1922
What is this? IT IS CINEMA. Not cinema
that is amateurishly psychological, not cinema
that fixes theatrical action, but natural cinema
that is regularly ordered in time and space, a
cinema that fixes organised human and natural
raw material and organises the viewer's attention
at the moment of projection through montage.
That is the most important work at the present
time. The knowledge of scholars and the
enthusiasm and courage of artists must be
21 Dziga Vertov: We. A Version of a Manifesto
Source: D. Vertov, 'My. Variant manifesta', Kino-Fot, no. 1,25-31 August 1922,
pp. 11-12.
WE call ourselves Cine-Eyes as distinct from
'cinematographers' - that flock of junk-dealers
who do rather well peddling their rags.
We see no link between the cunning and
calculation of the profiteers and the genuine Cine-
Eye.
We think the psychological Russo-German
film-drama, weighed down with the apparitions
and memories of childhood, is absurd.
The Cine-Eye thanks the American adven-
ture film with its ostentatious dynamism, the
dramatisations of American Pinkertonism, for
their rapid shot changes and close-ups. They are
good, but disorderly: not based on a precise study
of movement. A cut above the psychological
drama but nonetheless insubstantial. A cliche. A
copy of a copy.
WE declare the old films, the romantic, the
theatricalised etc., to be leprous.
- Don't come near!
- Don't look!
- Mortally dangerous!
- Contagious.
WE affirm the future of cinema art by
rejecting its present.
The death of 'cinematography' is necessary
so that the art of cinema may live. WE call for
the acceleration of its death.
We protest against the mixing of the arts that
many call synthesis. The mixing of bad paints,
even those ideally matched to the colours of the
spectrum, produces not white but dirt.
We are for a synthesis at the zenith of
achievement of every art form - but not before.
directed to cinema.
Down with the Russian psychological
picture. For the moment, welcome American
thrillers and stunts. Expect pictures that are based
on a natural script with subjects that are naturally
constructed in time and space and with the action
of the necessary people, the models. The day
when a picture like that is shown will be a glorious
day for many people, because in it they will find
what in art they have lost forever.
WE are purging the Cine-Eye of its hangers-
on, of music, literature and theatre, we are
seeking our own rhythm, one that has not been
stolen from elsewhere, and we are finding it in
the movement of objects.
WE invite you:
- away-
from the sweet embraces of the romance,
from the poison of the psychological novel,
from the clutches of the theatre of adultery,
with your backsides to music,
- away-
into the open, into four dimensional space
(3 + time), in search of our own material, metre
and rhythm.
The 'psychological' prevents man from being
as precise as a stop-watch and hampers his desire
for kinship with the machine.
In the art of movement we have no reason to
devote our attention principally to contemporary
man.
In the face of the machine we are ashamed
of man's inability to control himself, but what are
we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity
more exciting than the disorderly haste of active
people and the demoralising inertia of the
passive.
For us the joy of dancing saws in a sawmill
is more familiar and easier to understand than
the joy of human dancing.
WE exclude for the time being man as an
object of filming because of his inability to control
his own movements.
Our path - from a bumbling citizen through
69
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23 (top left) Cover for the Eccentrism manifesto, published by the FEKS group in Petrograd in 1922.
24 (bottom) 'Down with the Russian psychological picture. For the moment, welcome American thrillers and stunts'.
Kuleshov's experience making On the Red Front during the Civil War in 1920, helped shape his new aesthetic of
'Americanism' (see Document no. 20).
25 (top right) Dziga Vertov in early 1921.

70
 1922

the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric
man.
By revealing the souls of machines, by
making the worker love his lathe, the peasant his
tractor, the driver his engine -
we bring creative joy to all mechanical
labour,
we bring men closer to machines,
we train the new men.
The new man, liberated from unwieldiness
and awkwardness, with the precise, light move-
ments of the machine, will be the grateful object
of the filming.
WE openly acknowledge the rhythm of the
machine, the rapture of mechanical labour, the
perception of the beauty of chemical processes,
we hymn earthquakes, compose cine-poems to
the flame and to power stations, revel in the
movements of the comets and meteors and the
gestures of the searchlights dazzling the stars.
Everyone who loves his art seeks the essence
of his own technique.
The unstrung nerves of cinematography need
a strict system of precise movements.
Metre, tempo, type of movement, its exact
disposition in relation to the axes of the shot's
coordinates, and possibly also to the axes of
global coordinates (three dimensions + the
fourth - time) must be studied and learned by
every creative worker in the field of the cinema.
Necessity, precision and speed - three
requirements for movement that is worth filming
and projecting.
A geometric extract of movement through
an exciting succession of images is a requirement
for montage.
The Cine-Eye is the art of organising the
necessary movements of objects in space and time
into a rhythmic artistic whole, in accordance with
the characteristics of the whole and the internal
rhythm of each object.
The material - the elements of the art of
movement - is composed of the intervals (the
transitions from one movement to another) and
by no means of the movements themselves. It is
they (the intervals) that draw the action to a
kinetic resolution.
The organisation of movement is the organis-
ation of its elements, i.e. of the intervals, into
phrases.
In every phrase there is a rise, a peak and a
falling off of movement (manifested in varying
degrees). THE WORK

The work

Principal peak

AB The phase AI< : The work

71
 1922
A work is constructed from phrases just as a
phrase is constructed from intervals of movement.
A Cine-Eye who has conceived a film poem
or a fragment, must know exactly how to make
a note of it in order to give it life on the screen
if favourable technical conditions arise.
The most complete script will not of course
replace this kind of note just as a libretto does
not replace a pantomime or literary accounts of
Scriabin's50 works do not give us any idea of his
music.
We must have graphic signs for movement
so that we can represent a dynamic exercise on a
sheet of paper.
WE are searching for cine-scales.
WE fall and rise with the rhythm of move-
ments that have been slowed down and speeded
up,
rushing from us, past us, towards us,
in circles, straight lines, ellipses,
to the right and the left, with plus and minus
signs;
movements curve, straighten out, divide,
split, multiply again and again, soundlessly
22 Lev Kuleshov: Americanism
Source: L. v. Kuleshov, 'Amerikanshchina', Kino-Fot, no. 1, 25-31 August 1922,
pp.14-15.
Anyone who, from 1914 to the present day, has
systematically visited cinemas, watched all the
films that have been released by both Russian
and foreign studios, and observed which films
most effectively force the public to react to
cinema action, will have no difficulty in stating
that:
1/ . Foreign-made films are more popular
than Russian ones.
21. The best foreign films are American-made
detective pictures.
The public is especially receptive to Amer-
ican films. A successful move by the hero, a
desperate chase, a daring fight causes whistles of
delight, howls and whoops in the cheap seats and
tense interested figures jump up from their seats
so that they can see the interesting action better.
Superficial people and deep-thinking officials
are terribly frightened of Americanism and detec-
tive films and they explain away the success of
these pictures by the unusual depravity and the
72
shooting through space.
The cinema is also the art of inventing the
movement of objects in space responding to the
demands of science, the incarnation of the inven-
tor's dream, whether he is a scientist, an artist,
an engineer or a carpenter, the realisation by the
Cine-Eye of what cannot be realised in life.
Drawings in motion. Blueprints in motion.
Projects for the future. The theory of relativity
on the screen.
WE welcome the ordered fantasy of
movement.
Our eyes, turning like propellors, take off
into the future on the wings of hypotheses.
WE believe that the moment is at hand when
we shall be able to toss into space hurricanes of
movement reined in by the lassos of our tactic.
Long live dynamic geometry, the race of
points, lines, planes, volumes.
Long live the poetry of the propelling and
propelled machine, the poetry of levers, wheels
and steel wings, the iron screech of movements,
the dazzling grimaces of red-hot jets.
poor 'tastes' of the younger generation and the
people who sit in the cheap seats.
There is no point in saying anything here
about the unashamedly literary subjects of the
films or about the depravity of the audience.
We should focus the main attention of our
observations on the audience in the cheap seats
because the majority of the audience in the more
expensive seats goes to the cinema for psycho-
pathic or hysterical motives.
In cinema there have never been so many
of the refined artistic constructions or complex
'investigations' that might be unintelligible to a
less cultured audience: the reaction of the spon-
taneous audience to basic primitive impressions
is much more striking, more interesting for the
current epoch.
In detective literature, and to an even greater
extent in the American detective script, the basic
element of the plot is an intensity in the build-up
of the action - the dynamism of the construction -
and for cinema there is no more damaging manifes-
 1923
28 Dziga Vertov: The Cine-Pravda
Source: D. Vertov, 'Kino-Pravda', Kino-Fat, no. 6, 8 January 1923, p. 13.
With the speed of international communications
and the lightning despatch of filmed material the
Cine-Gazette ought to be a 'survey of the world
every few hours'.
It is not.
We must face up to this.
The Cine-Pravda is a car on a leash, an aero-
plane beneath a ceiling: it cannot be a Cine-
Gazette.
The release of the Cine-Pravda as a period-
ical film magazine is a strategic retreat resulting
from economic causes.
The Cine-Pravda needs and does not have:
a permanent establishment of contributors, on-
the-spot correspondents, and the means to main-
tain them and move them about, an adequate
29 Proletkino: Quasi-Theses
Source: 'Pochti tezisy', Pro/etkino, 1923, no. 1/2 (May/June), pp. 3-4.
About Cinema
Cinema is an overrated little machine that
damages your eyesight - and nothing more.
It is an unhealthy plaything for the amuse-
ment of children.
It is the work of the talentless to cater for
the demands of the tasteless.
It is not an art. . . .
This, in different words but with one voice,
is what the cultural specialists of the recent past,
the Russian, German and American Eichen-
walds, have repeated over and over again. This
is what the cultural specialists repeatedly said.
But the bosses, the bourgeois factory owners
and the bourgeois politicians with a nose for the
power of this 'plaything', scattered thousands of
them throughout the world. In two decades
cinema has gained a power and influence that
in twenty centuries all the other ('noble') arts
combined have not achieved.
Capitalism is not stupid: if it set cinema in
motion this means that it needed it and that its
84
supply of film stock, and the opportunity for prac-
tical links with foreign countries. The absence of
even one of these factors is enough to kill the
Cine-Gazette.
The Cine-Pravda only exists,
but it must live.
The government and the Comintern have not
yet realised that, by supporting the Cine-Pravda,
they could find a new mouthpiece, a visual radio
for the world.
Independent of the changes in the Photo-
graphic and Cinematographic Section of Narkom-
pros, the only revolutionary government in the
world must have and must defend the revol-
utionary Cine-Gazette.
deployment would be profitable. A hundred
thousand cinemas scattered across the globe are
worth thinking about ....
Arguments between cultural specialists of all
sorts and shades 'on the significance and the role
of cinema' must cease once and for all. Such argu-
ments are empty and reactionary. That much is
obvious.
Especially after Ilyich's remark: 'Of all your
arts in my view the most important is cinema.'
About Soviet Cinema
Ilyich made the remark just quoted two years
ago. 58 It is only now that we have heard about
it. For five whole years after October this 'most
important art' was kept in the background!
We have nationalised the studios, rental
offices, theatres, large-scale cinema property and
we have done nothing with it. We have squan-
dered, wasted and dispersed it. Narkompros has
so far had no real cinema policy. The Party has
 1923
programme that derives from the situations found
in the play that is taken as a basis.
As an example here is a list of the sections
of numbers in the epilogue to Wise Man:
1/. The hero's explanatory monologue. 2/.
A fragment from a detective film. (A classification
of 11., the theft of the diary). 3/. An Eccentric
music-hall entree (the bride and her three
rejected suitors - all one person in the play - in
the role of best men: a melancholy scene remi-
niscent of the song 'Your hands smell of incense'
and 'May I be punished by the grave' (we
intended that the bride would have a xylophone
and this would be played on six rows of bells, the
officers' buttons). 4/.5/.6/. Three parallel two-
phrased clowning entrees (the theme: payment
for organising the wedding). 7/. An entree with
a star (the aunt) and three officers (the theme:
the restraint of the rejected suitors), punning (by
reference to a horse) on a triple volte number on
a saddled horse (on the impossibility of bringing
it into the room, traditionally, in 'triple harness').
8/. Good agit-songs ('The priest had a dog')
accompanied by a rubber priest like a dog. The
theme: the start of the wedding ceremony. 9/. A
break in the action (A paper-bay's voice
announcing that the hero is leaving). 10/. The
villain appears in a mask. A fragment from a
comedy film. (A resume of five acts of the play
summarised. The theme: the publication of the
diary). 11/. The continuation of the (interrupted)
action in another grouping (a simultaneous
wedding with the three rejected suitors). 121.
31 Dziga Vertov: The Cine-Eyes. A Revolution
Source: D. Ve rtov , 'Kinoki. Perevorot', Let, 1923, no. 3 (June/July), pp. 135-43.
. . . I only wanted to establish that what we
have so far done in cinema is 100 per cent
mistaken and the direct opposite of what we
should be doing . . .
Dziga Vertov.
FROM OUR PROCLAMATION AT
THE BEGINNING OF 1922
... You, the cinematographers:
89
Anti-religious songs ('Allah-Verdi' - a punning
theme tune on the need to bring in a mullah
because of the large number of suitors that one
bride is marrying) from the choir and a new
character used only in this scene, a soloist dressed
as a mullah. 13/. General dancing. Some play
with a poster inscribed: 'Religion is the opium of
the people.' 14/. A farcical scene. (The bride and
her three suitors are packed into a box and pots
are smashed against the lid.) 15/. The marital
trio - a parody of life. (The song: 'Who here is
young?'). 16/. A precipice. The hero's return. 17/.
The hero's winged flight beneath the big top (the
theme: suicide in despair). 18/. A break. The
villain's return. The suicide is held up. 19/. A
sword fight (the theme: enmity). 20/. An agit-
entree involving the hero and the villain on the
theme of NEP. 211. An act on a sloping wire
(crossing from the arena to the balcony over the
audience's heads. The theme: 'leaving for
Russia'). 22/. A clowning parody of this number
(with the hero). Descent from the wire. 23/. A
clown descends the same wire from the balcony
holding on by his teeth. 24/. The final entree with
two clowns throwing water over one another (as
per tradition), finishing with the announcement:
'The End'. 25/. A volley of shots beneath the
seats of the auditorium as a finale. The connecting
features of the numbers, if there is no direct tran-
sition, are used as linking elements: they are
handled with different arrangements of equip-
ment, musical interludes, dancing, pantomime,
carpet-clowns.
directors without a cause and artists without
a cause,
confused cameramen
and scriptwriters scattered across the world,
you, the patient public of the cinemas with
the staying-power of mules burdened by the
experiences that have been placed before you,
you, the impatient owners of the cinemas that
have not yet gone bust, greedily picking up the
crumbs from the German or, more rarely, the
American table -
you are waiting
 1923

