film shows modern-day footage, I changed the colour to black and white as I wanted to show a lot of timeless quality. This also shows that my film is a throwback to photographic past and it shows the audience that it is a representation of Vertov’s work.
The 1920s increasingly used the Dissolve effect which has multiple occurrences in The Man and The Movie Camera. Its final frame of one image is briefly laid over the introductory of the next frame; it is the oldest form of film transition. In my film, I was able to achieve this effect easily and quickly with modern day technology.
For the Split-screen, nowadays we have the editing software like Adobe to help us achieve this effect quickly. But in the 1920s, Vertov used his hand cracked 35mm camera and would have to cover the part of the lens to create the first image with an empty half, and then reshoot the same strip to fill in the gaps. I enjoyed using this effect in my film as it focuses on different actions at the same time and is a very eye-catching effect. In my film I took two different shots and placed them next to each other and used a feather effect in the middle to help blend in the footage.
Double exposure was where my knowledge of editing was put to the test. I have never done this effect before in my films, so I was very eager to learn it for my film. Moreover, I admired how Vertov used this effect in the scene with a cameraman going into a pint glass. In the 1920s, this effect was achieved by exposing the same strip of film to different moving or still images and overlaying them. Nowadays, in the 20th century, computer trickery, Adobe, helped me to achieve double exposure by having a camera image over a moving image of tourists.
By exploring Vertov’s cinematic techniques I was able to learn a lot about the cinema in the 1920s. This helped me create my own film that has a good representation of those techniques.
References
Jeffrey Brooks (1991) Russian Cinema and Public Discourse, 1900–1930, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 11:2, 141-148
Michelson, A. (1984). Kino-eye. Berkeley: California University Press.
Dziga Vertov, a guide to references and resources, Feldman, Seth R.; 1979, Boston: G. K. Hall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dziga_Vertov
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/five-wonderful-effects-man-movie-camera
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