Moskva / Moscow (1926)

Mikhail Kaufman.

DZIGA VERTOV X
Grand piano: Gabriel Thibaudeau
Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 13 Oct 2004

Prog. 10

MOSKVA / [MOSCOW] (Sovkino, USSR 1926)
Kino-Eye Race. Dir: Mikhail Kaufman, Ilya Kopalin; ph: Mikhail Kaufman, Ivan Beliakov, Piotr Zotov; 35 mm, 1681 m., 66’ (22 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Vertov’s younger brother, the kinoc cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, not only photographed but also directed films. Made in the same year and on the same subject, Kaufman’s Moscow can be called a sister movie to Vertov’s Stride, Soviet! Yet this does not mean that the two films look alike. Both are beautiful, but in different ways. To evoke Nietzsche’s famous dichotomy, the beauty of Vertov’s film is Dionysian, while Kaufman’s filmmaking style (here as elsewhere) strives to meet the Apollonian ideal. Stride, Soviet! is weird, unbalanced, dynamic; Moscow, clear, calm, analytical — exactly what many thought a good documentary should be. People who liked Kaufman’s film — among them, Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein — often used to contrast it to Vertov’s, wedging, unwittingly or not, a crack of rivalry between the two kinoc brothers — a crack which grew wider after The Eleventh Year, and turned into a chasm after Man with a Movie Camera."

"It will perhaps be of more use if I quote what Eisenstein and Kuleshov wrote about Moscow instead of trying to invent something of my own. I will first quote Kuleshov’s review, published in the journal Novyi LEF in 1927. Though on the whole Kuleshov and Vertov hit it off (which cannot be said of Vertov and Eisenstein), Kuleshov could hardly have been pleased by Vertov’s public denouncements of The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, or by the fact that some reviews at the time referred to Stride, Soviet! with a second, alternative title — "2,000 Metres in the Land of the Bolsheviks" — that had a polemical anti-Kuleshov, anti-fiction-film, anti-adventure-genre edge. No wonder Kuleshov’s review of Kaufman’s Moscow had an anti-Vertov edge to it, too: "Up to now, subjective-artistic montage has been predominant in our newsreels. Newsreels were edited expressionistically. The montage did not serve the material in the cause of its best possible presentation, but was an individual creative element of the work of the editor. … Newsreel must show events correctly, and the form of the montage of the newsreel is defined not by the author, but by the material. In the film Moscow this typical montage shortcoming is still there, as an inherited trait, but to an insignificant degree. What is shown here opens our eyes to the routine Moscow that we see so often; we walk around and pay no attention to the remarkable parts of the town, to the large amount of traffic, to those unexpected shots which Kaufman has managed to see and film. The cityscape part of the film is the best. The shots taken from above and below achieve amazing effects, and give us a new sense of landscape material. It is especially valuable that the new points of view that Kaufman uses are not used in order to show his originality, from a desire to show everything in an unusual way, but really are the best and clearest way to show contemporary Moscow. In the quality of the filming, and in the skilful choice of the camera’s point of view, such sequences as the crossing tram lines, the repeated piece of roadway, and the pavement with the lamp-post are remarkable not only for us, but even for European and American cinema. In this part of the film the main shortcoming is the failure to abandon a penchant for rapid montage. The best bits are too short — you don’t have time to examine them." (Strange to read this last complaint in an essay authored by Lev Kuleshov, the prime promoter of rapid "American" cutting in Russia, whose own films were routinely criticized for rapid montage — but then, Kuleshov might counter, what works for action movies does not automatically work for newsreels.)"

"What Eisenstein, for one, said about Moscow was, too, largely meant to spite Vertov: "Let us take, for example, the lauded A Sixth Part of the World and Stride, Soviet! Instead of one remaining a propaganda film and the other an educational film, they make a pathetic attempt to move their audiences emotionally, which, if you ignore the almost rhyming and rhythmic intertitles which take up 50 percent of the films’ length, is attempted by means of the images interpolated between them, which are like postcards with views, and not like Nanook or Moana. … Kaufman’s brilliant work Moscow stands apart from all this. Without any lofty emotional claims, beautifully shot, well edited, this film, naturally, resolves the task it has set itself — showing Moscow — by means of location shooting (whereas the philosophy of A Sixth Part of the World, in the absence of artistic means, is bound to sink, and does sink into extensive speaking through intertitles). Moscow shows kinoculism the healthy path and the area — newsreel — which it should occupy in the construction of Soviet cinema." Eisenstein wrote this in 1927 — in response to Vertov’s repeated attacks on his work."

"Postscript. Knowing as I hope I do the Giornate audience, I am not in the least worried that Eisenstein’s bashing might sway anyone against Stride, Soviet! or A Sixth Part of the World — no more than Vertov’s criticism of Battleship Potemkin could change anyone’s opinion about Eisenstein’s film. It is true that Kaufman’s directorial style was more sober than Vertov’s, and was more about what he called the "cine-analysis" of facts than about emotions and poetry. But no one nowadays would call Kaufman’s path the only "healthy" one, just as today (compared with the 1920s) not many people would find that the phrase "poetic documentary" contained a contradiction in terms — and we ought to thank Vertov for that. Unlike his tamer brother, Vertov refused to live up to everyone’s expectations about the proper place for non-fiction, and it is perhaps owing to Vertov’s lack of propriety that we now take it for granted that documentary cinema is a form of art." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)

AA: Probeg Kino-Glaza. A city symphony qf. Ruttmann. A fine print. The duration of the screening: 1:16'26" = 77 min.