weakened by your memories, you dreamily . . . Five action-packed years of world-wide

pine FOR THE MOON of a new six-act excitement have come and gone without leaving
production ... (nervous people are requested to any mark on you. The pre-Revolutionary
close their eyes), 'fictional' models hang over you like icons and
you are waiting for something that will not your devout souls are fixed on them alone. You
be are supported in your delusion from abroad
and that you ought not to be waiting for. because they send to resurrected Russia the
imperishable relics of cine-dramas garnished with
As a friend I warn you:
a magnificent technical sauce.
DO NOT BURY YOUR HEAD like an
Spring arrives. A return to work in the film
ostrich,
raise your eyes, studios is anticipated. The Soviet of Three looks
on with undisguised regret as film producers leaf
LOOK AROUND YOU- through the pages of literary works in search of
THERE! suitable material for adaptations. The titles of the
I can see theatrical dramas and poems that are to be put
as every child can see: forward for adaptation are already floating in the
THE INTESTINES ARE TUMBLING air. Both in the Ukraine and here in Moscow we
OUT. are already making a few films that have all the
THE ENTRAILS OF EXPERIENCE makings of impotence.
FROM THE STOMACH OF CINEMA Our considerable technical backwardness,
DISEMBOWELLED the fact that we lost our capacity for active
ON THE REEF OF THE REVOLUTION, thought during our period of inactivity, our orien-
they are dragged along tation towards six-reel psycho-dramas, i.e. our
leaving a trail of blood on the ground, orientation towards our own backsides, doom
TREMBLING with fear and revulsion. every new attempt in advance.
IT IS ALL OVER. Cinema's organism has been poisoned by
Dziga Vertov. habit. We demand that we be given the chance to
experiment on this dying organism in order to test
the antidote that we have discovered. We propose
From a stenogram: to convince the non-believers: we are ready for a
DZIGA VERTOV TO THE SOVIET preliminary test of our treatment on the 'rabbits'
OF THREE of film sketches ....
The Soviet of Three .
. . . With a psychological, detective, satirical,
travel film - it does not matter which - you can
cut out all the subjects and leave just the interti- THE RESOLUTION OF THE
tIes and you will be left with the literary skeleton SOVIET OF THREE
of the picture. To this literary skeleton we can
add other film subjects that are Realist, 10.4.23
Symbolist, Expressionist, anything you like. This
does not alter the state of affairs. The relationship We consider the situation on the
is the same: a literary skeleton plus cine- cinema front to be unfavourable.
illustrations. The first new Russian productions
Almost all films both here and abroad are that we have been shown recall, as was
like this ... to be expected, the old 'fictional' models
to the same extent that the Nepmen
recall the old bourgeoisie.
From the Proclamation of 20.1.23 The summer exhibition repertoire
FROM THE SOVIET OF THREE that we can see both here and in the
TO CINEMATOGRAPHERS Ukraine does not inspire confidence.
The prospects for broad-based

90
 1923
experimental work have been pushed
into the background.
All our efforts, sighs, tears and
aspirations, all our prayers for it have
become a six-act film drama.
Hence the Soviet of Three, which
does not expect that the Cine-Eyes will
be allowed to work and is not relying on
the latter's desire to realise their own
projects, scorns for the moment the right
of authorship and resolves: to publicise
immediately for universal use the
general principles and slogans of the
impending revolution through newsreel
film. To this end in the first instance the
Cine-Eye Dziga Vertov is ordered, as
a matter of Party discipline, to publish
certain extracts from his book The Cine-
Eyes. A Revolution which will be
enough to clarify the essence of the
revolution.
The Soviet of Three.
In fulfilment of the Resolution of the Soviet
of Three of 10.4.23 I am publishing the following
extracts:
1.
Observing the films that come to us from
Western Europe and America and considering
the evidence that we have of work and research
abroad and in this country, I come to the
following conclusion:
The death sentence pronounced by the Cine-
Eyes on all films without exception is still valid
today.
The most thorough investigation does not
reveal a single film, a single piece of research that
is correctly designed to emancipate the camera
which has been pitifully ,...---------.
enslaved and subjugated LEGITIMISED
to the imperfect and none MYOPIA
too clever human eye.
We do not object to cinema sapping litera-
ture or theatre, we sympathise completely with
the use of cinema for all branches of science, but
we define these functions of cinema as sidelines
that derive from its offshoots.
The basic and most important thing is:
A CINEMA FEELING FOR THE WORLD.
91
Our starting point is: the ,....._ _ _ _ _--,
use of the camera as a Cine- MAKE WAY
Eye, more perfect than the FOR THE
human eye for examining the MACHINE!
chaos of visual phenomena '--_ _ _ _ _---1
that resemble space.
The Cine-Eye lives and moves in time and
space, it perceives and fixes its impressions in a
completely different way from that of the human
eye. The position of our ,.....-------,
body during observation, the DOWN WITH
number of aspects of a 16 FRAMES
particular visual phenom- A SECOND!
enon that we observe in a '--_ _ _ _ _--1
second is by no means obligatory for the camera
which will perceive more and better, the more it
is perfected.
We cannot make our eyes any better than
they have been made but we can go on perfecting
the camera for ever.
Until now a cameraman has never been
rebuked for a running
horse that moved unnat- ACCIDENTAL
urally slowly across the DISLOCATION &
screen (when the camera CONCENTRATION OF
handle was cranked too DISLOCATION
fast) or for the opposite, '---------~
a tractor that ploughed a field too quickly (when
the camera handle was cranked too slowly), and
so on.
These are of course accidental but we are
preparing a system, a carefully considered system
of such cases, a system of apparent irregularities
that examine and organise phenomena.
Until now we have coerced the film camera
and forced it to copy the . - - - - - - - - -.....
work done by our eyes. DON'T COPY THE
And the better the EYES
copy, the more highly L-._ _ _ _ _ _......J
we thought of the photography.
From now on we are emancipating the
camera and forcing it to work in the opposite
direction, moving away from copying.
All the weaknesses of the human eye have
been revealed. We reaffirm the Cine-Eye that
gropes its way through the ,.....--------,
chaos of movement for a THE
counter-balance to its own MACHINE
movement; we maintain & ITS CAREER
that the Cine-Eye, with its '--_ _ _ _ _ _--1
measure of time and space, is growing in strength
and in its possibilities for self-assertion.
 1923

2. 3.
. . . I compel the audience to see in the way . . . You are walking down a street in
that it suits me best to depict a particular visual Chicago now, in 1923, but ..----------,
phenomenon. The eye is subjugated to the will I force you to bow to the MONTAGE
of the camera and is directed by it late Comrade Volo- in time
darsky, who is walking and space
along a street in Petrograd L-_ _ _ _ _ _...I_
THE SYSTEM OF CONSECUTIVE in 1918 and who responds to you with a bow.
MOVEMENTS Another example: the coffins of popular
heroes are being lowered into their graves (filmed
towards the consecutive moments of action that in Astrakhan in 1918), the graves are covered
bring the cinematic phrase in the shortest and (Kronstadt, 1921), a gun salute (Petrograd, 1920),
most striking way to the summit or depth of its eternal remembrance, people doff their hats
resolution. (Moscow, 1922): these things go together even
Example: filming a boxing match not from with the thankless material that has not been
the point of view of the audience specially filmed (see Cine-Pravda no. 13). A
witnessing the bout but by further example of this is the montage of
shooting the consecutive move- welcoming crowds and vehicles for Comrade
ments (the methods) of those Lenin (Cine-Pravda no. 14) that were filmed in
fighting. different places at different times. 68
Example: filming a group of dancers not
from the point of view of the audi-
ence sitting in the auditorium with
the ballet on the stage in front of
them. ... I am the Cine-Eye. I construct things.
For a ballet I have planted you, who were created by me,
audience in a most~------------,
THE MOST UNPROFITABLE, remarkable
haphazardly THE MOST UNECONOMIC
THE CINE-EYE FRATERNITY
follows first the room that THE SOVIET OF THREE
WAY OF COMMUNICATING never
ensemble of the A SCENE IS THROUGH
The Hall of Intervals, Moscow
groups of existed TODAY 3TODAY
THEATRICAL before and
dancers, then COMMUNICATION
APR IL
random individ- that I also A REPORT
uals, then some created. D2Y ON THE SUBJECT OF

