Shankhaiski dokument / The Shanghai Document

Yakov Bliokh: The Shanghai Document / Шанхайский документ (1928). Poster design by the Stenberg brothers (Vladimir Stenberg, Georgi Stenberg), signature "2 Stenberg 2". Photo from IMDb.

DZIGA VERTOV XIII
Grand piano: Costas Fotopoulos
Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 14 Oct 2004

Prog. 13 (68’)

HÄNDE — EINE STUDIE / HANDS — A STUDY (D 1928/29)
Dir: Albrecht Viktor Blum; 35 mm, 233 m, 10’ (20 fps), Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin.
Senza didascalie / No intertitles.

Thomas Tode (GCM): "This is a compilation film made up solely of close-ups of hands, which obviously come from all sorts of films, documentaries as well as feature films. They are edited in short sequences, arranged by association. It starts, for example, with the hands of babies and children (caressing a puppet, moments of play, drawing), and progresses from winding up toy automobiles to grown-up hands acting in traffic (the hands of a tram driver, the gloves of a policeman). Sometimes a narrative is constructed by editing: ringing a front-doorbell, receiving mail, reading notes). Mostly, however, the editing follows semantic contexts, e.g., leisure activities (gardening, playing cards, flower arranging, rowing, swimming), eating (milking a cow’s udder, kneading dough, peeling an apple, eating ice cream, ladling soup, basting a roast), chores (vacuum-cleaning, ironing, sewing, doing the dishes), beauty care (manicuring, shaving a beard and a head, cutting hair). Interestingly, one sequence is devoted to filmcraft, just as in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (handling a strip of film, animating figures). The "odd one out" is an erotic sequence about women’s hands (repairing stockings, applying lipstick, adjusting a bra, taking off a negligee, conquered by men’s hands, caressing each other). Before things get too saucy, the images are deflected towards decency (putting on a wedding ring, opening a bottle, clinking glasses, applauding). Certain sequences remind us of Vertov’s sometimes humorous associative editing technique, which treats people, things, and animals all alike: rinsing glasses, washing legs, scrubbing the backside, grooming a horse, bathing a dog. It may be of interest to compare this film with Dziga Vertov’s script "Hands Etude" (apparently based on an idea by Aleksandr Rodchenko), reproduced in the chapter "The Kinocs and Left Front of the Arts", in Yuri Tsivian’s Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties."

"Blum had already used close-ups of hands (working on machines, crippled fingers) in his film In the Shadow of the Machine, which might have helped inspire his compilation Hands. As this film was never submitted to the censorship committee it can only be dated vaguely, to 1928/29. Blum, who completed two similar compilation films in 1929 (Wasser und Wogen and Quer durch den Sport), justified his methods of compiling in articles. He warned against a director editing his own films because he "rarely musters the ability to view his own work objectively" (Film und Volk, no. 2, December-January 1928/29). In an article in Film-Kurier (1.6.1929), Blum pleads for the documentary form — a term which began to establish itself around that time: "In the archives of every German film production company, e.g., UFA, 100,000 metres of film stock lie unused. Images of life, documents of the existence of man, animals, plants, documents of things, buildings, and towns, things of all sorts, of the customs and practices of tribes and nations, of natural catastrophes, accidents, work processes, daily occurrences, unstaged, as they come before the cameraman’s lens. Cinematographic documents that span the entire life of man today. This abundant wealth of raw material for cultural films [Kulturfilme] remains mostly unused.”" – THOMAS TODE (GCM)

AA: * One of my favourites. A good discovery. Actual duration of the screening: 11'27".

Yakov Bliokh: The Shanghai Document / Шанхайский документ (1928). Photo from: Центральная студия документальных фильмов / Музей ЦСДФ / CSDF Museum.

