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

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The second part of Three Songs about Lenin is the only one that deals directly with Lenin, his life, work, and especially his death. The song has a concerto-like A-B-A structure that is mirrored in the whole film, with the slow, mournful song in between two faster, enthusiastic movements. The first and last section of "We Loved Him" mostly mix images from the wake of Lenin's body with close-up of mourners, while the middle section is made up of dynamic footage from the Revolution and the Civil War. The music featured in the second song is by Wagner and Chopin. This is particularly striking since Vertov was notorious for his preference for Eastern over Western culture, hence his choice of folk songs from Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan as the main inspiration for Three Songs about Lenin. The use of Western classical music, both in the choice of selections and in the A-B-A form, contributes to give the second song a more austerely traditional and romantic outlook, which aesthetically links "We Loved Him" with the dominant Soviet styles of the 1930s, mythography and socialist realism. The importance of the photo as document/symbol of truth was downplayed in favor of the idealization of the state and its leaders. The single still or picture which emphasized the particular detail or the individual worker was replaced with larger-than-life images of the Soviet's enterprises, now presented not so much as a collective undertaking than as a result of the leader's superhuman capacities to guide the entire nation (Fig. 7, pictures 5, 6). The main goal of mythography was to instill an artificial sense of unity in all fronts (ethnological, technological and cultural), in order to convey both to the Soviet masses and to foreigners the idea of the Soviet Union as a unified, colossal, mighty industrial power under a strong and unconquerable leadership. In terms of art production, the period of mythography is characterized by a return to romantic pictorialism and by monumental propaganda.

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The middle part of Three Songs about Lenin starts with a woman working at printing press. These images bridge the first song with the second song through the labor of women and the mass dissemination of the teachings of Lenin. Immediately after we are confronted with the most recurrent visual motif of "We Loved Him," the intercalation of close-ups of Lenin's head in death (Fig. 8, still 13) and of the faces of his mourners. Only the shots of Lenin are actual documentary footage; the beautifully lit close-ups of women were probably shot in studio (Fig. 9, stills 14-17), and are clearly reminiscent of Rodchenko's still portraits (Fig. 10, pictures 7-8). The introduction of artifice (as opposed to the belief in the absolute value of the untempered document in factography) is indicative of the goals of mythography: the strengthening of the image of the leader through embellishment and romanticization. Lenin is heroicized in all of his legendary attributes: as the intellectual force (writing), as leader of the revolution (addressing the masses in Red Square), as friend of the common people (smiling and shaking hands with workers, Fig. 11, still 12). Even in death he is nothing but majestic (Fig. 8, still 13). Furthermore, intertitles are much more frequent here than in the first song, stressing once and again the unique qualities of the leader, his wondrous achievements, the enormous loss his death caused to the nation, and implicitly, the subsequent need for a similar father figure. In one of the rare recent analyses of Three Songs about Lenin, Annette Michelson discusses at length the role of the intertitles in "the process of historicization which transforms document into monument," or in other words, in the transformation of factography into mythography. According to Michelson, "the function of the monument is not only to commemmorate, but definitively, to inter and block the return of the dead," therefore translating the persona of Lenin into the unobtrusive field of the "sublime inane," and paving the way for the Successor--Josef Stalin. (11) Stalin, however, did not seem to think this way; it is known that he disliked the film because it did not show him in a major role during the Civil War or at Lenin's wake. In fact, when the film was reissued in 1938, Svilova was forced to insert supplementary material on Stalin.