As PHRASE
body's feet: a series of incoherent impressions that In this
are different for every member of the audience. room are R~I~~_
We must not subject the cinema audience twelve walls
filmed by me L--_ _ _Starts at 8 p.m.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _---I
to this. The system of consecutive movements
requires that the dancers or boxers should be in different parts of the world.
filmed in a way that sets out the relevant materials In combining the shots of the walls and of
one after the other and forces the eyes of the the details with one another I managed to put
audience to see the consecutive details that they them in an order that will please you and to
must see. construct a cinematic phrase, that is the room,
The film camera drags the eyes of the audience correctly in intervals . . .
from the hands to the feet, from the feet to the I am the Cine-Eye. I create a man more
eyes and so on in the most profitable order and perfect than Adam
it organises the details into a regular montage was created. I create THE ELECTRIC
exercise. thousands of YOUTH
different people 1-------------1
according to different preliminary sketches and
schemes.
92
 1923
r am the Cine-Eye.
r take the strongest and most agile hands
from one man, the fastest and best proportioned
legs from another, the mos~ handsome and
expressive head from a thud and through
montage I create a new, perfect man ....
4.
. . . I am the Cine-Eye. I am the mechanical
eye.
I the machine show you the world as only I
can see it.
I emancipate myself henceforth and forever
from human immobility. ] am in constant motion.
I approach objects and move
away from them, I creep up to FILMING
them, I clamber over them, I IN
move alongside the muzzle of a MOTION
running horse, I tear into a
crowd at full tilt, I flee before fleeing soldiers, I
turn over on my back, I rise up with aeroplanes,
I fall and rise with falling and rising bodies.
I the camera rushed along the equilibrium,
manoeuvring amid the chaos of movements,
fixing movement to movement in the most
complex combinations.
Freed from any obligation to 16-17 frames a
second, freed from the restraints of time and
space, / juxtapose any points in the universe
regardless of where I fixed them.
My path leads towards the creation Of. a fresh
perception of the world. I can thus deCipher a
world that you do not know.
5.
.. Let us settle once more: the eye and the
ear.
The ear does not watch; the eye does not
listen.
A division of functions.
The Radio-Ear is the montage '] hearl'
The Cine-Eye is the montage '/ see!'
There you have it for the first time, citizens,
instead of music, painting, theatre, cinema and
other castrated effusions.
93
In the chaos of movements rushing past,
away, towards you and colliding, the simple eye
comes to life.
The day of visual THE ORGANISATION OF
impressions is over. THE OBSERVATIONS OF
How can we construct THE HUMAN EYE
our impressions of a .
day into an effective whole in a visual exercIse?
If we film everything that the eye has. seen
these will naturally be a muddle. If we edIt the
photographed material skilfully it w~ll be clea!er.
If we throw out the rubbishy impedImenta thlOgS
will be even better. We shall get an organised
memorandum of the impressions of a normal eye.
The mechanical eye, the film camera,
rejecting the
deployment of THE ORGANISATION OF
the human eye THE OBSERVATIONS OF THE
as a crib, MECHANICAL
repelled and EYE
attracted by
movements, gropes in the chaos of visual
events for a path
for its own move- THE DISLOCATION AND
ment or oscil- CONCENTRATION OF
lation and exper- VISUAL PHENOMENA
iments, stretches L._ _ _ _ _ _~-.:-----:--'
time dismembers movements, or it does the
opp~site, absorbing time unto itself, swallowing
the years and thus schematising the lengthy
processes that are inaccessible to the normal
eye .... The machine-eye is assisted by the Cine-
Eye-Pilot, who not merely directs the movements
of the camera but trusts it with experiments in
I I
space and in the future, and the Cine-Eye-
Engineer, who directs the
cameras from a distance. THE BRAIN
As a result of this kind of cooperative action
between the emancipated and perfected camera
and the strategic brain of man, directing,
observing, calculating, there emerges an unusu-
ally fresh and hence interesting representation of
even the most ordinary objects ....
... How many of them, hungry for spec-
tacle, have worn out their trousers in the theatre?
They are running away from the everyday,
running away from the 'prosaic' nature of life.
Nonetheless theatre is almost always no more
 1923
than a poor imitation of this very same life plus
an idiotic conglomerate of balletic affectations,
musical squeaks, lighting effects, sets (from the
daubed to the constructed) and occasionally of
good work by literary masters that has been
perverted by all this nonsense. Certain mast~rs.of
theatre are destroying theatre from wlthm,
breaking down the old forms and proclaiming
new working slogans for theatre. They summon
to their aid biomechanics (in itself a good idea),
cinema (glory and honour to it), writers (not in
themselves bad) and sets (there are some good
ones), automobiles (how could you not rev~re
them?) and gunfire (a dangerous and impres~lve
thing at the front) and, generally speakmg,
nothing results.
Theatre and nothing more.
Not merely not a synthesis, not even a
regular mixture.
It cannot be otherwise.
We the Cine-Eyes, determined opponents of
premature synthesis ('towar?s synt~e~is a~ the
zenith of achievement!') reahse that It IS futtle to
mix the fragments of our achievements: the little
pieces will perish straight away in the chaos and
the crush. And on the whole -
THE ARENA IS SMALL
Look at life.
Here we are, the masters of vision, the organ-
isers of visual life, work, armed with the Cine-Eye
which rushes everywhere.
Here the masters of words and sounds, the
most skilled editors of audible life, are working.
And I even dare to thrust under their noses the
ubiquitous mechanical ear and megaphone - the
radio-telephone.
What is this?
It is the FILM NEWSREEL
32 Lev Trotsky: Vodka, the Church and the Cinema
Source: First published in Pravda, 12 July 1923; this translation is from L. Trotsky, Problems
of Life (London, 1924), ch. 3, pp. 34-43.
There are two big facts which have set a new
stamp on working-class life. The one is the advent
of the eight-hour working day, the other, the
prohibition of the sale of vodka. The liquidation
of the vodka monopoly,69 for which the war was
94
And the IRADIO NEWSREEL I
I promise to arrange a parade of Cine-Eyes in
Red Square on the occasion of the release by the
Futurists of the first number of an edited radio-
newsreel.
Not a Pathe or a Gaumont newsreel (a news-
reel like newspaper), nor even a Cine-Pravda (a
political newsreel), but a real Cine-I?ye news-
reel- a rapid survey of VIS VAL events znterpreted
by the film camera, fragments of REAL energy
(as distinct from the theatrical), building by inter-
vals to an accumulated whole through the great
skill of montage.
This kind of structure for cinema permits you
to develop any theme, whether comic, tragic,
trick or otherwise.
The whole secret lies in one or another corre-
lation of the visual moments, in the intervals.
The unusual flexibility of montage construc-
tion permits the introduction into the fih~ sketch
of any political, economic or other motIf. And
so:
FROM TODAY neither psychological nor detec-
tive dramas are needed in
cinema,
FROM TODAY filmed theatrical productions are
unnecessary,
FROM TODAY neither Dostoyevsky nor Nat
Pinkerton will be filmed.
Everything will be included in the new defi-
nition of film newsreel.
Into the confusion of life enter with
determination:
1) the Cine-Eye, calling into question the
human eye's conception of the world and
presenting its own 'I see!' and .
2) the Cine-Eye Editor, who for the first tIme
organises the minutes of life seen in this way.
responsible, preceded the revolution. The war
demanded such enormous means that Tsarism
was able to renounce the drink revenue as a negli-
gible quality, a milliard more or less making no
very great difference. The revolution inherited
 1924
41 Dziga Vertov: The Cine-Pravda: A Report to the Cine-Eyes
Date: 9 June 1924.
Source: S. V. Drobashenko (ed.), Dziga Vertov. Stat'i. Dnevniki. Zamysli (Moscow, 1966),
pp.75-9. Extracts first quoted in: A. Belenson, Kino segodnya. Ocherki sovetskogo
kinoiskusstva (Kuleshov-Vertov-Eizenshtein) (Moscow, 1925), p. 36.
On the one hand the Cine-Pravda is linked to
the old newsreel. On the other hand it is the
contemporary mouthpiece of the Cine-Eyes. In
this report I must examine both these elements.
The PatM and Gaumont newsreels and the
newsreels of the Skobelev Committee74 were
replaced after the October Revolution by Cine-
Week (Kinonedelya) produced by VFKO.
Cine-Week could be distinguished from
previous newsreels really only by the fact that its
intertitles were 'Soviet'. The content stayed the
same as before: the same parades, the same
funerals. It was at exactly this time that I began
work in cinema, still ill-acquainted with its tech-
niques. Despite its youth, cinema had by that
time already established firm patterns and you
were forbidden to work outside them. My first
experiments in collecting incidental frames into
more or less 'harmonious' montage groups date
from this period.
One of these experiments was - or so it
seemed to me - a complete success and for the
first time I began to doubt the need for a literary
link between individual visual elements stuck
together. I had temporarily to suspend the exper-
iment because I was working on a film for the
anniversary of the October Revolution.
These works also served as the base from
which I later approached Cine-Pravda.
It was at precisely the time of these exper-
iments that we (a few people), who had lost our
faith in the possibilities of fiction film and begun
to believe in our own resources, drafted our orig-
inal plan for a manifesto that was later to make
so much noise and cause our apostles of cinema
so many uncomfortable moments.
After a long interval (at the front) lance
again returned to VFKO and was despatched
to the newsreel section. Learning from bitter
experience, I was extremely careful in the first
numbers of Cine-Pravda. But, as I became
convinced that the sympathy, if not of everyone
then of at least a section of the audience, was
on my side, I exerted more pressure on the raw
112
material.
At the same time as I was recelvmg the
support of the Constructivist Alexei Gan, who
was then publishing the journal Kino-Fat, I was
facing growing internal and external opposition.
Passions were aroused by the tenth number
of Cine-Pravda.
The thirteenth number of Cine-Pravda
received the unexpected support of the press.
After the fourteenth number had been released
the almost unanimous diagnosis that it was
'insane' greatly puzzled me. That was the most
critical moment in Cine-Pravda's existence.
The fourteenth Cine-Pravda differed signifi-
cantly not only from the newsreel of that time in
general but also from previous numbers of Cine-
Pravda. Our friends did not understand and
shook their heads. Our enemies flew into a rage.
Cameramen declared that they would not shoot
for Cine-Pravda. The censors would not pass the
fourteenth Cine-Pravda at all (or rather they did
pass it but they cut out roughly half so that it was
equivalent to destroying it). I must admit that I
myself was confused. The construction of the film
seemed clear and simple to me. I did not at first
appreciate that my critics, who had been brought
up on literature, were unable through force of
habit to cope without a literary link between the
subjects.
Subsequently we managed to eliminate the
conflict. Young audiences and workers' clubs
were receptive to the film and there was no need
to worry about the audiences of 'Nepmen'. The
sumptuous Indian Tomb enveloped it in its own
embraces.
A crisis threatened. But the battle continued.
Cine-Pravda made heroic efforts to shield the
proletariat from the corrupting influence of fiction
film dramas. To many people these efforts
seemed laughable. The minute number of copies
of Cine-Pravda could serve at best thousands of
people but not millions.
But, although Cine-Pravda's role in creating
an extensive repertoire for the workers was small,
 1924
its agitational role in the battle with the repertoire
of commercial cinemas turned out to be
significant.
Soon the prosecution split. Our most far-
sighted critics put their heads together and began
to imitate us successfully in their own work. Some
had even done this considerably earlier. But
many remained hostile to our work.
A handful of conservative scribblers, very
dim people, tirelessly lavish praise on canned film
conserves (mostly imported from abroad) and
they support the preparation of similar film surro-
gates here (of significantly worse quality, it is
true). By their inept fussing they are killing at
root every even slightly revolutionary initiative.
Kicking these unwanted nursemaids out is
not to be recommended. In revenge they will
prove that they were the ones with the umbrellas
who saved the public from the rain, i.e. from the
Cine-Eyes. And when the rain stops and the sun
of fiction film drama shines they will fan the
public attentively. Through the efforts of these
critics the magnanimous image of the American
millionaire hero will shine in the stern heart of
the Russian proletariat.
Almost all those who work in fiction film are
overtly or covertly hostile to Cine-Pravda. This is
quite understandable because, if our point of view
is victorious, they will have either to learn to
work in a new way or to leave cinema altogether.
Neither group represents a direct danger to
the purity of the Cine-Eyes' line.
Much more dangerous are the newly formed
intermediate, as it were, compromising, oppor-
tunistic groups. They borrow our methods and
translate them to fiction film drama, thus
fortifying its positions.
In their attacks on Cine-Pravda our detrac-
tors maliciously point out that it is produced from
raw material that has been previously shot and is
therefore 'incidental'.
In our view this means that the newsreel
organises fragments of life into a theme and not
vice-versa. This also means that Cine-Pravda does
not prescribe that life should live according to a
scriptwriter's script but observes and records life
as it is and only then does it draw conclusions
from its observations. It transpires that this is our
advantage rather than our defect.
Cine-Pravda is made of raw material in the
same way as a house is made of bricks. With
bricks you can build a stove, the Kremlin walls
113
and many other things. Just as you need good
bricks to build a house, so you need good film
material to make a 'work of cinema.' Hence our
serious approach to newsreel film, that factory of
raw film material where life, in passing through
the lens of the film camera, does not disappear
without trace for ever but leaves a trace that is
exact and inimitable.
The technical quality, the social and
historical value of the material and, subsequently,
the quality of the whole thing depend on how
and when we submit life to the lens and how we
reinforce the trace that it leaves.
The thirteenth Cine-Pravda, released on the
occasion of Lenin's birthday, is constructed from
raw material that defines the mutual relationships
between two worlds, the capitalist world and
the USSR. The material is inadequate but
generalised.
It is interesting to note that now, a year after
the fourteenth Cine-Pravda was released, orders
are once more starting to come our way. As you
see, this newsreel has not aged and will not age
quickly. But in its time it was the most abused
number of Cine-Pravda.
The fifteenth and sixteenth Cine-Pravdas
concentrate the material of several months: one
is a winter number, the other a spring one, and
both are experimental in character.75
The seventeenth Cine-Pravda was released
for the opening day of the All-Union Agricultural
Exhibition. 76 It shows not so much the exhibition
itself but the 'circulation of the blood' provoked
by the idea of an agricultural exhibition. It is a
great step from the fields to the city: one foot is
in the rye in the midst of the countryside while
the other steps on the exhibition ground.
The eighteenth Cine-Pravda77 is a flight by
the camera from the Eiffel Tower in Paris through
Moscow to a factory in the distant Soviet Far
East. This flight through the heart of everyday
revolutionary life exerted a colossal influence on
sincere audiences. Do not think, comrades, that
I am bragging but several people thought it
necessary to tell me that they regard the day they
saw the eighteenth Cine-Pravda as a turning-point
in their understanding of Soviet reality.
Today you will see the nineteenth Cine-
Pravda.78 We cannot show the others. They are
already worn to the point where they are
unrecognisable.
I shall not employ words to describe the
 1924
content of the latest Cine-Pravda: it is constructed
visually. With many visual threads it links town
and country, south and north, winter and
summer, peasant women and women workers and
towards the end it revolves around the single
family, the remarkable family of Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin. Here is Lenin - alive, there he is - dead.
The overwhelming grief and sense of loss compel
his wife and sister to go on working with
redoubled energy. The peasant women toil, the
women workers toil and the woman selecting the
negatives for Cine-Pravda toils as well .... 79
At the same time as they were working on
these numbers of Cine-Pravda the Cine-Eyes
have mastered another field that does not, or so
it would seem, have any immediate connection
with our tasks - caricatures and advertising
films.so There are reasons why we felt compelled
to learn to master this weapon.
In time this weapon will prove useful.
The normal work of the Cine-Eyes is the
experimental film that we make without a script
and without any preliminaries resembling a script.
This attempt is a very difficult and dangerous
reconnoitre, which those who are economically
and technically unarmed should not undertake.
But we have no right to reject an impossible possi-
42 Sovnarkom of the RSFSR: Decree on the Establishment
of Sovkino
Date: 13 June 1924.
Source: E. G. Lemberg: Kinopromyshlennost' S.S.S.R. Ekonomika sovetskoi
kinematografii (Moscow, 1930), p. 204 footnote.
Sovnarkom of the RSFSR, having considered the
report of the commission on cinema established
by decree of Sovnarkom of the USSR on
4 September 1923, decrees:
1 With the aim of unifying throughout the
entire territory of the Federation both the
capital of cinema organisations and their
operations in the fields of production,
distribution and import-export, a limited
company for the production and
distribution of films within the RSFSR
should be established.
2 All central and local state institutions of the
RSFSR which own undertakings for the
114
bility that has been presented to us. We shall try
to seize reality with our bare hands.
Comrades, very soon, perhaps even before
the appearance of our next works, you will see
on Soviet screens a number of surrogates, a
number of films made in imitation of the Cine-
Eyes. In some actors will depict real life in suit-
able surroundings; in others real people will play
the roles in a most refined script.
These are the works of the compromising
'Cine-Mensheviks'. They will resemble our works
in the same way that a forged bank-note
resembles a real one or large mechanical dolls
resemble small children.
The world conflagration of 'art' is at hand.
With a premonition of disaster, theatre workers,
artists, writers, choreographers and other
canaries are fleeing in panic seeking refuge, they
run to cinema. The film studio is the last strong-
hold of art.
Sooner or later all sorts of long-haired charla-
tans will gather there. Fiction film will obtain
colossal reinforcements but it will not be saved: it
will rather perish with the whole array of soothing
edifiers.
We shall blow up the Tower of Babel that is
art.
production and distribution of films must
exchange the entire capital and holdings of
these undertakings in payment for shares in
the newly established limited company,
transferring everything to it in working
order.
3 The newly established limited company is
permitted to include Mezhrabpom and
Proletkino on the same terms as those
extended to state cinema organisations.
4 An organisational bureau shall be
established under the chairmanship of
Comrade Krasin81 and including Comrades
Lunacharsky, Yakovlev, Mantsev,82
Syrtsov, Tumanov, and representatives of
 1924
the Moscow and Leningrad Soviets and
Goskino, to be responsible for all the
preparatory activities for the organisation
of the newly established limited company,
including the drafting and presentation for
approval in the form of a decree of the
Statutes of the limited company and the
distribution of shares.
5 In accordance with the decree of 13 May
1924 of Sovnarkom of the USSR on a
monopoly of distribution, the monopoly of
distribution within the frontiers of the
RSFSR is given to Narkompros of the
RSFSR. Upon the organisation of the
limited company Narkompros is obliged to
conclude an agreement with it on the
distribution of films.
6 The ideological guidance of the cinema
43 Dziga Vertov: Fiction Film Drama and the Cine-Eye.
A Speech
Date: 15 July 1924.
Source: S. V. Drobashenko (ed.), Dziga Vertov. Stat'i. Dnevniki. Zamysli (Moscow,
1966), pp. 79-81.
Comrades, I am speaking on behalf of the Cine-
Eye group. As most of you are aware this group
is not linked either through its existence or
through its work with so-called 'art'.
We are directly engaged in studying the
phenomena of life around us. We place the ability
to show and interpret life as it is significantly
above the occasionally amusing playing with dolls
that people call theatre, cinema etc.
The very theme of today's debate, 'Art and
Everyday Life', is of less interest to us than, let
us say, the theme, 'Everyday Life and its Organis-
ation' because, I repeat, it is precisely in this last
field that we are working and that we consider it
right to work.
To see and hear life, to notice its curves and
sudden changes, to catch the crunch of old bones
under the press of the Revolution, to follow the
growth of the young Soviet organism, to fix and
organise the individual characteristic phenomena
of life into a whole, an extract, a conclusion: that
is our immediate task.
It is a task of colossal, rather than merely
experimental, significance. It is an examination
115
industry is entrusted to Narkompros, and
it is suggested that the forthcoming
conference of the Narkompros of the
Autonomous Republics should define the
forms of ideological guidance for each
Republic separately, together with the ways
of unifying ideological guidance
throughout the whole territory of the
Federation.
7 The Sovnarkom decree transferring the
State Cinema Technicum to Leningrad is
revoked. It must remain in Moscow.
Chairman of Sovnarkom of the RSFSR: A. I.
Rykov
pp. Director of Sovnarkom of the RSFSR:
Gorbunov
Moscow, Kremlin, 13 June 1924.
of our transitional period as a whole and at the
same time it is an examination on the spot, among
the masses, of every individual decree or decision.
It is a thermometer or hydrometer of our
reality and its significance is undoubtedly greater
than the concoctions of individual authors, writers
or directors.
Of course this task is not within the power
of a few people or a few dozen people. It is a
task that requires the measure of the entire Soviet
state.
The ranks of workers in the Party and the
soviets, who are at the present moment hesitantly
involved in so-called fiction film must turn their
back on what is essentially a plaything and throw
all their resources, all their knowledge and all
their experience into investigating and examining
our reality with the camera.
The whole expanding apparatus of worker
and village correspondents serves as a guarantee
of the fact that this work will be real and not
imaginary, that it will be possible to conduct the
observation with sufficient depth and profundity,
that the camera will be able to reflect on the
 1924

