Shestaia chast mira / A Sixth Part of the World

Dziga Vertov: Shestaia chast mira (1926). Original poster, designed by Alexander Rodchenko. "Rarely has Rodčenko integrated a photograph into a poster the way he did here. The act of seeing is deliberately highlighted by leaving out the second eye. The two-dimensional structure becomes more dynamic through the apparent peeling away of the left corner, which produces the rising diagonals. Rodčenko here plays with the multi-layered nature of the images and has signed with his monogram: RA." Photo and caption: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Collection Dziga Vertov.

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

Prog. 11 (89’)

Kino-Pravda No. 18. February 1924 (Premiere: February 25, 1924). 13 min 51 sec. Up the Eiffel Tower in Paris / Moscow / Auto race Petrograd – Moscow / Aspects of everyday Soviet life / Peasant from Jaroslavl' visiting Moscow / Ceremonial introduction of a newborn into a workers' collective. Photo and caption: Österreichisches Filmmuseum. Kino-Pravda Online Edition.

KINO-PRAVDA 18 (PROBEG KINOAPPARATA V NAPRAVLENII SOVETSKOI DEISTVITELNOSTI 299 METROV 14 MIN. 50 SEK.) / [KINO-PRAVDA NO. 18 (A MOVIE-CAMERA RACE OVER 299 METRES AND 14 MINUTES AND 50 SECONDS IN THE DIRECTION OF SOVIET REALITY)] (Goskino, USSR 1924)
A work by Dziga Vertov; rel: 3.1924; 35 mm, 284 m., 13’ (20 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "As an exception to our programming rule the 18th and 19th issues of Kino-Pravda (both 1924) are being shown out of sequence. We wanted them to be seen together with Vertov’s 1926 A Sixth Part of the World to make more salient a peculiar — uniquely Vertovian — genre to which these three films belong. Vertov called this genre probegi kinoapparata — movie-camera runs, or races, across far-apart geographic locations. The thrill of this genre is that these are all impossible travels, visionary voyages, imagined pan-planetary pans. Kino-Pravda No. 18 takes the viewer from West to East, Kino-Pravda No. 19, North to South; and A Sixth Part of the World is a movie journey around the vast territory of the Soviet Union. The first of the three, Kino-Pravda No. 18 ("A race in the direction of Soviet reality"), was conceived as a journey on more than one level. It looks like a journey because Vertov starts with found footage filmed in Paris, and moves on to the footage shot in Russia, and it certainly feels like one — for the sequence that links Paris and Moscow has been assembled from travelling shots."

"It is not just a camera race, it is a relay race: Vertov edits together various kinds of camera movement, reflecting the camera’s mode of transport. We are first taken up the Eiffel Tower, its magnificent girders slowly gliding by (this movie-camera ascent, the title tells us, is dedicated to the memory of the tower’s builder — Gustave Eiffel died in 1923). From there, a plane takes over. A title, "The movie camera lands in the territory of the USSR," is followed by a shot taken from the undercarriage of a descending airplane, as fields and meadows loom up rapidly below us. As the movie camera lands, it is taken over by a racing car ("Auto race Petrograd-Moscow," the title reads). This is perhaps the closest Vertov’s film practice ever came to his somewhat elusive theoretical concept of "intervals", formulated in his manifesto "We" in 1922: "Kinoculism is the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm of each object. Intervals (the transition from one movement to another) are the material, the element of the art of movement, and by no means the movements themselves. It is they (the intervals) which draw the movement to a kinetic resolution.""

