Odinnatsatyi / The Eleventh Year

Dziga Vertov: Odinnatsatyi / The Eleventh Year (1928). Original poster. Design: Stenberg Brothers (Vladimir Stenberg, Georgi Stenberg). "In the centre is a motif from the film: the mast of a crane in the form of a circular photograph, from which ever thinner yellow concentric lines radiate like radio waves. Ranged one above the other is portraits of members of the navy and workers on a blue background and of an intellectual and a child on a red background. The Stenberg brothers have signed with their artistic abbreviation: 2 STENBERG 2."  Photo and caption: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Collection Dziga Vertov.

DZIGA VERTOV XII
Moderator, live translator, narrator and explicador: Yuri Tsivian
Grand piano: Antonio Coppola
Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 13 Oct 2004

Prog. 12 (74’)

ODINNADTSATYI / [THE ELEVENTH YEAR] (VUFKU, Kiev, USSR 1928)
Newsreel.
Author-Leader: Dziga Vertov; asst. dir: Elizaveta Svilova; ph: Mikhail Kaufman; asst. ph: Konstantin Kuliaev; rel: 15.5.1928; 35 mm, 1194 m., 52’ (20 fps), Österreichisches Filmmuseum.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Fired from the Moscow-based Sovkino, Vertov (and with him, Kaufman and Svilova) was offered a job in Kiev, at VUFKU, the All-Ukrainian Photo-Kino Directorate, which he accepted on condition that he and Kaufman be allowed to finish Man with a Movie Camera, part of which (the Moscow footage) had already been filmed. The VUFKU officials viewed the project as somewhat parochial, but they agreed, setting their own terms: Man with a Movie Camera could be finished, but before Vertov returned to it he had to make a feature-length documentary celebrating the 10th anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution — more or less the same kind of ode-in-pictures as his Stride, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World. This was the deal — which explains why Man with a Movie Camera, begun in 1926, was not completed until 1929. Moving to Kiev and all, by the time Vertov began working on the agreed anniversary film, 1927 had already passed. "The Eleventh Year" is a patch-up title, allowing the film, despite the delay, to be dedicated to the 10th anniversary of October."

"In other words, what the Kiev studio hired Vertov to do was more or less what Sovkino had fired him for: to shape newsreel material into a movie ode to his young country. Odes are odious nowadays, so much so that I am almost embarrassed to admit that The Eleventh Year is my favorite Vertov. But then, do we need to worry about something that never worried Vertov? It is true that the political theme of this film is as orthodox and plain as its photography and editing are daring and complex, but why do we always have to treat such things as a contradiction? Vertov did not, for in the eyes of a Left-wing artist of the 1920s, ten years of Socialism (well, eleven) was a radical social experiment, and as such deserved, nay required, presentation in a radically experimental way. His critics did, and if we, film historians, start distinguishing between "form" and "content", or, worse, between "message" and "means", we will not appear much better than one L. Shatov, a Marxist film critic from the Leningrad weekly Life of Art [Zhizn iskusstva], who found the form of The Eleventh Year inadequate to its lofty theme. This is what he wrote: "By means of extremely complex montage and photographic tricks Vertov and his cameraman Kaufman achieve the demonstration on screen of almost absolutely non-objective, abstract movement ‘in its pure form’, which smells strongly of the idealistic, non-objective ‘Constructivism’ of the Western European Dadaist innovators and their ilk. It cannot be gainsaid that all these quadruple exposures, reverse filming, and so on and so forth, are very pleasant, often externally stunning, effected with great ‘taste’ and skill, but what, besides an easy-on-the-eye ‘spectacle for spectacle’s sake’, can such an October anniversary film give the viewer?!" The difference between critics like Shatov (you name them) and artists like Vertov, or Eisenstein, or Malevich, was that for them the revolution was wedded to art, while for Shatov and his ilk, all that it required was propaganda, pure and simple. And, unlike good art, good propaganda must be plain."