screen in extracted form the mood and determi-
nation of the masses.
Skilful organisation of the filmed factual
material will make it possible to create a 'work
of cinema' of great agitational power, without an
obtrusive and unimposing faith in the grimacing
of actors and without the love- or detective-based
inventions of one or another person's
'inspiration' .
The fiction film drama should occupy the
place in a film show that is now occupied by the
newsreel film.
The remainder of the programme should be
filled with the works of the Cine-Eye in the field
of science, education or everyday life.
The film drama stimulates the nerves. The
Cine-Eye helps people to see.
The film drama shrouds the eyes and brain
in a sickly fog. The Cine-Eye opens the eyes,
clears the vision.
The film drama gives people a sore throat.
The Cine-Eye is a clear spring breeze in the face,
the spaciousness of fields and forests, the breadth
of life.
Can it really be true that, if we have NEP,
if the shopkeepers, as in the tsar's time, pay more
than a mere ten per cent to the 'monopoly', then
our films must also be a mere ten per cent
different from tsarist and foreign films?
Can it really be true that in the name of
profit we are obliged to intoxicate the proletariat
with cine-vodka, pouring agitational powders into
the proletariat as an antidote?
One can tolerate a great deal. One can
tolerate it in the cafes-chantants of NEP if one
knows where one is going, if one can at least see
the distant goal ahead.
One can even tolerate fiction film dramas
and their authors - the high priests of art - but
we must not for one moment, for one second
make this the basic aim of Soviet film production.

44 Vladimir Blyum: Against the 'Theatre of Fools' - For Cinema

Source: V. Blyum, 'Protiv "teatra durakov" - za kino', Zhizn' iskusstva, no. 44,
28 October 1924, pp. 10-11, and no. 47, 18 November 1924, pp. 3-4.

