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

On the other hand, Three Songs about Lenin is rarely mentioned in more recent analysis of Vertov's work (or of Soviet film) and when it is, the film is usually briefly dismissed as a piece of propaganda with little or no aesthetic merit. For instance, Denise Youngblood writes: "this abysmal film marked the bitter end of the career of a great and original director, whose artistic politics helped shape the cinema debates of a decade.

Three Songs about Lenin is typical of what the Soviet 'documentary' would become." (23) Such a judgment is extremely problematic (it seems adequate only for the bombastic intertitles), because it refuses to notice the complex three-part structure of the film, the different styles and techniques preferred in each section, the sophisticated use of music and documentary material, or the fact that no Soviet "documentary" film after 1934 came close to the bold complexity of Three Songs about Lenin's visual virtuosity. The truth is, in the last twenty years Three Songs about Lenin has fallen into virtual critical oblivion while all the attention on Vertov has been devoted to The Man with the Movie Camera. As we mentioned before, the emphasis on Vertov's most experimental and formalist work reflects the state of scholarship of the Soviet avant-garde between the wars, a perspective that severely distorts our understanding of the period, particularly of the early 1930s. As Buchloh explains, "a revision of this comforting distortion of history is long overdue ... (for) this distortion deprives these artists of their actual political identity (as well as) ... of the understanding of one of the most profound conflicts inherent in modernism itself: that of the historical dialectic between individual autonomy and the representation of a collectivity through visual constructs." (24) A work such as Three Songs about Lenin offers great insights into this much-neglected period, by questioning the notion of a sudden death of all the formalist innovations of the previous decade after 1932. The transition seems to have been not quite so abrupt; a work such as Three Songs about Lenin shows that many of the debates and practices of the 1920s were still being applied and discussed by 1934. Indeed, as late as 1935 Vertov was unrepentant about his highly criticized experimental work. Rather, he justified it as a necessary preparation for the ultimate Socialist documentary, finally achieved with Three Songs about Lenin:

      All these newsreel films were committed to a single basic, common
   goal--showing the truth. Not kino-eye for the sake of kino-eye,
   but showing pravda [truth], kinopravda. All cinematic means, all
   cinematic inventions, techniques and methods in order to make the
   invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the
   disguised overt; in order to tell the truth about the Revolution,
   about the construction of socialism, the Civil War.... However, it
   is not enough just to film bits of truth. These bits must be
   organized in order to produce a truth of the whole....

      Creating kinopravda about Lenin--even within the confines of a
   theme strictly limited by the assignment--required making use of
   all previous experience of kino-eye filming, all acquired
   knowledge; it meant the registration and careful study of all our
   previous work on this theme....

      I hope that it's clear after all I've said that those elements in
   Three Songs about Lenin which comrades have liked most and which
   they consider to be absolutely new represent, in fact, the
   development of all our previous work. (25)