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

Three Songs about Lenin was the only Vertov film that was unconditionally praised at the time of its release in the Soviet Union. The critical and popular success of the film was all the more improbable given the fact that, for several years, Vertov had been the main victim of ferocious attacks from the cultural authorities. Already by 1932, an editorial of the influential journal Proletarsko Kino described Vertov's documentaries as 'illiterate, presumptuous and excessively pretentious 'theory'" and did not conceal its animosity towards these films: "we stand on the positions of implacable struggle against documentarism, we have set ourselves the task of destroying it completely." (20) Not surprisingly, Vertov had little help from anybody with the arduous task of producing Three Songs about Lenin. The pressures and hardships he and his ever smaller group of collaborators endured were too numerous to count, from the impossibility of getting experienced technicians (for example, not even Vertov's brother Mikhail was allowed to join him), the daunting magnitude of the research that Svilova performed single-handedly (she had to travel all over the Soviet Union researching unfriendly and chaotic local archives for material on Lenin; she managed alone to unearth nine unseen clips, while in the ten years since Lenin's death the whole film industry had only discovered one), to the poor distribution of the film, even when it had proved a popular success. As a result, Vertov suffered a nervous breakdown during the production of Three Songs about Lenin, from which he never completely recovered. Given these circumstances, the enthusiastic critical reception to Three Songs about Lenin comes as something of a shock, one that problematizes traditional views of art politics during the early years of Stalinism.

Vertov was even awarded the prestigious order of the Red Star for Three Songs about Lenin, a film he himself considered the crown of his achievements, for he believed he had "managed to a significant degree to make Three Songs about Lenin accessible and intelligible to an audience of millions. But not at the price of rejecting cinematic language. Not at the price of rejecting the methods discovered earlier." (21) Indeed, the film marks the only time in Vertov's career when he successfully combined his formalist, political and documentary ideas into a coherent whole that could be understood by the intelligentsia and the masses alike. The film was praised both in the Soviet Union and abroad, and it was the main reason behind Vertov's reentrance into the canon of Soviet filmmakers, signaled by the publication of Abramov's monograph in 1962. While dismissing The Man with the Movie Camera as little more than a formalist experiment, Abramov described Three Songs about Lenin as "a memorable example of socialist realism in the documentary film, (which) became a classic of Soviet cinema." (22) A more precise evaluation of the film, taking into account its baffling stylistic diversity, was given both by Jay Leyda in Kino, his seminal history of the Soviet and Russian film, and by David Bordwell in his introduction to the films of Vertov published in Film Comment in 1972. Both critics, among the first to discuss Vertov's work in the English-speaking world, recognized Three Songs about Lenin as Vertov's masterpiece, an opinion shared by Vertov himself and his contemporaries.