I taneously both the universal regulator and the

The fairy, Betise,83 if she exists, was present at
the birth of cinema as a spectacle and endowed
the infant with something better than she
intended.
I modify that: I do not mean the application
of cinema to science, teaching or education.
These kinds of films are like a drop in the ocean
of cine-stupidity. They are not the films that built
up an enormous cinema industry, the films for
which whole cities grew up, the ones that are
trumpeted by a large film literature, the ones that
propelled dozens of film stars on to the screen -
directors and actors whose popularity far
exceeded in its scale the former glory of those
other favourites of the fairy Betise, those 'darling
tenors' .
Cinema consists mainly, above all, ninety
nine per cent, of the so-called 'drama feature'.
This is the subject of mass audience demand.
Here the legal code of the aforesaid fairy is simul-
116
source of the most elevated cinematic delights.
Nothing is so stupid that even a very intelli-
gent person could not endure it in cinema. The
plot, its development, the 'idea', the means of
representation - all these in the average mass film
are of such a low standard, so trite and wretched
(even in 'hits' - the works of directors of 'genius'
and 'great' actors) that no normal person would
be under any illusions about the artistic, ideo-
logical or any other value of the spectacle. 'As
cinema this is stupid,' he will say - but at the same
time this will not prevent him from expressing his
immediate regret that he missed the fifth episode
of The Adventuress from Monte Carlo . ...
In this particular instance we are dealing with
a phenomenon well known to psychology where
it is recorded as 'dissociation (the destruction of
association) of consciousness'. The greatest minds
are subject to this dissociation. It is interesting
that not so long ago N. Bukharin uncovered a
'destruction of association with consciousness' in
 1925
fully independent art in its own right has begun
to be clarified.
The Americans, who were the first to bring
health, life and reality into cinema, were the orig-
inal Adams to produce the correct and, in many
respects, true line of development for cinema.
Old Cine-Russia, cultivating not only theatre but
also the theatrical, has as a result built a cemetery
where a cross marks every grave, every pseudo-
cinematographic theatrical feature film.
The new Soviet cinema, a cinema that is
willing and striving to be and to stay healthy and
full of life, has been able to come close to a
successful resolution of this question and to
produce, albeit so far in a homeopathic dose, a
little real cinema.
Nevertheless there are now many people
(not everyone perhaps, but a significant
proportion), not just here but also in Europe and
even in America, who seriously propose to find
for cinema a series of points of contact with
theatre by transferring to the screen the
expressive acting qualities and functions of
theatre, giving cinema a theatrical and theatri-
calised appearance.
Let us take America. The best examples are
The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood and The Thief
of Bagdad and, in particular, the central hero
of these pictures, the 'incomparable and unique'
Douglas Fairbanks himself. Who is this 'Doug'?
He is, first and foremost, an actor. He is an actor
who combines in fantastic form full-blooded
rounded cheeks and a supple athletic body with
a decorative appearance, a dancer-like balletic
48 Dziga Vertov: Cine-Pravda and Radio-Pravda
Source: D. Vertov, "'Kinopravda" i "Radiopravda"', Pravda, 16 July 1925.
The textile worker should see the worker in the
engineering works when the latter is manufac-
turing the machinery that the textile worker
needs. The engineering worker should see the
coal miner who provides his factory with the fuel
that it needs, coal. The miner should see the
peasant who produces the bread that he needs.
All workers should see one another in order
to establish close and indissoluble links between
them. The workers of the USSR should see that
in other countries - in England, France, Spain,
129
quality and even the exaggeratedly gallant affec-
tation of the contemporary Molieresque theatrical
trend.
Now for Germany. It is a country that
reaffirms the slogan of theatricality better and
more powerfully than anyone. Caligari, Raskol-
nikov, The Nibelungs are sufficiently clear exam-
ples of this inclination. The director Robert
Wiene and the actor Conrad Veidt are the best
theatricalisers of cinema although they do not
openly admit to this in theory. Thus, for example,
Wiene, the director of Caligari, tries to justify the
theatricality of his works through Expressionism,
i.e. the attempt to lay bare the inner nature of
the characters and their personalities.
Here in Soviet Russia there are also failures
of a purely theatrical nature, not to mention the
endless number of examples of the theatricalis-
ation of cinema (theatricalism), which are some-
what fewer than in America or Germany, even
in those insignificant attempts to create a genuine
cine-object.
That is the general situation and state of
affairs here in Soviet cinema and elsewhere in
European and American cinema.
We are convinced that the truth of the
banner of cinema theatricalisation is a transitory
truth and that it will continue to exist until such
time as the basic raw material of cinema and the
methods of organising it are defined, until the
sphere of activity of feature films is determined
and, lastly, until such time as the question of
the feature film's very existence as such, both in
general and in particular, is called into question.
etc. - there are everywhere workers like them-
selves and that the class struggle between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie is being waged
everywhere. But different workers are far away
from one another and for that reason they cannot
see one another.
The workers and peasants have to trust the
words used by one person or another (a teacher,
an agitator) to describe the situation of other
workers and peasants who are living in another
place. But each teacher, agitator, priest, writer
 1925
etc. describes what is happening elsewhere in his
own particular way dependent on many factors:
his convictions, his education, his ability to write
or speak, his integrity and incorruptibility, his
'mood' and the state of his health at a particular
moment. How then can the workers see one
another?
The 'Cine-Eye' pursues precisely this aim of
establishing a visual link between the workers of
the world. The Cine-Eyes themselves work in
the newsreel field (Cine-Pravda, Cine-Calendar,
Cine-Eye) and the field of scientific film (Silk-
worm Breeding, Rejuvenation), and the scientific
part of a film (Abortion, Radio-Pravda, etc.).
The 'Cine-Eye' movement is gradually
attracting attention and sympathy. The sympath-
etic letters from the provinces, the encouraging
resolutions of the peasant audience, the circles
of Cine-Eye observers that are springing up, the
reinforcement of the Cine-Eyes by the rising
generation of Komsomol film production workers
now in training and the fact that a section of our
state customers has at last turned to the 'Cine-
Eye' all mark a significant degree of approval for
us in our struggle.
In this respect the cinemas that show full-
length films are the most conservative. We must
promote 'mixed programming' as a slogan:
(i) a three-reel newsreel of the 'Cine-Eye'
type: The Lenin Cine-Pravda, let us say;
(ii) a one-reel cartoon;
(iii) a one- or two-reel scientific film or
travelogue;
(iv) a two-reel drama or comedy.
Mixed programmes of this kind, towards
which we shall have gradually to school both
cinemas and the public, will provide an opening
into commercial cinemas and will serve as a basis
for self-sufficiency, for profitability for newsreels
and scientific films even in cases where significant
sums have been spent on them.
Of course, the designated proportion may be
altered in either direction. It was in 1922 that
Lenin demanded the establishment for cinema
programmes of a definite proportion between
'entertainment' pictures (for purposes of adver-
tising and receipts) and a propagandist newsreel
From the Life of the Peoples of the World.
Shortly afterwards in a private conversation
with Comrade Lunacharsky, Comrade Lenin
130
once again referred to the need to establish in the
cinema repertoire 'a definite proportion between
entertainment films and scientific ones' and he
gave instructions that 'the production of new films
imbued with Communist ideas and reflecting
Soviet reality should begin with the newsreel.' To
this Comrade Lenin added, 'If you have a good
newsreel, serious educational pictures, then it
doesn't matter if, to attract the public, you have
some kind of useless picture of the more or less
usual type.'
It is no secret that these insistent instructions
on the part of Comrade Lenin have so far not
been realised in the slightest measure.
The cramming of the cinema repertoire with
fiction dramas places the Cine-Eyes' work in
newsreel and scientific film-making in an
extremely unprofitable and dependent position in
relation to fiction film. Vast capital resources and
all the best instruments of production are at the
latter's disposal.
Against this balance-sheet:
Fiction film 95%
Scientific, educational and travel 5%
films
100%
we must promote this balance sheet: 88
'Cine-Eye' (everyday life) 45%
Scientific educational films 30%
Fiction drama 25%
100%
That is how the problem of the 'Cine-Eye',
i.e. of the organisation of the perception of the
workers, will be resolved. The Cine-Eyes' second
position deals with the organisation of the
workers' hearing.
We are promoting agitation through facts not
merely in the field of perception but also in the
field of hearing.
How can we establish an auditory link along
the whole world-wide proletarian front-line?
While in the visual sphere our cinema
observers have fixed the visible phenomena of
life with their film cameras we must now talk of
recording audible facts.
We are acquainted with that recording
apparatus the gramophone. But there are other
more perfect recording apparatuses: they record
 1925
every rustle, every whisper, the sound of a water-
fall, the speech of an orator, and so on.
A demonstration of this sound recording can,
after it has been organised and edited, easily be
transmitted by wireless in the form of a 'Radio-
Pravda'.
Here too, in the broadcasting schedules of
every radio station, we can establish a definite
proportion between radio dramas, radio concerts
and a radio newsreel 'from the life of the peoples
of different countries'.
A 'radio newspaper' without paper and
oblivious of distances is the basic purpose of radio
rather than the broadcasting of Carmen, Rigo-
[etto, romances etc. with which our radio began
its development.
While there is still time we must save our
radio from a passion for 'fiction broadcasting' (cf.
the dominance of fiction film).
We contrast 'Cine-Pravda' and the 'Cine-
49 Viktor Shklovsky: The Semantics of Cinema
Source: V. B. Shklovskii, 'Semantika kino', Kinozhurnal A.R.K., 1925, no. 8 (August), p.5.
The science of the meaning of words is called
semantics. The word 'poem' is of course not
perceived merely for its sound. Sometimes even
its sound is almost not perceived and then it fulfils
the role of a conventional sign that brings to our
attention a whole series of interconnected mean-
ings. A distinctive semantics also exists in
painting. Individual moments in a picture are
significant not just because of their beauty: the
semantic element encroaches upon the purely
pictorial aspect and transforms it. For example,
if a picture contains a detail that is semantically
important but in the pictorial sense individually
insignificant, that detail may draw the spectator's
gaze and alter the focus of the picture. Our very
perception of space is explained by the fact that
we recognise the objects in a picture and, on the
basis of our knowledge of their usual essence, we
endow them with volume.
If we scrutinise an indistinct :;ilhouette or we
perceive an object in the distance, we shall locate
that object's individual parts differently in space
according to our perception of it. So-called non-
objective painting is more like painting in images
of indeterminate meaning. Semantic constants
131
Eye' to 'fiction film'. We contrast 'Radio-Pravda'
and the 'Radio-Ear' to 'fiction broadcasting'.
Technology is taking rapid strides forward.
A method of transmitting images by radio has
already been invented. In addition a method has
been found of recording sound phenomena on
film.
In the very near future man will be able to
transmit by radio visual and auditory phenomena
recorded with a radio-cine-camera simultaneously
to the whole world.
We must make preparations so that we can
turn these inventions of the capitalist world to its
own ruin.
And we shall not be preparing to broadcast
operas and dramas. We shall redouble our prep-
arations to give the workers of the world the
chance to see and hear the whole world, to see,
hear and understand one another.
play an even more significant role in cinema.
The latest view is that the case of a merger
of two separate alternating objects into a single
moving object is attributable to our psychology
rather than the physiology of sight. We are
inclined to think of the object as moving rather
than changing: hence, if letters of a different
shape but with the same value are projected on
the screen, we see how the letters modulate and
gradually change their outline. But, if we project
on to the screen letters that are very similar in
shape but have a sharply. distinguished sound
value, we shall find the moments of transform-
ation are much more noticeable.
If we increase the distance between frames,
making the shots less frequent, we do not destroy
the sense of continuity of movement but merely
make its perception difficult. Ultimately it is poss-
ible to make the viewer swoon if he has to expend
too much mental energy trying to connect the
fragments rushing past him. Cinema movement
is exceptionally interesting from the point of view
of the perception of movement in general. It has
as much to do with reality as a broken line has
to do with a curve. Our knowledge of what the
 1926
suffer from the absence of Soviet films. Then the
crisis will affect commercial screens as well. This
will be a blow to the entire economic basis of
cinema. To save the situation Sovkino will once
again be forced to arrange the purchase of foreign
films. The funds that could now save Soviet film
production will go abroad. I do not have to point
out that this will be an enormous cultural defeat.
The cutback in Soviet film production
cannot, as the trades unions have already pointed
out, be allowed to happen. On the contrary: film
production must be given the immediate financial
support it needs during the next few weeks or the
production season will be lost once and for all.
Similarly we must complete as soon as possible
the reorganisation of the film industry and the
merger of production and distribution that we
have already embarked upon. Lastly, in
production itself we must take every possible
measure to avoid a cutback in production and the
dispersal of the qualified workforce. To achieve
this we must make every effort to reduce the cost
of Soviet films. For precisely 500,000 roubles we
can make either five 'hits' for 100,000 roubles
57 Dziga Vertov: The Factory of Facts
Source: D. Vertov, 'Fabrika faktov. (V poryadke predlozheniya)" Pravda,
24 July 1926, p. 6.
After five years of persistent prospecting the
'Cine-Eye' method has won a complete victory in
the field of non-played film (see The First Cine-
Eye Reconnoitre, the Lenin Cine-Pravdas,
Forward, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World,
now on release).
Now - as the experience of the past year
shows - a simple borrowing of the purely external
style of the 'Cine-Eye' by so-called 'fiction' film
(played films, films with actors) is quite enough
to make a noise (The Strike and Potemkin) in that
area of cinema.
We see the number of different ways in
which the 'Cine-Eye' method is even now ousting
'played' and 'acted' film for the cinema. The
increasing borrowing of the external style of the
Cine-Eye by 'played' film (The Strike and
Potemkin) is only one instance, a mere chance
reflection of the ever growing 'Cine-Eye' move-
ment. But that is another question and I shall not
150
each or twenty-five good 'middling' films for
20,000 roubles each. It is that second path that
Soviet cinema must take now. In the last season
in the activity of that very same Proletkino we
find examples of failed hits such as Mabul, which
cost 225,000 roubles or Lena Gold (70,000
roubles) while the only really successful Prolet-
kino films for that season, The Great Flight and
Who Whom?, cost 12,500 and 6,000 roubles
respectively. Another example: Abortion, which
made a profit of over 100,000 roubles, cost 7,000
roubles overall. At the present time the most
important step is to produce the cheap films we
need. If we do that, it will not be difficult to find
the funds and the actual quality of the films will
not suffer; we shall stop only the dear 'spec-
tacular' films such as the adaptations of the
classics, etc. The greatest attention will be given
to themes that reflect our everyday life, the reality
that surrounds us and that give us the opportunity
to make broad use of exteriors.
The Soviet cinema is in danger. As a matter
of urgency we must use every possible means to
cure it.
deal with it here. The speed, the methods, the
price of the disappointments through which the
proletarian audience will gradually come to
realise the impossibility of salvaging the decrepit
and degenerate 'acted' film, even when it is
receiving regular injections of elements of the
'Cine-Eye' - these are questions for the future.
But the question raised by Comrade
Fevralsky in his timely Pravda article of 15 June 98
of a single centre, a firm base, for 'Cine-Eye'
work and 'Cine-Eye' workers is a matter for the
present, a matter of current interest.
Comrade Fevralsky is quite right when he
talks about the need to centralise immediately all
aspects of non-theatrical and non-played film.
The newsreel archives, the production of
scientific films, of Soviet film newsreels, of Cine-
Pravda, animation workshops, the production of
the great 'Cine-Eye' films, the re-editing and
correction of foreign educational films and, lastly,
 1926
the production of such actorless hits as A Sixth
Part of the World - all this must be concentrated
in one place and not (as at present) split between
each department, between each of the Goskino
and Sovkino buildings scattered across Moscow.
Every non-played film in one place with a film
laboratory. With an archive of non-played films.
Our viewpoint is:
Alongside the unified film factory of grimaces
(a union of all kinds of theatrical film work from
Sabinsky to Eisenstein) we must form
A FILM FACTORY OF FACTS
(a union of all kinds of 'Cine-Eye' work from
the current newsreel flash to scientific films, from
thematic Cine-Pravdas to film series imbued with
revolutionary pathos).
Once again:
Not a FEK~ (the Leningrad Factory of the Eccen-
tric Actor), nor Eisenstein's 'factory of attrac-
58 Viktor Shklovsky: Where is Dziga Vertov Striding?
Source: V. B. Shklovskii, 'Kuda shagaet Dziga Vertov?', Sovetskii ekran,
14 August 1926, p. 4.
The inclusion of real raw material in a work of
art is a natural phenomenon that has happened
on more than one occasion. In Melmoth the
Wanderer mentioned in Eugene Onegin the
horrors of the novel are annotated: this, they say,
happened here or there.
This resulted in an original montage of
attractions, the attention of the audience was
directed to the shot, to the information. The plot
motivated the stunt.
A stunt does not merely consist of Harry
Piel, wearing white spats, jumping from roof to
roof. A stunt is a fragment of raw material experi-
enced aesthetically.
The montage of attractions (of Eisenstein)
marks a transition to raw material.
In his excellent article 'The Pathos of the
Separator' Sosnovsky99 expressed his surprise at
the new shot that addresses the hero and his
family.
This will come to cinema. It does not, of
course, just apply to separators. It will come to
literature. It too will probably be called a 'novel'.
In his letters to Nekrasov, Saltykov-
151
tions', not a factory of kisses and doves (film
directors of that ilk have not yet become extinct),
nor a factory of 'death' either (The Minaret of
Death, The Bay of Death, Tragedy in Tripolye,
etc.)
Simply:
A FACTORY OF FACTS.
Shooting facts. Sorting facts. Spreading facts.
Agitation with facts. Propaganda with facts.
Fistsful of facts.
Flashes of facts!
Masses of facts.
Hurricanes of facts.
And individual little facts.
Against cinema sorcery.
Against cinema mystification.
For the genuine cinefication of the workers'
and peasants' USSR.
Shchedrin protested that 'he calls my articles
short stories and novels'.
For the time being the history of literature
studies not works but their titles.
The novel died long ago.
Great Russian literature is an enormous
misfortune for the present day.
Because people expect a 'broad canvas' from
it with Kitty Levin as a Komsomol girl.
Dziga Vertov is a straightforward and strong
man. It appears that he is numbered among those
who perceive the betrayal of art as its end.
He stands for non-fictional, non-aesthetic
cinema. It seems that his group is opposed to
actors. But, since the non-actor does not know
how to behave naturally in front of the camera,
a new problem arises: how to train everyone to
be filmed. This is like taking a sledge-hammer to
crack a nut.
Dziga Vertov has done a great deal in Soviet
cinema. It is due to him that new paths have
opened up.
I had to see Forward, Soviet!
The majority of the shots in this picture were
 1928
several times to a point it has already passed and
it is surprising how, in the general rhythm of the
sequences alternating on the screen, you do not
see these repetitions: the bridge has ceased to be
a photograph of a real bridge, it has gone beyond
the laws of real time and space and completely
taken root in the screen, subject only to the will
of the artist and acting through his mastery on
the audience. Just as in literature as much time
can elapse between the sweep of the sable and
the movement when it strikes someone as the
author needs to describe the whole preceding life
of this onlooker (Taras Bulba) , so Eisenstein
directs things with his mastery, selecting only
what he needs for a particular effect on the audi-
ence and bravely abandoning the false 'necessity'
for an exact imitation of real actions. Through
this he achieves an effect of unprecedented
power.
An even more vivid example of Eisenstein's
new method may be found in the scene of Keren-
sky's 'ascent' of the Jordan staircase of the Winter
Palace. The staircase itself (I myself have filmed
it and know it well) is comparatively small, three
flights in all, yet in Eisenstein it ascends with
solemn irony almost to the heavens. A minute
little man in kid gloves and brand-new boots
ascends the steps, on each landing the intertitles
give him a new title: 'Military ... Naval ...
Supreme .. .' There are a lot of landings, the
titles grow, multiply and flourish luxuriantly.
Architectural figures smile benevolently, marble
nymphs proffer laurel wreaths. Weighed down
with honours the Supreme Commander at the top
of the staircase (and, according to Eisenstein, at
the height of his glory) awaits while the door is
opened that leads into the inner chambers of the
80 Dziga Vertov: The Eleventh Year. Speech to ARK
Date: 16 February 1928.
Source: S. Drobashenko (ed.), Dziga Vertov. Stat'i. Dnevniki, Zamysly. (Moscow, 1966),
pp.104-6.
Comrades! The Eleventh Year, like the first part
of Cine-Eye, like Forward, Soviet! and A Sixth
Part of the World, is one model, one type of non-
played film.
In my capacity as the author of the film
shown here today I should like to draw your
200
palace. The intertitle 'At the tsar's portals' marks
the beginning of a new stage in his magnificent
destiny. Kerensky waits a long time. It is remark-
able how this long wait is again produced not by
a real interval in time but by a purely cinematic
method.
The feet in brand-new leggings multiplied
many times and tapping lightly in slight
impatience, the glove bravely clutched in the
hand held behind the back, the stupid crown of
the head beneath the outstretched marble
wreaths and the motionless door closed the whole
time in the end force the audience to laugh. The
'portals' begin at last to open with a slow, solemn
movement.
Once again we see the same method as in
the raising of the bridge. The moving halves of
the door, filmed from a dozen angles, float across
the screen with the same force as the thousand-
pound girders of the bridge. Eisenstein was not
satisfied with the real path that a real door
completes in real space. He courageously multi-
plied it and produced a screen image that is both
replete and vivid.
'October' will be a remarkable film. People
will not merely watch it and memorise it, they
will record it and learn from it. I attribute special
significance to everything that I have written.
People do not write much about films and when
they do write they do not for the most part write
about what they should write about. Pages some-
times appear in Ogonyok under the heading 'We
ought to know our own (Soviet) scholars.' I main-
tain that we ought to know well the people who
are really engaged in creating the 'most important
of the arts.'
attention in this film to the following things.
First, The Eleventh Year is written in the
purest film language, in the 'language of the eyes'.
The Eleventh Year is designed for visual percep-
tion, for 'visual thought'.
Second, The Eleventh Year is written by the
63 (top) Kerensky's ascent of the Jordan staircase of the Winter Palace
in October.
64 (bottom) Lunacharsky's practical contribution to studying 'the law of
entertainment' in 1928 was to co-script a romantic melodrama, The
Salamander, which also starred his wife Nataliya Rozenel.

201
65 Poster for Vertov's The Eleventh Year (1928) by the Stenberg Brothers.