"I did not mention Malevich in vain. Kazimir Malevich liked The Eleventh Year as much as I do, and said that to appreciate the innovative charge of its visual images, one needs to know the analogous experiments in painting by the Italian Futurists Balla and Boccioni (see Lines of Resistance, chapter 24). I dare to add that people familiar with Malevich’s art of the late 1920s will find an affinity between Mikhail Kaufman’s photography in The Eleventh Year and what Malevich was trying to achieve in his second figurative period. It is a little hard to explain what I have in mind without pictures, so if you have a copy of Lines of Resistance to hand, open it to pages 312-313. (Thank you.) What you see here is a selection of frame enlargements from The Eleventh Year, which I made to show Kaufman’s consistent efforts to arrange figurative elements into geometrical patterns, as a result of which, as Malevich (and Shatov, from the opposite perspective) would say, Kaufman’s shots acquired an abstract or non-objective quality — more or less in the way I have tried to explain in my caption. Want to know why Shatov accused Kaufman of "Constructivism"? Take a look at the pictures on pages 305 and 317, and you will see why, right away."

"So much for visuals — Mikhail Kaufman’s side of The Eleventh Year. The other side was editing — Vertov and Svilova’s contribution to this excellent film. This side, too, was criticized for "formalism". As you go through contemporary reviews, you realize that many people simply did not get it — they thought many shots in this film were just spliced together at random, with no plan at all. One well-meaning but totally stupid critic by the name of Belsky wrote this in a Ukrainian newspaper: "But if there is a ‘but’, it must refer to the muddled montage. The ‘Electrical Cooperative’ and the smiling peasant woman come in for no reason. She smiles when the electrician climbs a post to fix the electricity supply, and she smiles in the same sequence, only a little more merrily, when Petrovsky and Kaganovich speak on a platform. Some sort of peasant households with sheaves come in for no reason, and the high side of the ship Red Ukraine. It is also strange that the entire fleet has one sailor and one ship. One and the same close-up of the Dnieper Hydro-Electric Station is repeated often and intrusively in all the parts, and this is all mixed up with the army and the mines of the Donbas. I think that this mistake can be easily corrected. You can throw out some of the sequences, shortening the film by one part, or you can replace these sequences with new ones, without shortening the film, and put the whole thing in order." I do not know who deserves to be killed more — Belsky, or Shatov. (Perhaps both!)"

"In any case, Vertov felt something needed to be done to defend The Eleventh Year, and did so in a speech at a discussion of the film at the Association of Revolutionary Filmmakers in February 1928: "Does it not seem to you that the first few parts are better edited than the last ones? This question has been put to me particularly often in recent days. This impression is deceptive. The first part is obviously on a level at which it is easier for the viewer to take it in; the fourth and fifth parts are constructed in a more complex way. They contain far more montage inventiveness than the first two parts; they are looking more to the future of cinema than the second and third parts. I have to say that the fourth and fifth parts have the same relation to the first part as an Institute of Higher Education does to a secondary school. It is natural that more complex montage forces the viewer to experience more tension, and demands greater attention in order to be taken in.""

"The main thing about the montage experiments in The Eleventh Year is Vertov’s attempt to cut across space and time. Once again, if it is still on your lap, I’d like you to open Lines of Resistance. Go to page 300: across oceans and deserts, Africa, India, and China are watching Ukrainian workers building a dam. Pages 292 and 293: an ancient burial mound was found at the site where the dam was being built, and Vertov cross-cuts it with the present-day scene (note the double-exposure shot of a worker’s hammer disturbing the eternal sleep of the ancient bones). Some critics got this revolutionary metaphor — a provincial reviewer writing for Tambovskaia pravda, for instance: "The play on a Scythian skeleton is interesting, as a comparison of two distant epochs: in the place where wild Scythians wandered in darkness two thousand years ago, the greatest achievement of culture, Lenin’s electric lamp, is now shining brightly.""

"Finally, on page 289 you will see three shots showing three workers hammering one steel stake into a wooden platform. Their movements are mutually coordinated, so that two blows never come at one time. This choreography of labor is beautiful in itself, but what makes this sequence particularly powerful is that Vertov edits these shots to the rhythm of the blows. (I want to hear what our piano player does with this sequence.) I do not insist it ever occurred to Vertov, but it did occur to me that Vertov’s, Kaufman’s, and Svilova’s work on this film was coordinated just as perfectly. Unfortunately, this film was the last-but-one on which the two brothers worked together. They stopped talking to each other soon after Man with a Movie Camera was finished." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)

AA: The print was more beautiful than many others in this retrospective. Some images had a really good definition. Naive machine poetry. Minimalist musical soundscape by Antonio Coppola. Actual duration of the screening: 56'01".

Albrecht Viktor Blum: Im Schatten der Maschine – Ein Montagefilm (1928). Photo from: Rate Your Music.

