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Pravda for is that of industrialisation. This, of course, is the main theme in A Sixth Part of the World and a major theme in Forward,
Soviet! Even Vertov s most poetical films, Man with a Movie Camera and The Eleventh Year, treat this subject. Throughout these films,
his greatest and most innovative work, Vertov continues to follow an agenda determined by journalism, even if his approach to the
subject may be original. Moreover, while A Sixth Part of the World was classified in the credits as a poem, Vertov s first feature length
documentary films, Cine-Eye and Forward, Soviet! Were classified as newsreel even his the eleventh year was so designated. Indeed, this
classification of documentaries as newsreel, and the limited understanding of the emergent form, lay at the heart of s responses to
Vertov s films. Vertov was doing things with non-fiction film that no longer fitted the notion of newsreel. Rather than celebrate the new
form, his opponents tried to draw attention to the un-newsreel aspect of his work as if it was a shortcoming, and refused to accept that
it had gone beyond and transformed the genre as conventionally understood. It was judged not for what it attempt to do but for
things it never aspired to do in the first place. Vertov put it vividly: When a critic denounces a horse for its inability to miaow, he is
saying something about himself, and not the horse. From as early as Dziga Vertov had been transforming newsreel, making films that so
far superseded the category that it became increasingly misleading. When critics and industry figures eventually realized what was
happening many of them condemned him for not making conventional newsreel. Part of the problem here was the Russian term for
newsreel: khronika applied to all films of record at this time. While it enjoyed widespread currency, its sense was restrictive and
implied a jumble of events given sense by chronological sequence alone. The weakness of khronika as a term to describe the
burgeoning sphere of documentary film was a major factor leading critics such as Shklovsky as we have seen to criticise Forward,
Soviet!
For the absence of dates and figures. Elsewhere, he repeats the view that a newsreel requires a strictly chronological sequence with
unobtrusive editing and that Vertov has been taking unacceptable liberties. The assumption that newsreel should strive simply to record
implied a style of few set-ups, long takes, little editing and few if any close-ups. None of the means now at the disposal of the
cinematographer were to be used either to present material engagingly or make directorial commentary. Shklovsky, the champion of
the feuilleton and innovative non-fictional literary forms, grants cinema no such licence. Vertov comments in his diary in response to
Shklovsky s attack that every fact recorded by the camera remains a fact even if it is not numbered and indexed. It is precisely this
disregard for the protocols of naming and recording that enables Vertov to forge a new, more flexible and expressive non-fiction form,
through techniques such as associative editing, flashback and reverse motion. Documentary is founded on such freedom. Yet Shklovsky
was not alone: other critics too criticized A Sixth Part of the World as flawed newsreel. In such a view, the film s crime was this very
same refusal to confine itself to the mundane illustrations of life expected of the genre, and to attempt to evoke the deeper meaning, the
greater sense of the epoch. However, for critics willing to accept the creativity of Vertov s approach, it was his continued use of newsreel
footage that was the problem. Such detractors criticized Vertov for the opposite failing: for recording too slavishly, for not imposing
meaning on the material, for not being artistic khudozhestvennyi enough and not revealing the deeper connection between phenomena.
The notion of khudozhestvennyi is a problematic one for Russian documentary in that it means both artistic and fictional Vertov
opposes the latter, the notions of fiction of made up, imaginary plots and scenarios, but clearly is not opposed to artistic in the sense of
works made with artistry, with care and competency. Similarly, the notion of a director, a term borrowed from the theatre, was one
Vertov contested. While in his early less experimental works he briefly attempts to appropriate the term, during the crucial Cine-Pravda
period he eschewed it. Instead, Vertov s s films credit him as supervisor or Cine-Eye although his role appears to be broadly that of a
director. In his writings of the s he likewise associates the term director with a theatricality he rejects. An unintended effect, however, of
these panegyrics against fictional cinema and directors was to supply ammunition to those fostering the impression that Vertov was
unwilling to structure his material. It was in this spirit that a critic called Levidov argued that Vertov s caught off-guard approach to
material was something of a dereliction of duty for a director. This was Eisenstein s critique of Vertov too. In Eisenstein s view the role
of the director was to use editing to shape reality and reel phenomena whereas Vertov simply recorded passively. As we shall see in
chapter such condemnation of unstaged documentary as passive and contemplative was to become so intense in the early s as to all but
destroy the form and effectively erase the distinction between documentary and fiction film. It would, however, be some time before
staging became ensconced as the norm for documentary film-making. In the meantime, form the early s onwards, Vertov was willing to
mount a vigorous defence of documentary film as record. For Vertov the need to register went hand in hand with the need to construct
an argument, and he had to defend his view of the combination against both sides: those who felt his films should simply record and
name on one side Shklovsky and those who felt he should neglect no mean available in the promotion of a tendentious argument on
the other Eisenstein in each case, Vertov s opponents assumed documentary, or newsreel, completely devoid of creativity. The future is
in the hands of on the other hand, an enlightened minority realized that exceeding the confines of newsreel by not simply naming and
showing is not necessarily a bad thing. A number of contemporary critics grasped the novelty of Forward, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the
World and attempted to understand, or even welcomed, this departure from generic convention. Indeed, many of the critics appeared
relieved they had not had to suffer a tedious newsreel of the kind they had expected to see. V. Fefer also stresses this sense that Forward,
Soviet! is infinitely more engaging than newsreel as audiences had known it hitherto: The Cine-Eyes refuted the usual approach to these
kind of stock-taking films of dry illustration with accounts in figures and diagrams. Over the seven reels of the film there is not a single
figure, not a single dry voiced intertitle, and that is precisely why the visual facts presented in condensed form on the screen persuade
by their concreteness. As secretary of the editorial board of Sovetskii ekran, Izmail Urazov put it: Dry commissioned newsreel has grown
into a heroic chronicle of the revolution. Yet is it really still newsreel, still chronicle? Rather than simply assert that this is newsreel of a
new type, a number of the enthusiasts for these films grope towards new definitions. Vladimir blium s celebration of A Sixth Part of the
World was typical: Dziga Vertov has given an undoubted model for the non-fiction artistic film not newsreel g. Osipov similarly
recognized the novelty of Forward, Soviet! and tried to define it as something between narrative and lecture: Here newsreel stops being
newsreel a plotless succession of pictures, like in a Sovkino-Journal and turns into a narrative, into a film lecture, where every sequence
proves something; it turns into a harmonious whole, with a beginning, an intensification of the action, and a denouement. The future is
in the hands of this kind of newsreel. Fefer argues likewise that the film combines the virtues of fiction s capacity to hold an audience

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with newsreel s scope, whereas a conventional newsreel approach would have lasted five times as long and if the film had concentrated
on particular individuals in the manner of fictional films, it would have lost breadth. Like Fefer, fellow LEF film-maker Vitali
Zhemchuzhny recognises A Sixth Part of the World cannot be called newsreel and suggests a journalistic analogy: This is not
information
but an editorial. Despite the acclaim for these films and recognitions of their merit, the Moscow Soviet s rejection of Forward, Soviet!
meant it was not distributed or promoted properly and never given a chance to attract a mass audience. By contrast, a sixth part of the
world was shown quite widely, at least in Moscow, and did fairly well. As Victor Pertsov commented at the new LEF round-table
debates, Esfir shub s fall of the Romanov Dynasty Padenie dinastii Romanovykh, was the first feature-length Soviet documentary to be
publicised

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