202
 1928
film camera in documentary language, in the
language of facts fixed on film.
Third, The Eleventh Year is written in
socialist language, in the language of the commu-
nist deciphering of the visible.
Before you start to discuss the film I should
like also to answer some of the more interesting
questions that people have put to me recently
following the film's showing at the 'Hermitage'.
Question no.l: is it not true that certain shots
in The Eleventh Year depend on symbolism? No.
We do not depend on symbolism. If it transpires
that certain shots or montage phrases achieve, in
the process of being perfected, the significance of
symbols, this does not make us panic and eject
them from the film. We think that a symbolic film
and shots constructed according to the principle
of expediency but acquiring the significance of
symbols are quite distinct concepts.
Question no.2: why do you employ complex
shots, cinephotomontage? We resort to complex
shots either in order to indicate simultaneity of
action or to distinguish a detail from the general
film image or to contrast two or more facts.
Explanations asserting that this method is a stunt
do not correspond to reality.
Question no.3: do you not think that the first
few reels are better edited than the last? In the
last few days this question has been asked with
particular frequency. The impression is deceptive.
The first reel is obviously made on an easier level
of visual perception. The fourth and fifth reels
are constructed in a more complex manner. There
is much greater montage ingenuity in them than
in the first two: they look to the future of cinema
more than the second and third reels do. I should
say that the fourth and fifth reels stand in the
same relationship to the first reels as a university
does to a middle school. It is natural that more
complex montage should force the audience to
exercise more effort and should require particular
concentration to be perceived.
Question no.4: was The Eleventh Year made
203
without a script? Yes, like all the Cine-Eye films,
it was made without a script. You are aware that
our numerous opponents, speculating about our
rejection of scripts, have tried to suggest that we
are generally opposed to planned work. Nonethe-
less, and despite these existing misconceptions,
the Cine-Eyes devote more effort and attention to
their preparatory plans than do those who work in
played films. Before we start work we study our
particular theme extremely carefully in all its
manifestations, we study the literature on this
particular question, we use every source available
to ensure that we can represent the matter as
clearly as possible. Before we start shooting we
devise a thematic plan, an itinerary and a
shooting diary. How do these differ from a script?
By the fact that all this is a plan for the actions
of a camera bringing a particular theme to life
and not a plan to stage the same theme. What
distinguishes a plan to shoot a real battle from a
plan to stage a number of individual battle
scenes? ... This is roughly the difference
between a Cine-Eye plan and a script in fiction
cinema.
The last question concerns intertitles and
many comrades put it like this: how do you
explain the abundance of titles in A Sixth Part of
the World and their lack in The Eleventh Year?
In A Sixth Part of the World we were dealing with
the experiment of taking the titles beyond their
parentheses by creating a specific 'word-theme'
series. In The Eleventh Year the 'word-theme' has
been eradicated and the meaning of the titles has
been reduced practically to nothing. The film is
constructed by interweaving film phrases without
using titles. The titles in The Eleventh Year have
almost no meaning. Which is better? The first
experiment - or the second? I think that both
experiments - both the creation of a 'word-theme'
and its eradication - are equally important and
have very great significance both for the Cine-
Eyes and for the whole of Soviet cinema.
 1930
118 Dziga Vertov: The Radio-Eye's March 163
Source: D. Vertov, 'Mart Radioglaza', Kino i zhizn', 1930, no. 20 (mid-July), p. 14.
Let us begin with funeral music.
Let us talk about the film that the Party
Conference on Cinema Affairs recognised was
'ideologically excellent', the film that has not left
our screens for three years in one way or another,
in one guise or another, first in its entirety under
its real title The Eleventh Year and then in
disparate form under various titles above the
signature of other 'authors'.
If in Moscow or Kharkov we try showing the
following films in a single day (1 am citing these
examples from memory): The Special Far-Eastern
Army, The Shadows of Machines, A Panopticum
Exhibit, Documents of the Epoch, Pashkov's Five-
Year Plan, Room's Five-Year Plan l64 and The
Eleventh Year - and if we view these films in
quick succession we shall satisfy ourselves that
The Eleventh Year is, to a greater or lesser extent,
a part of every one of these films.
The director Room has chosen for himself
sequences that the author of The Eleventh Year
himself intended to use in a sound version, added
to them some 'quotations' from the Lenin Cine-
Pravda and A Sixth Part of the World and put
sound to the material he has selected. He drew
the documentary film The Eleventh Year into the
prison cell of a sound-proofed studio, cut the film
into pieces and tattooed it with artificial toy
sounds.
Having at last seen the premiere of Room's
Five-Year Plan we were compelled to stand in
honour of the memory of The Eleventh Year
which has been prematurely tortured. That is why
we began with funeral music. That is why, long
before the premiere, Room persuaded, assured
and convinced us that there was absolutely no
need to record any documentary sounds.
The group shooting The Donbass Symphony
only received its sound-recording apparatus in
March - that is several months later than the date
indicated in the calendar plan (1 December) and
one and a half months after the later date set for
Leningrad, 20 January.
In order to get maximum use out of the
sound-recording apparatus that had been
acquired after such incredible difficulties the
group declared themselves to be shock-workers
299
and immediately set about shooting a sound
march through their energetic experiments in
documentary sound recording. Several weeks
later the members of the VUFKU production
group and the Shorin laboratory workers
seconded to the group, after hearing on screen
the experiments in shooting sound documentary
material conducted by the group in March and
listening to the accompanying report by Comrade
Vertov, the leader of the group, stated that the
final results of the experiments conducted (shots
of industry, daily life, a railway station, individual
moments of a current newsreel) 'not just in theory
(of the Radio-Eyes) but also in practice finally
and completely resolve the very vexed question of
sound documentary filming.'
In the journal Kino i zhizn Comrade Shorin
writes, 'Practice is a great thing. . . . There was
a prejudice against nature shots. The Vertov
group and Comrades Timartsov and Chibisov
produced such fine recordings that on another
occasion you would think that you were not in
the theatre but on the street, in a factory, a
station and so on. You would even feel the air,
the intensity. The works of the director Vertov
at once open your eyes to the fact that studio
sounds are dry and lifeless and that it is quite
impossible to imitate natural sounds and noises
in the same way as they are recorded in nature.
Previously people thought differently. That is the
significance of this experiment!' (A. Shorin, Kino
i zhizn, no. 14.)
Thus, those of us who work in non-played
cinema have no reason to be embarrassed about
the technical difficulties of the transitional period
from Cine-Eye to 'Radio-Eye' (from non-played
silent cinema to non-played sound cinema). On
the contrary we are advancing, rearming
ourselves en route, to the chagrin of those who
oppose us on 'principle' and to the joy of our
delighted imitators (not to be confused with our
followers).
To a question on the role of sound in docu-
mentary film we recently replied:
that declarations on the need for a non-corre-
spondence between phenomena that are seen and
phenomena that are heard, declarations on the
 94 (top) Poster for Ivanov-Barkov's Judas (1930) a now-
forgotten example of a 'genuinely mass film', according to
Kino i zhizn.

95 (left) Vertov's group tackled their first use of sound

equipment on The Donbass Symphony in the spirit of
'shock workers', determined to prove the value of location
recording and challenge the Eisenstein-Pudovkin doctrine
of 'non-correspondence' between sound and image.

