(DZIGA VERTOV AND WESTERN FILM STUDIESE cont'd)

Finally, in 1984 a selection of Vertov's writings including many polemical pieces was published in an English translation by the University of California Press with the title Kino-Eye, The Writings of Dziga Vertov, edited by Annette Michelson, an instructor at New York University and one of the founding editors of October, a magazine named for Eisenstein_'s film. In a lengthy introduction, in the arcane language deemed appropriate for this kind of work, Michelson elevated Vertov to a pitch of unrivaled intellectual and artistic grandeur; his destiny, according to her, was to have been the Trotsky, but alas not the Lenin, of cinema. "Of all the great innovators of the Soviet cinema, none speaks so directly to the issues of our time as Dziga Vertov" - says the blurb on the back cover of this publication; while inside, Michelson can write:   

The evolution of his work renders insistently concrete, as in a series of kinetic icons, that philosophic phantasm of the reflexive consciousness: the eye seeing, apprehending itself as it constitutes the world's visibility: the eye transformed by the revolutionary project into an agent of critical production. [13]  

Revolutionary projects, it's clear, transform minds into exceptionally uncritical objects. It's hardly to be wondered at if the Soviets, seeing in Western academic fields such fertile soil for artistic disinformation, co-operate in the release of select documents by or about Vertov and make some of his films available for study.  

But the texts that the Soviets have provided enable us at least to clarify some important points about Vertov, important, that is, now that his name has entered Western text books in this uncritical manner. It is clear, for example, that Vertov saw himself primarily as a protagonist in a political battle, whose field of action was film:  

The Council of Three [Vertov, his wife, and his brother], basing itself politically on the communist program, is striving to instill cinema with the ideas underlying Leninism .... (Kino-Eye 34)  

With the skillful organization of factual footage, we can create film-objects of high propagandistic pressure.... (Kino-Eye 48, Vertov's emphasis)  

In the area of vision: the facts ... are organized by film editors according to party instructions.... (Kino-Eye 49)   

There is no question, then, that Vertov saw himself as a dutiful servant of the Party. He wrote elsewhere that the film screen was a "platform" onto which "soviet reality" was to be projected. This "soviet reality" was the "communist decoding of the world", a favorite phrase with Vertov.[14]  

Vertov's main pitch in the polemical battles he waged against his colleagues who were making fiction films was a remark attributed to Lenin by Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik commissar of education, in which Lenin appeared to favor newsreel propaganda as a means of indoctrinating the masses.[15] Let them enjoy some bourgeois-style entertainment, the argument ran, to entice them into movie theaters, and then hit them with Communist propaganda by way of "factual" films. Vertov's idea, which he claimed was Lenin's also, for what should constitute these "factual" films was "the screen newspaper," the "political newsreel," the "propagandistic newsreel."[16] Vertov called this propagandistic newsreel Kinopravda, a movie version of the Party paper, Pravda. Literally translated, this comes out in American English as Movietruth, in French as Cinémavérité. But by it Vertov intended only to use the name of the Party's paper to lend standing to his "newsreel," not to invest his work with a genuine philosophy of cinematic reality.