IM SCHATTEN DER MASCHINE — EIN MONTAGEFILM / [IN THE SHADOW OF THE MACHINE — A COMPILATION FILM] (Film-Kartell Weltfilm GmbH, Berlin, D 1928)
Dir/ed: Albrecht Viktor Blum; superv: Leo Lania; prod. at the request of "Volks-Film-Verband"; dist: Weltfilm, Prometheus, Berlin; censorship: B.20743, 8.11.1928; premiere: 9.11.1928, Berlin (Tauentzien-Palast); gen. rel: 9.11.1928, Berlin (Tauentzien-Palast); lunghezza originale / orig. length: 2 rls., 494 m.; 35 mm, 488 m., 22’ (20 fps), Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.
Didascalie in tedesco / German intertitles.

Thomas Tode (GCM): "Albrecht Viktor Blum had made a name for himself as a compilation filmmaker with three films, for the Piscator Stage, Film-Kartell Weltfilm, and Volks-Film-Verband, and then edited the German version of Shanghai Document (for details, see Thomas Tode, "Albrecht Viktor Blum", in CineGraph — Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen Film, 29th edition, Munich, 1997). In the middle of October 1928 he and author-playwright Leo Lania received a commission for another compilation film, entitled In the Shadow of the Machine. Film-Kurier (5.11.1928) reported: "It will be assembled from excerpts of partly unpublished Ukrainian films. [...] Some American footage has also been used. To get material as impressive as possible, a number of films, 50-60, have been viewed." The film was meant as a 20-minute short to accompany screenings of Shanghai Document. It seems to have been produced with this purpose at very short notice."

"Interesting from a methodological point of view is the fact that Blum, through his editing, instils the images with a reverse meaning: enthusiasm for technical progress turns into its criticism. As he described it in his own words: "The machine invented by man to serve man progressively turns into man’s master. Indeed, in the end, man will be no more than a handyman, a slave of the machine itself." (Quoted in records of the Blum-Vertov Affair, 5.8.1929, in Thomas Tode and Alexandra Gramatke, eds., Dziga Vertov — Tagebücher / Arbeitshefte, Konstanz, 2000, p.25). The film’s techno-critical intention is due to the fact that it was intended to serve the aims of trade unions. The same stance can also be found in Lania’s (and Phil Jutzi’s) Um’s tägliche Brot (Hunger in Waldenburg) (Germany, 1929). Lania, managing director of the Left-wing film society "Volks-Film-Verband" from the end of 1928, strongly encouraged the society to produce their own films."

"Blum’s film consists mainly of two Soviet films of 1928, the 5th reel of Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora and the last part of Dziga Vertov’s Odinnadtsatyi (The Eleventh Year). Blum integrated large passages from Odinnadtsatyi almost unaltered into his film, as "these passages already included the thoughts to be expressed" (per the records of the Blum-Vertov Affair). When Vertov showed parts of his hitherto-unknown film Odinnadtsatyi to German film clubs in 1929, he was accused of plagiarism. This prompted Vertov to defend himself vehemently in the press against these accusations, although the Soviet Trade Commission wanted to hush up the affair. Film critic Siegfried Kracauer tried to mediate. The whole bitter exchange is documented in the chapter "Vertov versus Blum", in Yuri Tsivian’s book Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties."

"Vertov regarded the controversy as a legal matter, a case of copyright infringement: the concern of an artist. Blum stated that his patron, Weltfilm, stopped him from naming the sources for his film because of import quota regulations. To be declared a German film by the censorship committee, it had to be free of any foreign material. Willi Münzenberg, the director of the IAH (Internationale Arbeiter Hilfe) press trust, had personally obtained the Ukrainian film footage for him. Vertov, on the other hand, ignored the fact that it was a common and programmatic procedure among German workers’ film organizations to recycle images from other films in compilations. In addition, Blum was working on behalf of the IAH and KPD (German Communist Party) along the lines of "operative” filmmaking and counter-information. This concept was based on ideological as well as financial reasons. According to Blum’s co-author Leo Lania, this allowed filmmakers "to reform the genre of newsreels and documentaries with little financial means from the bottom up, by reusing existing films and film sequences." (Film und Volk, no. 3, April 1929, p. 1)" – THOMAS TODE (GCM)

AA: A heavily duped print. A powerful montage about injured hands. A montage of war injuries. Duration of the screening: 22'51".