300
 1930
need for films consisting purely of natural sounds
and declarations on the need for films of pure
dialogue are all wrong;
that neither correspondence nor non-corre-
spondence between what is seen and what is heard
is by any means necessary for either documentary
or played films;
that sound shots are edited on the same bases
as silent shots: they may correspond or not corre-
spond in the montage or they may be interwoven
one with another in various appropriate
combinations;
that it is absolutely essential to discard the
absurdly confusing division of films into dialogue,
natural sound and imitative sound films; that in
sound as in silent cinema we must maintain a rigid
distinction between just two categories: documen-
tary films that are heard, and seen and heard, (with
authentic dialogue, natural sounds etc.) and played
119 Dziga Vertov: Speech to
the First All-Union Conference on Sound Cinema
Date: August 1930.
Source: Iz istorii kino, no. 8 (Moscow, 1971), pp. 178-88.
Comrades!
In a questionnaire from the Mezhrabpomfilm
technical bulletin in answer to the question in
what circumstances and how is it possible to shoot
the most interesting sound films the workers of
the various studios replied:
'Actions taking place in the open air, in
nature'.
'In studio surroundings, partly in nature'.
'Reproduction of natural sounds' etc.
A first level teacher wants filming to take
place on the street, in the forest 'so that you
can hear how the birds sing'. The workers in the
photographic studio of the State Mint write to say
that 'it would be interesting to produce sound
recordings like those produced by D. Vertov, i.e.
similar to those of the 'Cine-Eye'.
Now let us turn to location shots. We usually
describe as location shots those shots that are
filmed not in a studio or a building or inside some
kind of premises but outside, on the street, in the
open air. It is those who work in non-played
cinema who resort most frequently to location
shooting. Those who work in fiction film use it
301
films (with artificial dialogue and sounds that have
been specially prepared for shooting);
that we shall, as before, call non-played films
which are audio-visual and transmitted by radio:
'Radio-Eye', that we must apply the 'Leninist
proportion'165 to the sound 'Radio-Eye' as well
as to the silent 'Cine-Eye' (both to cinema
programmes and to the overall production of
sound films); that the 'Radio-Eye' should be seen
as the most powerful instrument in the hands of
the proletariat, as an opportunity for the workers
of the world to hear, see and understand one
another in an organised fashion, as an oppor-
tunity, unlimited by space, for agitation and
propaganda with facts, as an opportunity to
contrast the radio-cine-documents of our socialist
construction with the documents of oppression and
exploitation, the radio-cine-documents of the capi-
talist world.
more rarely. Why? Because location shooting
does not require the inevitable use of artificial
lighting. Because location shooting makes it
easier to obtain documentary film material and
allows candid and concealed camera and other
techniques, because location shooting (as distinct
from interior shooting) is not hampered by imper-
fections in film stock, lens or lighting apparatus.
In the transition from silent to sound cinema
film workers - in non-played film, naturally -
should devote all their efforts to preserving the
advantages of location shooting in the production
of sound documentary film.
While technical experts here and abroad
have after several unsuccessful experiments
turned away from location sound recording and
given it up as a bad job, the 'Cine-Eye' group has
continued to study the problem and has actively
prepared to start work in this direction.
People have said and written that the
director Ruttmann in Germany has made a visual
sound documentary film called World Melody.
On closer examination it transpired:
11. that the silent part of the film consists of
 1930
dupes from various newsreel and travel films plus
... the acting of Koval-Samborsky; 2/. that the
sound part of the film is composed of music and
artificially imitated sounds and that there are no
documentary sounds whatsoever in the
film; and 3/. that Ruttmann, disillusioned with
non-played sound film, has begun shooting a
played sound comedy. Then people said and
wrote that an American sound newsreel was
being regularly shown in Paris. But closer exam-
ination of this newsreel revealed:
11. that the silent part was really a newsreel
film and 2/. that the sound part involved mere
imitative sound recorded on studio equipment.
When we left Germany they were finishing
a new sound-proofed studio. There were two
buildings intersecting like a cross, an absolutely
isolated sound studio and beneath the building an
underground pool filled with water. As long as it
is isolated from the street, it is also isolated from
noise.
In the Tobis studios (in Berlin and in Paris)
there was absolute silence. Everywhere you
looked there were prominent notices: 'Silence.
No noise.' Everyone walked on tiptoe round the
muffled coffin. A similar coffin was designated for
the shooting of The Donbass Symphony. Soviet
cinema, copying foreign films, began with
imitative sound and Room told me triumphantly
and reproachfully, 'You, Vertov, are of course
an obstinate and persistent man. But believe me
you will not get any results. You are wasting
money and wasting time. I tried it and nothing
came of it. I advise you not to try: nothing will
come of it.'
Today, when the wishes of the workers who
filled in the Mezhrabpomfilm questionnaire have
already been partially met, when shooting in the
'open air', in 'factory conditions' and 'on the
streets' has been carried out and has produced
good results, when even the 'twittering birds' that
the little teacher asked for have been recorded
on film, today, when location shooting no longer
seems frightening but, on the contrary, attracts
the attention of a steadily increasing number of
film producers, we must say directly: the
comrades who predicted 'cats' choruses' and the
end of non-played cinema have turned out to be
prophets of doom. Their predictions have been
shattered by that very same 'Cine-Eye' method
that the worker in the State Mint mentioned as
desirable. It transpired that the organised control
302
of the film camera through the selection of the
most expedient shooting angles when also applied
to the control of the microphone was the key
factor, the principal link and by seizing on it we
succeeded in elaborating the whole chain of
location shooting.
In particular the knot that tied the problems
of acoustics was not so much undone by us as
cut. We placed the full burden of resolving this
problem, just as we had previously done in silent
filming, not on changing the surrounding
conditions but wholly and fully on the manoeuvr-
ing Radio-Ear - the microphone. In our latest
complex sound recordings, as in our first exper-
iments to procure documentary sounds, we
avoided all the difficulties by directing the
'recording angle' of the microphone in the same
way that we had directed the shooting angles of
the film camera.
Judging by the results we correctly resolved
both the problems of acoustics and the other
problems connected with outside filming.
Now let us discuss briefly our entire non-
played offensive step by step.
First, we moved from a small room in
Shorin's laboratory to the Radio Centre; we
stripped the fabric from the walls, opened the
windows and made some experimental
recordings.
Second, we linked different parts of the city
by wire, took microphones out on to the streets,
made some trial recordings with stationary equip-
ment transmitting documentary sounds along the
wires and then widened the experiment. By
recording over ever increasing distances, for
instance, we produced recordings of other cities.
Third, we took a silent film camera out on to
the street, linked it to stationary sound-recording
equipment by a lengthy cable and made a large
number of experimental audio-visual documen-
tary sequences, summed up the experiments we
had conducted in March and arranged a viewing
for specialists, as a result of which the vexed ques-
tion of documentary and location sound recording
was seen to have been fully and finally resolved.
Fourth, taking stock of the results we had
achieved, we agreed on the rapid construction of
a mobile sound cinema unit and, with the help of
Comrades Timiryazev and Chibisov, assistants in
Comrade Shorin's laboratory, we conducted
experiments with the first mobile sound-recording
cinema unit. These first experiments, performed
 1930
in April, culminated in our shooting the May Day
celebrations in Leningrad.
Fifth, for the first time we travelled a long
distance with the mobile sound-cinema unit, to
Kharkov to film the 11th. Congress of the Ukrai-
nian Communist (Bolshevik) Party.
Sixth, after rebuilding the mobile unit we
decided to travel, accompanied by the assistants
from the Shorin laboratory, to the Donbass,
where we filmed desperately 'in the dark', i.e.
with no opportunity to check the results of our
filming.
That is how we worked, moving from the
velvet coffin of the sound-proof studio to the
fearful roar and the iron clanking of the Donbass.
That is how we worked, resolving the problem of
location sound recording while at the same time
resolving the problem of documentary and non-
played recording.
As a result we see before us material pro-
duced by three methods.
First, material where image and sound are
recorded at a different time on different film
strips.
Second, material where image and sound are
recorded on different film strips but simul-
taneously and synchronously.
Third, material where image and sound are
recorded on the same film strip.
In the first case the quality of the image
surpasses the quality of the sound (because the
image was shot with ordinary silent equipment
and the sound recorded over long-distance wires
and often distorted by static).
In the second case the quality of the sound
surpasses the quality of the image (because the
silent camera is attached by cable to the stationary
sound equipment and is restricted in its
movements).
In the third case the quality of the image is
almost equal to the quality of the sound: they are
both satisfactory.
In the first case the recording is not limited
by distance but is limited by the extreme difficulty
of the ensuing synchronisation.
In the second case the synchronisation is
assured but the recording is severely limited by
the distance from the stationary equipment.
In the third case the recording is not tied by
distance or synchronisation but is hampered by
the weight of the equipment, the absence of
convenient means of conveyance, the need in
303
expedition conditions to re-charge the batteries
regularly, the need for sufficient precision in
adjusting the equipment and for an immediate
check on and rectification of the mistakes that
have been made.
Which of these three methods of location
shooting is the best? Which method should we
use?
The practice of the 'Radio-Eye' group's work
demonstrates both that all three methods are
good, because each one of them has great pros-
pects, and that all three methods are faulty
because they are impedect and still at an embry-
onic stage.
Comrade Bravko says that we should only
shoot on two film strips. Comrade Bravko is
wrong because at the moment he is thinking only
of played cinema and of the system of equipment
that he works with. Comrade Erofeyev says that
we should only shoot on one strip. Comrade
Erofeyev (and I say this in the spirit of the friend-
liest possible self-criticism) is wrong because, in
fighting courageously on the front of non-played
cinema, he is carried away by the first sound
successes of documentary cinema and forgets the
future and the prospects that the 'Radio-Eye'
method opens up to non-played sound film.
Many years have now passed since our first
declarations and discussions of the 'Radio-Eye'.
Possibly many of our comrades have forgotten
what this means?
Even before the appearance of sound cinema
on the world horizon we said and wrote that the
'Radio-Eye', the next step after the 'Cine-Eye',
would not just be an audible Cine-Eye. We said
and wrote that the 'Radio-Eye' was an oppor-
tunity for the workers of all nations and countries,
regardless of distance, to see, hear and under-
stand one another. We have proved that the
'Radio-Eye' is not just an opportunity to transmit
audio-visual documentary films by radio, but also
an opportunity to shoot at a distance, an oppor-
tunity to accumulate documentary audiovisual
material from the 'Radio-Eye' hub or centre.
People say to me what they said in 1919,
1922 and 1925: 'Fantasy. Utopia. It is premature
to discuss it.' Not so long ago, in 1925, this pretext
was used to curtail the discussion of the 'Radio-
Eye' and of sound cinema that was beginning.
But sound cinema was already on the door-
step. It was knocking on the door. It arrived and
caught cinema unawares. Why? Because people
 1930
were looking down at their own feet and not
looking ahead.
I was invited to talk about location shooting.
What location shooting? Shooting at the studio
gate, in the yard next door, the neighbouring
street - or location shooting regardless of
distance?
If we are talking about location shooting
regardless of distance, then (and I trust this does
not seem to be a paradox) stationary equipment
with a far-flung network of microphones is much
more flexible than a mobile sound cinema unit,
just as a vast power station with a network of
lines is more flexible than a mobile generator.
This applies to the recording of documentary
sound. The experiments conducted by the 'Radio-
Eye' group in this connection dispose of all
doubts in this matter. For instance, shooting
in Kharkov, Nizhny Novgorod and other cities
with equipment situated in Leningrad produced
quite positive results.
As far as long-distance synchronous shooting
is concerned, there is still a little work for our
inventors to do but it is wrong to describe it as
utopian. We carried out the first experiments in
remotely controlled synchronous shooting and
camera direction in that same March (which we
call the 'Radio-Eye's' March). The experiments
were conducted amateurishly but were neverthe-
less partially successful. You will soon see the
results of these experiments in The Donbass
Symphony.
What we in 1922-3 unfortunately thought of
as utopian fantasy should no longer appear
utopian. This mistake must not be repeated in
relation to the 'Radio-Eye'. Now we are talking
of immediate, rather than distant, prospects.
These new (to many comrades) prospects must
not be ignored in defining the general line of
location sound recording and, consequently, the
general line of our inventors' work in this
direction.
On the one hand we must facilitate the work
of the mobile film unit in the following respects:
11. lessening the general weight of the component
parts of the unit; 2/. setting up the cameras more
quickly on arrival on location; 3/. providing
special means of conveyance; 4/. improving
battery-charging operations; 5/. adjusting the
equipment and checking the exposed film during
the expedition; 6/. adapting the small 'Eyemo'
cameras to sound shooting (I do not think this is
304
by any means an insoluble problem).
On the other hand we must prepare our
stationary cameras for use in location sound
shooting. We must provide the first amateurish
long-distance 'Radio-Eye' experiments with a
firm scientific and technical base and broadly
develop long-distance synchronous recording.
In the one case we need a specially adapted
sound cinema vehicle (like an ambulance or fire
engine), in the other a sound-recording radio
station with a network of microphones and a
network of silent film cameras.
This kind of sound cinema vehicle must
satisfy the following basic requirements: first, it
must be able to film (from the vehicle, near it
and at least three to four hundred metres from
it); second, it must be able to develop sequences
of film of around twenty metres; third, it must
also be possible at least to hear these sequences,
if they cannot be viewed and heard at the same
time; fourth, it must be possible to use the vehicle
to re-charge the batteries regularly; fifth, it must
be possible to check in the vehicle - not just
visually but with the aid of precision instruments -
the war-readiness of the camera and to carry out
the necessary adjustments quickly and correctly.
This vehicle must be supplied, in addition
to <;>rdinary microphones, with a microphone for
directional sound recording and a microphone
that picks up sound equally well from all
directions.
If this vehicle, in addition to being equipped
for filming, for checking what has been filmed and
for listening to short sequences, is simultaneously
fitted out for sound projection on a small outdoor
screen, then, alongside shooting every sound
filming expedition could in the evenings conduct
a great deal of cultural educational work in
acquainting the inhabitants of the remotest parts
of our Soviet Union with sound cinema.
Guided by our location sound shooting
today, by the work of the mobile sound unit,
we do not forget about tomorrow, about long-
distance shooting.
In the field of sound reproduction the work
of the mobile sound projector and the trans-
mission of sound films over long distances corre-
sponds to this position.
Lenin spoke of the enormous importance of
radio, calling it a 'newspaper with no paper and
no sense of distance'. In conjunction with the
possibility of television and the possibilities of
 1930
recording sound impressions and transmitting
these sound impressions across long distances, the
importance of radio, the importance of this 'news-
paper with no paper and no sense of distance'
increases many times over.
An adequately equipped vehicle, as
described above, is feasible to resolve the
immediate problems of location shooting in the
narrow sense of the word.
But it is not adequate if we are talking about
location shooting in the broad sense of the word,
on the level of the 'Radio-Eye's' general pros-
pects, and we shall have to orientate ourselves
beyond the mobile film unit to the sound-record-
ing and sound-reproducing radio station.
What scope - not for capitalist competition
but for socialist competition between our inven-
tors! What scope for creative and productive
enthusiasm!
Instead of a few dozen sound-recording
cinema vehicles - the recording of images and
sounds regardless of distance.
Instead of several hundred sound-repro-
ducing cinema vehicles - the long-distance trans-
mission of sound films.
It is only in this way that we can hope to
serve the millions of masses in our Soviet Union.
It is only in this way that we can not only catch
up with the West but also overtake it, not only
catch up with America, which is far ahead of us,
120 Viktor Shklovsky: Sound as a Semantic Sign
Source: V. B. Shklovskii, 'Zvuk - smyslovoi znak', Kino i zhizn', 1930, no. 25 (October).
pp.17-18.
The sound film is making a noise. Assiduously.
Everyone knows that silent cinema existed and
that sound has now emerged.
Usually people think that sound is an
addition to the visual shot . . .
They think that it is not sound cinema that
has been invented but a method of making silent
film sound.
The technical invention is therefore experi-
encing its incubation period.
We must not imagine that the machine itself,
however interesting it might be, is causing a revol-
ution. Karl Marx said:
305
but also overtake it.
Lenin said that the production of new films
imbued with Communist ideas and reflecting
Soviet reality should begin with the newsreel and
that, in his view, the time to produce films of that
kind had perhaps not yet arrived.
Comrades!
Lenin's words refer to 1922. Eight years have
passed. Let us think: perhaps the time has now
arrived. Perhaps we are now in a position to fulfil
Lenin's command. In which case the question of
documentary location shooting (at present the
basic weapon in shooting non-played film and
newsreel) develops into a question of the basic
technical prospects for our whole cinema.
In the light of Lenin's words cited above, in
the light of the well-known Leninist proportion ,166
the 'Radio-Eye's' proposal develops into a
proposal to mark out the basic path of the tech-
nical (and not just of technical) development of
our whole cinema.
If by the end of the Five Year Plan we have
not merely a sound cinema vehicle but also a
powerful audio-visual sound-recording and radio-
transmitting station, our task of 'catching up and
overtaking' the capitalist countries in the tech-
nical and economic sphere will, in the field of
cinema and radio, be to a significant degree
resolved.
The steam engine itself, in the form of its
original discovery during the
manufacturing period at the close of the
seventeenth century - the form in which it
continued to exist down to 1780 - did not
in those days give rise to any industrial
revolution. It was the creation of
mechanised tools which made a revolution
in the steam engine necessary.
There is a note to this:
It had, indeed, been very much improved
by the invention of Watt's first steam-
 1934
the film has 'worked out'.
This progression from a formally brilliant
beginning to the simple inner power of the ending
to the film has something in common with the
creative biography of the 'FEKS' themselves, ·and
indeed with all our creative biographies. You
cannot create a work of art without the whole-
hearted enthusiasm of the artist. What the artist
loves is communicated to the audience. Learning
to love the way the masses live and what moves
them means becoming a valuable and useful
artist.
Our learning process has been difficult and
prolonged. We broke heads and hearts and we
learned to mend them when necessary.
The wise and firm policy of the Party has
guided our work and our education. Members of
the Central Committee have viewed unfinished
films and played a part in completing and putting
136 Dziga Vertov: More on Mayakovsky (Extract)
Date: 1934/5.
Source: S. V. Drobashenko (ed.), Dziga Verlov. Stat'i. Dnevniki. Zamysli (MOSCOW, 1966),
pp.185-8 .
. . . I shall inject into my future works a signifi-
cantly greater unity of form and content than I
managed to do in Three Songs of Lenin. Unity of
form and content is a guarantee of success.
Mayakovsky, overcoming the mountains of
prejudice, successfully fought his way on to the
pages of books, pamphlets, magazines, the pages
of all the national newspapers in his own lifetime.
But in one sphere he was not successful. He could
not fight his way on to the screen. He could not
overcome cinema's bureaucratic officialdom. His
scripts were either rejected or included in the
thematic plan but never made. Or they were so
disfigured in the process of production that he
was 'quite ashamed' of them.
Mayakovsky said:
. . . They pushed me from one script editor
to another, the editors devised principles
that do not exist in cinema, principles that
were peculiar to the day they were devised,
and it was clear that they thought only they
could write scripts.
340
the finishing touches to them. Members of the
Central Committee of the Party and the
Komsomol have worked with directors on the
selection and analysis of scripts. We have
developed in the creative sense, not just under
the supervision of the Party but through its direct
assistance and concern. The results speak for
themselves. The films are 'working out' and are
receiving a warm and enthusiastic welcome from
the audience of millions. If Chapayev is a political
event now, then what does the future hold! We
want very much to define our class joie-de-vivre
and our faith in final victory through the term
'optimism' but, to be honest, if we are to find a
place for the joy of a consciousness of life in our
country, a pride in our common victories, a clear
and joyful faith in a secure future, we must invent
a new vocabulary. The old vocabulary will not
sustain our progress.
I think that, as far as the artistic aspect of
the scripts is concerned, my qualifications
entitle me to insist on the application of
my own script 'principles' to films. This kind
of attitude on the part of script editors
scarcely helps the campaign to attract
qualified literary personnel into cinema.
The greatest poet of our era had expended
a mass of energy, time and effort in order to
appear on the cinema screen 'at the top of his
voice' and did not realise his intentions. Mediocre
officials upheld their 'principles'. But
Mayakovsky abandoned cinema once and for all.
Several years have now passed since
Mayakovsky's death and colossal changes have
taken place in all aspects of our life. It is only
the script departments that continue as before to
uphold their hackneyed principles against inter-
ference from those who work in poetic cinema.
The desire to make poetic, and especially poetic
documentary films continues to run up against a
 1934
wall of bewilderment and indifference. It
provokes panic. It sows the seeds of fear.
They look at you as if you had a death wish.
Moreover, you might kill others too.
V. Katanyan tells us:
He (Mayakovsky) walked round the whole
stadium, moving through the barriers from
one stand to another. He produced all his
forms of identification and press cards for
the policemen who stopped him:
'I am a writer, a journalist, I must see
everything . . .'
And the policemen let him through.
Now we cinema poets, cinema writers and
cinema reporters have to prove to our own
management that a passe-partout is an essential
precondition for the production of large-scale
poetic documentary films, that we cannot film a
Stakhanovite meeting without access to the Stak-
hanovite meeting, we cannot film a kolkhoz
congress without the opportunity to go into that
congress, we cannot film a Komsomol congress
without being present at it. Filming without the
opportunity to film, editing without the oppor-
tunity to edit, making visual and sound films,
films that can be seen and heard, without the
opportunity to see and hear oursel,:,es, all ~his is
the most reliable way to a break WIth realIty, to
futile indoor efforts, to insane attempts (inevi-
tably Formalist) to find a way out of an organised
blind alley . . .
If an artist is already starved creatively to the
point where he can no longer suffer the torment
of waiting, the torment of idleness, if he, lowering
his sights, agreed to make a film in obviously
hopeless conditions, he is making a mistake.
That is the kind of mistake that I made when,
contrary to my character, I submitted to the
demands of the management and began to edit
the film Enthusiasm even though I knew very well
that all the human material we had filmed had
for technical reasons been lost. Every time you
have to make a concession to the management,
every time you have to compromise, every time
you hope through superhuman creative efforts to
break out of an organisational blind alley, you
face the danger of Formalism, a Formalism that
is forced upon you, imposed upon you, despite
your creative intentions.
In cinema, as distinct from literature, poetic
(and especially poetic documentary) films are not
341
preserved in the form the author intended. The
test of time is not applied to these films. Even
Three Songs of Lenin did not escape this general
fate. We are no longer able to meet Comrade
Kerzhentsev's request and show him a complete
copy of the film in the form the author intended.
The battle against the destruction of author's
copies, author's 'manuscripts' has not yet pro-
duced the desired results.
The struggle for uncompromising conditions
for the production of these films has similarly not
yet produced the desired results.
Those of us who work in poetic documentary
film are bursting to work. We are suffering from
creative starvation. We must devote all our efforts
to explaining to those who control our film
studios, to our managers, that the author or
director who unquestioningly submits to the
outmoded hackneyed principles of film
production is not a good author or director. V!e
must point to the example of Mayakovsky, whIch
demonstrates that even the greatest poet can be
subjected to these hackneyed principles outside
film production.
Organisational, technical and other compro-
mises, the director's agreement to any kind of
work, should all be the object of suspicion rather
than being welcomed. Either this director is quite
indifferent to the end results of his work or he is
so starved creatively that he just gives it all up as
a bad job so that he can get his hands on a camera
again.
I myself am now severely starved. In the
creative sense, of course. My nourishment is all
around me; it surrounds me. If I were dependent
only on pen and paper, I should be writing day
and night, writing and writing and writing. But I
have to write with a camera. I write not on paper
but on film. My work is dependent on a whole
range of organisational and technical factors.
I must win my rights in my place of work.
And, if I cannot get anything out of a particular
management or governing body, I shall still not
surrender. Surely we all remember what Maya-
kovsky said in a similar situation: 'Governing
bodies come and go but art remains. '188
I am firm in the basics of my work and flex-
ible and compliant in the details. Perhaps we
should, like Mayakovsky, fight for every detail
and not be shy? . . . Mayakovsky submits a poem
to a newspaper. He asks: how much will you pay
me? They tell him: 45 kopeks a line. How much
 107 (top) Pudovkin blamed the 'refinement of the
methods of "estrangement" [ostraneniel' in the
FEKS' Alone (1931) for the film's 'cool reception'.

