Dziga Vertov as Theorist

Abstract

Vertov's major theoretical essays span the period of his silent film career. In comparison to these early writings, the articles he wrote after 1930, at the outset of the Soviet sound cinema, are more journalistic and anecdotal. The most interesting articles of the earlier group are those which outline Vertov's method of Film-Eye, his principle of Film-Truth, and his concept of Life-As-It-Is. Many of these anticipate the structure of Vertov's last and most controversial silent film, The Man with the Movie Camera, which retraces all of his theoretical concepts related to the documentary film, exemplifying his contention that the cinema can function as a truly international language of expression and communication. As a revolutionary filmmaker and innovator, one who aspired to a vision of total unity between the new forms of art and the new society, Vertov believed that this link could be forged by the pursuit of actual events as found in everyday reality. He introduced his ideas in words-both written and spoken-and images-both silent and sound. For Vertov discussed the function of sound in cinema in several articles written before 1930; that is to say, prior to the release of The Man with the Movie Camera, which he had wanted to be the first Soviet sound film. Hence, in both their ideological meaning and their zealous defense of the unstaged cinema, Vertov's articles can be studied as theoretical analogues to his last silent film. I will support this thesis by quotations from the collection Articles, Journals, Projects by Dziga Vertov, published in Moscow in 1966, and due to appear next year in English translation from the University of California Press.'