Dziga Vertov's Three Songs about Lenin : a visual tour through the history of the Soviet avant-garde in the interwar years

Criticism, Spring, 2003 by Mariano Prunes

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the relationship between the films of Dziga Vertov and Soviet photography during the interwar years. While Vertov's reputation has long been established in the film canon as one of the seminal Soviet Montage directors, analysis of his work is almost always reduced to a single film, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). This paper proposes to look at another Vertov film, the often ignored Three Songs about Lenin, and it makes a case for the latter film as the best and most comprehensive example of Vertov's aesthetic and ideological beliefs. Moreover, I also argue that Three Songs about Lenin provides us with the perfect vehicle to consider Soviet Montage Cinema within the larger frame of the Soviet avant-garde, and to understand its role, stylistic debts and influence. While all studies of Soviet Montage acknowledge the close relationship between film and the other arts, an in-depth study of this relationship is often lacking, as film studies and art history tend to follow strictly separate paths. Such a division has more to do with traditions in academia, than with the artists and directors themselves, who often collaborated with, mentioned and discussed each other's works. This is especially the case with photographers, who by the very nature of their medium are closest to film, and whose role in both defining the outlook and signaling the many transformations of the Soviet avant-garde cannot be overestimated. In fact, as this analysis of Three Songs about Lenin hopes to show, a study of Soviet photography is crucial to an understanding of Vertov's films and his stylistic evolution inside the Montage movement. This paper, therefore, proposes Three Songs about Lenin as the perfect site for an interdisciplinary approach that looks at Soviet Montage film as part of the Soviet avant-garde arts. In addition, it hopes to bring attention to the individual qualities of this long neglected, but brilliant film.

Few would dispute that in the years between the two world wars the Soviet Union witnessed one of the most innovative, prolific, influential and polemic periods of the modern era. The radical, effervescent, theoretical and practical activity in areas such as photography, cinema, literature and literary theory, painting, advertisement, design, theater or poetry (not to mention politics and economics), irreversibly affected both the art and the history of this century. Given the extent and complexity of artistic movements, artifacts and documents, as well as the sheer quantity of media involved, a comprehensive analysis of the period seems initially quite a daunting task. However, some general notions or directions can and have been perceived in the evolution of the Soviet avant-garde from 1971 to 1936, from the enthusiastic chaos of the Revolution to the centralized artistic doctrine of Stalinism.

As a necessary, unifying, initial perspective, one must realize that all cultural debates were played against the backdrop of the same highly charged political and ideological context. In other words, all artists across the cultural spectrum were searching for the same goals and discussing the same issues, particularly in those areas intrinsically related to each other. The historian of Soviet photography cannot afford to neglect the neighboring media of advertisement, design or, of course, the one Lenin defined as the most important for Communism, the cinema. Reciprocally, the film historian can greatly improve his/her appreciation of the period by looking at Soviet photography. It is the purpose of these pages to examine Dziga Vertov's last major film Three Songs about Lenin from the perspective of the history of photography. Three Songs about Lenin offers an insuperable compendium of the history of avant-garde Soviet photography between 1917 and 1936, and is therefore a quite extraordinary case study for the understanding of the practices and debates of the period. Moreover, the analysis of this 1934 film will also shed some light on the considerably less studied phase of 1930 to 1936, the controversial and often derided swan song years of the Soviet avant-garde. I will not include, however, a discussion of Vertov's writings and ideas on film, for his theories have been the subject of numerous analyses and interpretations to the point of becoming a staple of all introductory film courses. (1) On the other hand, with the obvious exception of The Man with the Movie Camera, Vertov's films are rarely seen--let alone studied.

Two accounts of the history of Soviet photography during the interwar years, those by Benjamin Buchloh and Margarita Tupitsyn, will constitute the starting point for my analysis. Overall, Tupitsyn's arguments are better supported by an impressive examination of contemporary documents, which firmly ground her thesis in the socio-political context of the time. Buchloh, on the other hand, prefers to consider Soviet photography as a chapter in the history of Modernism. Both critics divide the period according to what they identify as the dominant practice, which they generally agree to be suprematist formalism, constructivist faktura, documentary factography, monumental mythography and socialist realism. However, Tupitsyn and Buchloh tend to disagree on periodization, emphasis and definition of these modes of artistic production, which I will explain in detail in the analysis of Three Songs about Lenin. The history of Soviet cinema, as David Bordwell shows, undergoes similar stylistic transformations--but with significant delays. (2) Cinema is an expensive medium and, as such, it depends heavily on a solid film industry and on profit for its production. Even Lenin acknowledged this fact, when in his seminal 1922 decree on the film industry he conceded that films should balance education/propaganda with entertainment, in order to make them profitable. Due to the economic shortages caused by the Civil War (as well as by the foreign blockage on film stock), the Soviet film industry was virtually nonexistent before 1922 to 1924. A whole new generation of Soviet filmmakers had to content themselves with writing theoretical manifestos about the new revolutionary cinema well before they were able to put them into film. For instance, Vertov's first kino manifesto of 1919 (heavily influenced by constructivism) only reached its full filmic expression in 1929, with The Man with the Movie Camera. Needless to say, by 1929 the official attitude towards constructivism in art had been revised several times--never favorably. Cinema, given the complex structure of its production circumstances, simply could not adapt to the ever-evolving, frantic ideological debate as fast as photography. Both this characteristic and the necessity of a profit allowed the Soviet film stylistic anachronisms or concessions that otherwise could not have been explained or tolerated. These contradictions make Soviet cinema all the more interesting, for they problematize the traditional notion of a determinist, unforgiving, degeneration of the Soviet avant-garde into Socialist Realism (particularly after 1930), as well as questioning the highly romanticized view of the careers of artists such as Vertov.