108 (centre) 'The assurance and the strength of

youth' : Boris Chirkov as Maxim in The Youth of
Maxim .

109 (bottom) 'I managed to make Three Songs of

Lenin accessible and intelligible to an audience
of millions. But not at the price of rejecting
cinematic language.' (Vertov.)

342
 1934
do you pay other people? We pay everybody 45
kopeks. Then pay me 46 kopeks a line. He categ-
orically demands respect for his poems. Even a
kopek more respect than for ordinary poems.
It is clear that it is not a case of not being
able to survive without a high salary. It is a case
of your attitude towards people.
Lenin said that you must know what you are
writing or talking about.
The ability to talk about something you have
not seen and do not know is a special ability that,
unfortunately, few people possess. Fortunately it
is not an ability that I possess. You cannot base
a discussion on conjecture. I have no reason to
doubt that the film Prometheus suffers from
Formalism but it is precisely for that reason that
I ought to see it.
I managed (to a significant degree) to make
343
Three Songs of 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.
It is a matter of not separating form from
content. It is a matter of the unity of form and
content. Of restraining myself from confusing the
audience by showing them a method or stunt that
neither originates in the content nor is required
by necessity.
In this respect there is no need even to 'blow
my own trumpet'. In 1933, with Lenin in mind, I
decided to turn to popular culture as source
material. As subsequent events were to show
(remember Gorky's speech at the Writers'
Congress), I was not mistaken. The objections to
my approach were wrong. I was not mistaken: I
had foreseen things correctly.
I want to move further along this path.
110 (top) Pilots (1935) directed by Yuli Raizman for Mosfilm.
111 (bottom) Peasants (1935) directed by Friedrich Ermler for Lenfilm .

344
 1935
139 Dziga Vertov: My Illness
Date: 1935.
Source: S. V. Drobashenko (ed.), Dziga Vertov. Stat'i. Dnevniki. Zamysli (Moscow, 1966),
pp.188-91.
I started preparatory work on Three Songs of
Lenin in circumstances of savage persecution on
the part of 'cinema RAPP'.
They wanted to force me by administrative
measures to abandon documentary film. The
actual production of the film in Central Asia took
place in abnormal conditions, during a typhus
outbreak, with no means of transportation and
with irregular supplies of money. Sometimes we
ate nothing for three days. Sometimes we mended
the local population's clocks to earn enough for
a breadless meal. We walked about covered from
head to toe in naphthalene, smeared with acrid
and stinking liquids, our skin itching and unable
to breathe, to combat the lice that were attacking
us. Our nerves, maintained by sheer willpower,
held up the whole time. We did not want to give
in. We resolved to fight to the finish.
The sound synchronisation and the montage
took place in unusually fraught circumstances.
We did not sleep for weeks. We did all we could
to meet the deadline for showing the film in the
Bolshoi Theatre on the tenth anniversary of
Comrade Lenin's death. The first serious blow to
my np.rvous system was the ban on showing the
film in the Bolshoi Theatre on that day even
though it was ready.
A battle for the film began which ended in a
glittering victory. This victory cost me very
dearly. It was not just a matter of the film. The
question was posed in broader terms. The ques-
tion of the life or death of the cause to which I
had devoted my whole life was being decided. All
this was accompanied by a series of humiliations,
insults, calculated lack of attention, gibes,
pinpricks from a number of minor, but harmful
and unprincipled people. I had to exercise self-
restraint, to control my nervous system, to suffer
in silence, preserving my external calm and
equanimity.
As has now been established from data from
Prof. Speransky's laboratory, 'it is not just
damage to the trigeminal nerve but a number of
other nervous traumata that lead to a dystrophic
process in various tissues and areas' .196
357
My illness developed as a result of a series
of blows to my nervous system. The history of
my illness is the history of my 'discomforts', the
humiliations and nervous shocks connected with
my refusal to abandon work in the field of docu-
mentary poetic film. At the very moment when
Three Songs of Lenin was completed it showed
itself externally in my loss for nervous reasons of
a number of whole and healthy teeth.
The illness passed at the same time as my
nervous system calmed down after the final
ubiquitous triumph of Three Songs and, in
particular, with the attention accorded to me by
the Party and the Government on the occasion
of the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet cinema.
Prof. Speransky's book goes on to say that
'if a second blow is struck at any link in the
nervous system the predisposition of the nerves
to dystrophy will, because of the continuing albeit
minor irritation of the appropriate elements that
survives from the first attack, become an obvious
process.'
After the liquidation of RAPP the blow
struck me forcibly. Proletarskoe kino, the official
organ of cinema, declared simply: either change
to played film or 'your mum and dad will be
crying'. Either you abandon documentary film or
we shall destroy you through administrative
measures.
Now, after the triumphal progress of Three
Songs of Lenin, after I have been awarded the
Order of the Red Star, the blow is being struck
in more complex ways.
You want to go on working in poetic docu-
mentary film? All right. In broad terms we shall
allow you to do so. But we cannot put you in the
same competitive conditions as other directors.
They will have better production and living
conditions: apartments, cars, foreign trips, valu-
able gifts, higher wages, etc. You will not have a
bean. You will sit in your damp hole under the
water tank and above the sobering-up station.
You will stand in a queue for the toilet, the
cooking ring, the wash-tap, the tram, the bath,
etc. You will climb up to the sixth floor without
 1935
a lift ten times a day. You will work in the kitchen
fumes, under a leaky ceiling, to the hum of the
engines pumping the water, to the shouts of
drunkards. You will have neither quiet nor peace.
And do not expect any love and attention from
us.
You, they say, are supported by the people
you have trained? But these people's trust in you
will be broken. The cameraman, whose interests
you cannot protect. Your closest comrade-in-
arms and collaborator, Comrade Svilova, whose
interests and merits you cannot defend.
Comrade Svilova is the daughter of a worker
killed at the front during the Civil War. She has
twenty-five years' work in cinema behind her and
several hundred films she has made with various
directors. She took part in the nationalisation of
cinema. She has a number of achievements to her
credit like the creation through many years of
effort of our film legacy of Lenin. She is the
best editor in the Soviet Union. On the fifteenth
anniversary of Soviet cinema, when all her pupils
and comrades were given awards, Comrade
Svilova was pointedly punished by being deliber-
ately ignored and she did not even receive an
honourable mention. Only a serious crime could
deprive her of our attention. But Comrade
Svilova's only crime is her modesty.
'People don't like you!' one of the leaders of
our cinema organisations replies to all my bewil-
dered questions.
The renewed dystrophic tendencies in the
cavity of my mouth are only the start of a complex
140 Boris Shumyatsky: A Cinema for the Millions (Extracts)
Source: B. z. Shumyatskii, Kinematografiya millionov (Moscow, 1935),
pp. 148-76 and 234-40.
Chapter 4: On the Tracks of Socialist
Realism
In 1934 the best film produced by Soviet cinema
in the whole period of its existence was released:
Chapayev as a film represented the real summit
of Soviet film art.
The film is distinguished by its exceptional
simplicity. This simplicity, which is a character-
istic only of high art, is so organic to Chapayev,
358
intranervous process. This process must be
stopped. But how?
First of all I must liquidate the things that
cause it. In this case it is not enough to eliminate
the external manifestations of my nervous
condition, which I can do by an effort of
willpower. In this case the block suggested by
Prof. Speransky is inadequate. In this case
general measures are not enough: a change of
climate, rest, a change of diet, a seaside cure,
hydropathy. In this case I must (and this is the
main thing) eliminate the source of all these twit-
ches, that is, I must eliminate the abnormal atti-
tude towards me that the comrade I have already
mentioned explains and sums up in the formu-
lation: 'People don't like you.'
Who does not like me?
The Party and the Government? No. The
Party and the Government have given me a major
honour.
The press? No. The press, from Pravda to
papers beyond the Arctic Circle, have given me
the most excellent reviews.
The public? No. The public, in the shape
of their foremost representatives - the greatest
writers, workers' collectives, artists, etc. - have
risen to the defence of my film work.
Who does not like me? ...
I am a living man. It is quite essential to me
that people like me. That I am surrounded by
care and attention. That the promises I am given
are fulfilled. It is only then that the methods Prof.
Speransky suggests will help.
it constitutes such a striking contrast to every
Formalist device that in the first period after the
film's release a number of 'critics' were unable to
explain the reasons for its success to their own
satisfaction.
The strength of Chapayev lies in the
profound vital truth of the film. The directors,
the Vasilievs, have depicted superbly the positive
heroes and the positive features but they have
not been afraid to show in their film a number of
 1936

unduly reticent about. All this makes The Circus
the best film of the season and the only one that
we have made in this genre. It is no accident that
during the first fortnight that it was shown in
Moscow it attracted an audience of more than a
million.
But all this, if we are to move on from the
general tasks of our art, not only does not place
this film above criticism of its shortcomings but
also, on the contrary, directly necessitates it. It is
precisely our best films and masters of whom we
should make our greatest demands!
The long drawn-out logical and psychological
motivation of the actions of the heroes all under-
mines the opportunities open to a talented
master, the possibilities and the nature of cinema
art, and seems, if my friend Comrade Alexandrov
will excuse me, to be a manifestation of pure
carelessness.
That is why it is in the nature of the tasks of
perfecting that we have laid down these require-
ments for the contemporary level of the cinema
mastery of the Land of the Soviets: the production
of a form that is perfect in all its artistic manifes-
tations, including the production of a form that is
perfect in its maximum deployment of the specific
quality of cinema - its laconicism.
We are not just posing this problem for
193617: we must resolve it - we are obliged to
resolve it.

143 Dziga Vertov: Diary Entry

Date: 12 November 1936.
Source: S. V. Drobashenko (ed.), Dziga Vertov. Stan. Dnevniki. Zamysli (Moscow, 1966),
p.205.

I am trying to make use of my day off. There are
not many people at the studio. I settle down in
the main cutting room. But the Spanish material
is not there. They took it away to a screening
yesterday and, on the superintendent's orders,
they did not bring it back. I wait for nearly two
hours. The material does not appear and it is
obvious that it will not appear.
I recall how concerned Comrade Shumyatsky
was when Eisenstein lost 20-30 minutes of his
time because of some organisational difficulty. He
talked about creative capital being squandered on
trifles and about 'the crime that is being
perpetrated against our most precious raw
material - the artist and master'. 205
Why does Comrade Shumyatsky remain
silent about the crime that is being perpetrated
against me, a crime that can already be measured
not in minutes but in weeks, months and even
years of creative time that I have been robbed
of? Or does a crime perpetrated against a master
of the poetic documentary rather than the played
film not count as a crime? ... Until such time as
Comrade Shumyatsky declares loudly and openly
that he considers my work useful rather than
harmful, until such time as he says that I should
be granted equality with other directors not just
in my duties but also in my rights and oppor-
tunities, I shall be deprived of the minimum of
production and living conditions that are
necessary for a creative existence.

377