RESEARCH: Vertov
Article from school's recourses:
Dziga Vertov (Russian:
born David Abelevich Kaufman, and also known as Denis
Kaufman; 2 January 1896 -12 February 1954) was a Soviet pioneer documentary
film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices
and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and
the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from
1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova
and Mikhail Kaufman.
His most famous film was Man with a Movie Camera (1929) which
depicts a day in a Russian City, although it was actually
filmed in several
cities over the course of four years! His film making aesthetic was driven by
his political
beliefs as a Communist and he was heavily influenced by Eisenstein’s use of
montage.
Vertov's driving vision, expounded in his frequent essays, was to
capture "film truth"—that is, fragments of actuality which, when
organized together, have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
In the Kino-Pravda series, Vertov
focused on everyday
experiences, eschewing bourgeois
concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes
with a hidden camera, without asking permission first. Usually, the episodes of
Kino-Pravda did not include re-enactments or stagings. The cinematography is
simple, functional, unelaborate—perhaps a result of Vertov's disinterest in
both "beauty" and the "grandeur of fiction".
Some have criticized the obvious stagings in this film as being at
odds with Vertov's credos of "life as it is" and "life caught
unawares": the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed
is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed
off a chess board and the tracking shot that films Mikhail
Kaufman, his brother,
riding in a car filming
a third car.
For Vertov, "life as it is"
means to record life as it would be without
the camera present.
"Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and
perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera. This explanation contradicts the
common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant
"life caught unaware of the camera". His slow motion, fast motion,
and other camera techniques were a way to dissect
the image, Mikhail
Kaufman stated in an interview. It was to be the honest
truth of perception.
For example, in Man with a Movie Camera, two trains are shown almost
melting into each other. Although we are taught to see trains as not riding
that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains.
Mikhail spoke about Eisenstein's films as being different from his and his
brother's in that Eisenstein "came from the theatre, in the theatre one
directs dramas, one strings beads". "We
all felt...that through
documentary film we could develop
a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle,
but rather an art based on images,
the creation of an image-oriented journalism:”
Comments
Post a Comment