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

The first part of Three Songs about Lenin reflects the goals of factography not only stylistically but also thematically. As Tupitsyn explains in her chapter "The Photographer in the Service of the Collective," the main goal of factography was to "encourage millions of workers to take part in the Plan's grandiose economical transformations and to report news from the construction sites quickly and effectively." (9) Accordingly, "My Face Was in a Dark Prison" does not fail to include all the benefits brought by Lenin and the Soviet state to the far-away regions of the nation: literacy, electricity, water, revolution, medicine, science, agriculture, education, collectivization, etc. In fact, the whole segment is iconographically and thematically of a pair with photo-essay projects such as A Day in the Lire of a Moscow Working-Class Family (Arkadii Shaikhtet and Max Al'pert, 1931), in its detailed description of all the activities the "new" woman partakes of in the Socialist world, from reading Lenin's books or learning to shoot to driving a tractor or operating a radio (Fig. 1, pictures 1, 2 and Fig. 2, stills 1-3). It is interesting to note that from the two different approaches to factography that Tupitsyn distinguishes, the de-framed photo stills of Rodchenko or Langman and the photo-pictures of Shaikhet and Al'pert, Vertov's first song usually resembles the latter. Most shots are medium-length so that the actions and protagonists can be apprehended in their totality (Fig. 2, stills 3-6). When close-ups are used, they individualize people rather than defamiliarize objects (Fig. 2, still 2). In those images that most closely echo photomontage, for instance the shot of an airplane flying over a wooden watchtower or the one of a camel with cars passing behind it, the main objects (tower, camel) are not fragmented but superimposed onto the foreground (Fig. 2, stills 5-6). According to Stepanova, this is the main difference between photocollages of the early 1920s and the political photomontage in which "the individual snapshots are not fragmented and have all the characteristics of a real document." (10) Again, such an aesthetic choice places the first song firmly into the discursive and ideological field of factography.

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Finally, even if the first part of Three Songs about Lenin is generally shot along the more conventional lines of factographic practice, towards the end of the first section Vertov introduces more experimental compositions, for instance in the presentation of the university building, shown from an angle strikingly similar to Rodchenko's photographs of 1925 such as The Building on Miasnitskaia Street (Fig. 3, stills 7-10 and Fig. 4, picture 3). In addition, the rhythmic editing of the harvest workers brings to memory the accelerated machinist passages from The Man with the Movie Camera, whereas the shots of hands can be associated with Klutsis's famous 1930 photomontage Let Us Fulfill the Plan of the Great Projects (Fig. 5, still 11 and Fig. 6, picture 4). Vertov would use this device, of introducing (almost by the back door) a different Soviet style towards the end of a segment, again in the film. Throughout the first song, however, documentary factography rules almost absolutely, making this segment one of the most formally restrained of Vertov's career, one that most closely resembles standard documentary filmmaking. "My Face Was in a Dark Prison" reaches its end with footage of Lenin addressing the masses, before going back to Gorky for the introduction of the second song, the elegiac "We Loved Him."