SHANKHAISKII DOKUMENT / DAS DOKUMENT VON SCHANGHAI / LE DOCUMENT DE CHANGHAÏ / SHANGHAI DOCUMENT (Sovkino, Moscow, USSR 1928)
Dir/sc: Yakov Bliokh; ph/co-author: V. Stepanov; asst. ed: Lev Filonov; didascalie / intertitles: Viktor Pertsov; premiere: 1.5.1928, Moscow; lunghezza originale / orig. length: 1850 m (per Kulturfilmkatalog 1929–1930 des Kino-Kontor der Handelsvertretung der UdSSR in Deutschland, p. 38), 1700 m (per Leyda, Kino); 35 mm, 1460 m, 58’ (22 fps), Gosfilmofond, Moscow.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

Thomas Tode (GCM): "Soviet film of the 1920s is a cinema of montage and authorship. A case in point is the first significant feature-length documentary which also had a tremendous resonance abroad: Yakov Bliokh’s Shankhaiskii Dokument (Shanghai Document, USSR 1928). This can be regarded as a prototype of the "operative" film (Tretyakov), a film of counter-information. The opening sequences show Shanghai harbour and life in the Chinese and European quarters of the city. The hard work of over-burdened coolies is contrasted with the indolence of property-owning Europeans and the Chinese elite in a series of powerful images: an exhausted coolie peeks through a fence and catches a glimpse of the European bourgeoisie enjoying bathing and cocktails; the wheels of his cart dissolve into the spinning records of dancing hedonists; a giant treadmill powered by coolies is transformed into a carousel with laughing European children, followed by images of the hard work of Chinese children in silk mills and phosphorous-poisoned match factories."

"There is turmoil in the city. Revolutionaries fill the streets, and take over command in March 1927. The Europeans hide in their enclaves behind sandbags, call for battleships, and have regular troops and tanks land. The "Southern Army" of the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-Shek moves into the city and initiates a bloody split with the rebellious workers and the previously allied Communists. Bound prisoners are executed. In the end, Chiang Kai-Shek is branded as "the betrayer of the Chinese revolution". What is interesting in terms of the portrayal of power is that Bliokh has obscured the delicate role of the Soviet Union with its financial and military support of Chiang Kai-Shek, and turned a factual defeat into a moral victory for the Communist workers by invoking Chiang Kai-Shek’s "betrayal"."

"The epoch-making qualities of this film are the "discovery" of parallel montage as a political tool, the analytical view of the camera, and the journalistically clear-cut stance. The author insists — not least of all with the film’s title — that this is a presentation of documented practices of oppression and exploitation. His break with the postcard idyll previously conventional in travelogues is sharp and final, which contemporaries also acknowledged in their reviews: "The cultural film [Kulturfilm] must attain documentary value. This documentary value, however, will never be without a political flavor" (Film und Volk, no. 1, November 1928, p. 4). Bliokh’s parallel montage conjoins images that have no spatial or temporal relation to one another per se; instead these relations are first produced by the montage (as in Vertov’s films). Precisely because this is transparent for the audience, it is made explicit that this is an "interpretation" of the world as it appears, specifically from a Socialist perspective: a "Communist decoding of the visible world" (Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Berkeley, 1984, p. 79). The subtle difference between (justified) partisanship and propaganda is found where a person passing judgment is palpable behind the description. Through the revealing of the individual strategy of representation, the object loses authenticity, but the representation gains it. Authenticity is thus not an intention-less characteristic of images, no a priori given natural occurrence, but rather has to be understood as the form and result of media representation."

"The bulk of the footage, however, stems from the times before the uprising (e.g., the Chinese New Year celebrations). According to the credits, Stepanov was not only the cameraman but also co-author during this Sovkino expedition. Some of the depicted occurrences can be dated very precisely, to March and April of 1927 (the occupation of the city by the "Southern Army", and the ensuing massacre). Conspicuously, the film opened in Moscow one year later, on the 1st of May 1928. Even an extensive editing process cannot serve as an explanation for this delay, taking into account that Bliokh was said to be — according to Viktor Shklovsky — a talented organizer who decided quickly. The topicality of the events seems to have been not too relevant, although the "Chinese Revolution" had been given a lot of media coverage in the Soviet Union. Apparently the Soviets wanted to monitor political developments in China, a situation that was a pivotal point in the controversy between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin supported Chiang Kai-Shek, whereas Trotsky strictly opposed any support."

