Dziga Vertov

Dziga Vertov (Russian Дзига Вертов, actually Dawid Abelewitsch Kaufman / Давид Абелевич Кауфман, scientific transliteration Dziga Vertov, born December 21, 1895jul / January 2 1896greg in Białystok, .. † February 12, 1954 in Moscow) was a Soviet filmmaker. He applies his experimental creativity as well as his theoretical texts because as one of the most important early documentary filmmakers.

Vertov was a brother of the future Hollywood cinematographer and Academy Award winner Boris Kaufman and the cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, with whom he worked, as in his most famous film The Man with the camera.

Life and work

Vertov came from a Jewish intellectuals budget and studied at the Art School in Białystok, later in St. Petersburg and Moscow. With the beginning of the October Revolution of 1917, he produced agitational newsreels ( Kinonedelja ( movie week) and cinema - Pravda ( Film Truth) ), and later extended partly propagandistic documentaries. In his work of his wife Elizabeth Svilova as an editor and his brother Mikhail Kaufman stood as a cameraman aside.

As Sergei Eisenstein and other Soviet silent film directors of his time, he tried to influence the audience of his films by methods of film editing. He often walked currently far more experimental than his contemporaries, what his artistic career put an end, was prescribed as in the 1930s in the film art of Socialist Realism as a model - and just Filmdokumentaristen also had the cult of personality around Stalin take their toll. Thus Vertov had in 1934 " Three Songs of Lenin " - put this in itself sufficiently scene on Stalin's orders - a cinematic anthem about the founder of the Soviet Union on its 10th anniversary of his death. The relevant film "Lullaby " is a revealing example of the misuse of its documentary resources and its installation art.

Vertov 's best-known film and at the same time exemplary crystallization of his entire oeuvre is the man with the camera ( Человек с Кино-Аппаратом/Tschelowek s kinoapparatom ), glorifies the one hand, the urban life in Soviet cities and the mechanization of life, but on the other hand, the own process of creation camera lens focuses up to the cutting room. A variety of content, and stylistic similarities makes this film a predecessor of Godfrey Reggio Koyaanisqatsi.

Vertov's aesthetic concepts

Vertov published various writings and manifestos about the aesthetic considerations that were behind his films. He rejected the staged with actors fictions of the feature film from as bourgeois. However, he saw revolutionary potential in the cinema glaz ( Cinema Eye, was meant camera lens ), which can capture every detail of the world comprehensively and objectively.

Not by acting, staging, or the structures of other arts ( theater, the novel), but by the sophisticated assembly of objective reality sections of the meaning and effect of the film should arise. Thus, the recorded reality could also be effective in such a newly systematized that they serve agitational purposes.

Effect

From the late 1960s, Dziga Vertov's work of aesthetically and politically radical artists was rediscovered. Leading the way this was Jean -Luc Godard, the end of the 1960s gave up his individual work as a director and up in the 1970s only in designated programmatically collective Dziga Vertov Group ( Groupe Dziga Vertov fr. ) made ​​films.

Filmography (selection)

• Kino- Eye ( " Kinoglaz " ) ( 1924)
• One-sixth of the earth ( " Schestaja tschast mira " ) ( 1926)
• The Eleventh Year ( " Odinnadzaty " ) ( 1928)
• The man with the camera ( " Chelovek s kinoapparatom " ) ( 1929)
• The Donbass Symphony ( " Simfonija Dombassa " / " entusiasm " ) ( 1930)
• Three Songs of Lenin ( "Tri pesni o Lenine " ) ( 1934)
• Wiegenlied ( " Kolybelnaja " ) ( 1937)
• Three heroines ( "Tri geroini " ) ( 1938)

Republication

• 2010: Dziga Vartov - Šestaja čast mira and Odinnadcatyi, Edition Filmmuseum, 2 DVD; Bonus documentation in the shadow of the machine. Incidental music composed by English composer Michael Nyman.