-screenings in KAVA this week (Thursday 5pm and Saturday 7pm in Orion,
Eerikinkatu 15; accompanied with live music by an interesting band Cleaning
Women -- they make music with everyday devices used at home). The tickets cost 12 e / 10 e. The text behind the link is unfortunately only in Finnish but here below are two short english
texts about the films and comment on Deleuze´s thoughts on Vertov:
The Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi)
Directed by Dziga Vertov.
USSR 1928, 35mm, b/w, silent, 52 min. at 20 fps.
Fired from Sovkino studio after A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov
(and his brother-cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman and wife-assistant director
Elizaveta Svilova) was soon hired by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema
Administration. The trio's first assignment was a documentary celebrating the
tenth anniversary of the October Revolution – more or less the same kind of
ode-inpictures as Stride, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World. But while the
political theme of The Eleventh Year may be orthodox and plain, its photography
and editing are daring and complex. In the eyes of a left-wing artist of the
twenties, ten years of Socialism was a radical social experiment, and as such,
deserved, nay, required to be presented in a radically experimental way.
Kino-Pravda No. 21 (Lenin Kino-Pravda)
Directed by Dziga Vertov.
USSR 1925, 35mm, silent, b/w, 29 min. at 20 fps.
Lenin Kino-Pravda is a special, longer-than-usual issue of Kino-Pravda in which
Vertov jumps with boldness and ease between newsreel and drawn animation to
illustrate Soviet Russia's way up under Lenin's leadership, the decline in
Lenin's health, and the year elapsed since his death. One notable sequence
representing Lenin's illness can be seen as a tour de force of Vertov and
Alexander Rodchenko's animated titling. In another, an animated caricature
shows the face of a capitalist changing from gloating to despair – as he sees
more and more people, crowds of them, join the Communist Party after Lenin's
death.
"In an argument openly indebted to Michelson’s pioneering article, Gilles Deleuze claims that Vertov’s “camera-eye,” at once steadfastly trained upon quotidian “unplayed” reality and extravagantly mobile, functions not as a surrogate “subjective” gaze of any kind but rather as something like the ongoing movement of the dialectic itself, an image of the concrete totality, wherein the endless fullness of the external universe is perpetually reconciled with never-static cognition. Needless to say, neither this fullness nor this kind of cognition can ever provide the form or content for any finite human perception; on the most visible level, the Vertovian theory of the interval [marks] a correlation of two images which are distant (and incommensurable from the viewpoint of our human perception). [...] [T]he cinema could not run in this way from one end of the universe to the other without having at its disposal an agent which was capable of making all the parts converge.
Most important [for Vertov] were all the (communist) transitions from an order [that] is being undone to an order [that] is being constructed. But between two systems or two orders, between two movements, there is necessarily the variable interval. In Vertov the interval of movement is perception, the glance, the eye. But the eye is not the too-immobile human eye; it is the eye of the camera, that is, an eye in matter, a perception such as it is in matter [...] The correlation between a non-human matter and a superhuman eye is the dialectic itself, because it is also the identity of a community of matter and a communism of man.
It would seem initially, as François Zourabichvili argues in his excellent recent discussion of Deleuze-on-Vertov, that Deleuze’s “agent of convergence” is not camera technology as such but the cumulative effect of an entire repertoire of montage techniques, from shooting and editing right down to the stringing-together of photograms along the film strip itself. It is the work of the editor-creator that allows One Sixth of the World, as Deleuze writes, to show “the interaction at a distance, within the USSR, between the most varied peoples, herds of animals, industries, cultures, exchanges of all kinds in the process of conquering time.”
Zourabichvili points out, however, that Vertov’s “convergence of parts” does not converge, in Deleuze’s interpretation, around anything like a “subjective” center—however virtual or constructed—or emanate from a single authorial point. From a technical standpoint, argues Zourabichvili, it is Vertov’s consistent use of false continuity sequences— ubiquitous from the Kino-Pravdas on—that “de-center” the images he offers:
[T]he image is decentered, subtracted from its subjective condition, since the eye is taken away from the voyeur or the camera operator without for all that being attributed to another operator, the spectator perceiving the falseness of the continuity. For false continuity has an objective effect: that of opening the image onto a point of view that is not its own, and insofar as it is not its own. Each image thus interacts with other images, instead of organizing itself according to the conditions of the centering of “natural”—that is, subjective— perception. And it is in this sense that Vertov rejoins [...] the material world of movement-images: he starts with necessarily centered images, which he submits to an operation of decentering (montage)." (John MacKay, Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective)
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