"Anyhow, Shanghai Document was very popular with the Moscow public. Jay Leyda even goes so far as to mention it as a personal triumph for Bliokh. The film also proved to be a hit with Communist movements in foreign countries. (Distributed in the US by Amkino, it was shown at the Cameo Theatre in New York City in late 1928, where it was reviewed as A Shanghai Document.) That Shanghai Document is indeed a film d’auteur was illustrated by an unexpected incident in Germany: The Communist film company Prometheus had claimed the film as a German film production, probably as a means of circumnavigating the very restrictive import quota. The film was intended to be a shining example of the quality production program to follow. They claimed that it was a film by Friedrich Lienhard (= Karl Schulz, a parliamentary representative of the Communist Party and activist of the Communist press), edited by Albrecht Viktor Blum, with intertitles by Franz Höllering (see, for example, Lichtbild-Bühne, no. 271, 10.11.1928). In fact, this was only true for the production of the (slightly shortened) German version. This prompted the film’s furious actual director, Yakov Bliokh, to demand a public correction in the press (e.g., in Close Up, no. 2, February 1929, p. 76 fn.). The emphasis on authorship to this point was an issue only in feature films, not in documentary. The scandal surrounding this prototypical film in the field of documentary filmmaking highlights the issue of films and authorship."

"The prints of the film available today are significantly different. Regarding the political message (Chiang Kai-Shek as a traitor), Gosfilmofond’s Russian print is closest to the original of 1928, as a comparison with articles of the time reveals. It is this version, bought by the Library of Congress in 1990, that was thoroughly examined and commented upon by Nicholas J. Cull and Arthur Waldron in their article "Shanghai Document — Shankhaiskii Dokument (1928): Soviet Film Propaganda and the Shanghai Rising of 1927", in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, no. 3, 1996 (pp. 309–331), which includes a list of all the film’s intertitles in English. However, numerous sequences of the "Northern Army" leaving the city, and the "Southern Army" occupying the city are missing from this print."

"These sequences can be found in the Cinémathèque Suisse’s (16 mm) print, which probably originates from the Swiss Prometheus version that circulated in Switzerland from 1929 (all intertitles bear the name of the Prometheus company). Some passages at the end of the film deviate from the editing of the Gosfilmfond print (e.g., the speeches of the members of the military). More important, Chiang Kai-Shek is not called a "betrayer", but is referred to obediently as the "Generalissimo", and his political program concerning the insurgents has been changed from "retribution without delay!" to "moderation, reconciliation, entente". All these alterations might have arisen from diplomatic considerations about Chiang Kai-Shek, who meanwhile became his country’s central figure."

"In both versions the treadmill powered by coolies which is transformed into a carousel with laughing European children is missing (the children themselves can be seen in all prints). The treadmill can be found in an English print from the archives of ETV (Stanley’s Forman’s Educational and Television Films, Ltd.), now in Britain’s National Film and Television Archive. According to Ivor Montagu, this 10-12-minute compilation of Shanghai Document was made to promote the Film and Photo League. Gerd Roscher quotes about 7 minutes from it (among other images, the treadmill) in his documentary Wir machen unsere Filme selbst, Teil 1: Arbeiterfilm im Deutschland der 20er Jahre (BRD, 1978, 45 min). He substituted German intertitles for the English ones." – THOMAS TODE (GCM)

AA: * A favourite of mine. I saw this famous film for the first time. Shocking: the executions. As a rule the print is good, with fine definition. Actual duration of the screening: 62'41" = 63 min.