"As usual, smychka (announced by its signature emblem, the handshake) is one of the dominant themes in Kino-Pravda No. 18, but here Vertov decides to illustrate it in an off-beat way. The movie camera picks out a bearded man in the crowd, who turns out to be a peasant, Vasilii Siriakov, who has come all the way from Yaroslav Province to see Moscow, and the camera shows us Moscow through the peasant’s eye. "The movie camera pursues him," a title announces, whereupon a shadow of a man cranking a movie camera is shown. "The same peasant on his way to the Agricultural Exhibition" — and Siriakov is shown riding on a tram, all the while observing the tram conductor and the driver at work. The camera shadows our peasant everywhere. At one point he winds up in a Goskino workshop — at the moment when a baby is being Octobrized. What does this mean, "Octobrized"? The same as baptized — but in a workers’ collective instead of a church, and into Communism rather than a religion. (Invented with an eye to replacing church christening, this stopgap ritual never took root.) What is the best name for a newborn boy? You guessed it — and in an extreme close-up, we see the name "Vladimir" emerging from a worker’s mouth. All present are singing (guess which song?) as the boy is passed around — from a Communist worker to a Komsomol youngster and to a Young Pioneer. "To the Red Citizen Vladimir" (more singing faces) "grow healthy, Comrade" (close-up of hands holding the baby in the air). Workers at work. "Vladimir." Machine-tools at work. "Vladimir." The editing accelerates. "Vladimir." And intercut with all this, the recurrent shadow of the man with the camera, at work." – YURI TSIVIAN

Kino-Pravda No. 19. May 1924. 17 min 22 sec. Connecting city and country, south and north, summer and winter, peasant women and worker women / Emancipation of women in the USSR. Photo and caption: Österreichisches Filmmuseum. Kino-Pravda Online Edition.

KINO-PRAVDA 19 ("CHERNOE MORE — LEDOVITYI OKEAN — MOSKVA." "PROBEG KINOAPPARATA MOSKVA — LEDOVITYI OKEAN.") / [KINO-PRAVDA NO. 19 ("BLACK SEA — ARCTIC OCEAN — MOSCOW." "A MOVIE-CAMERA RACE MOSCOW — ARCTIC OCEAN.")] (Goskino, USSR 1924)
Dir: Dziga Vertov, rel: 9.5.1924; 35 mm, 375 m., 16’ (20 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Issue 19 tries to do many things at once — maybe a little too many for one reel. First, it contrasts cold and hot, winter and summer, Russia’s arctic regions and Russia’s Southern sea (named Black). Perhaps Eisenstein had a point when he said, with his usual deadly wit, that Vertov’s dream was to lick Nanook and Moana in one fell swoop (see the chapter "Vertov versus Eisenstein" in Lines of Resistance). Secondly, Vertov dedicates this issue of Kino-Pravda to "Woman, peasant woman, worker woman", a theme which defines the dominant gender of this film, particularly towards the end. A young woman types; another woman milks a cow; another works a field, etc. Women in politics: a State woman speaks; Lenin’s wife and sister — shown at Lenin’s funeral, and by his side when he was still alive. And at the very end, pro domo sua: "The editing of the negative for Kino-Pravda No. 19," says the title, and Vertov’s wife, the kinoc editor Elizaveta Svilova, is shown editing the very film we are watching. Déjà vu? If so, then in reverse: there is a similar sequence in Man with a Movie Camera, a film yet to be made."

"There is also another sequence in Kino-Pravda No. 19 which anticipates a similar trick from Man with a Movie Camera (and, in a strange way, brings to mind that early British film, How It Feels to Be Run Over). This issue, as the one released before it, is a camera race, so images of women doing different jobs are connected by a recurrent subject: a train in movement, often with the movie camera mounted on the car roof. At one point a curious intertitle informs us: "4 metres of movie-camera memory, as it falls under the wheels of the freight train." The huge wheels flash by; a view from under the train. That’s it. The last 4 metres of what the movie camera remembers. Evidently, in the eyes of the kinocs their kino-eye was a living being." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)

SHESTAIA CHAST MIRA ("PROBEG KINO-GLAZA PO SSSR". "EKSPORT I IMPORT GOSTORGA SSSR") / [LA SESTA PARTE DEL MONDO / A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD ("A KINO-EYE RACE AROUND THE USSR". "EXPORT AND IMPORT BY THE STATE TRADING ORGANIZATION OF THE USSR")] (Goskino [Kultkino] / Sovkino, USSR 1926)
Author/Leader: Dziga Vertov; asst. dir: Elizaveta Svilova; asst. to author/leader & chief ph: Mikhail Kaufman; ph: Ivan Beliakov, Samuil Bendersky, Piotr Zotov, Nikolai Konstantinov, Aleksandr Lemberg, Nikolai Strukov, Iakov Tolchan; film reconnaissance: Abram Kagarlitsky, Ilia Kopalin, Boris Kudinov; rel. 31.12.1926; lunghezza originale / orig. length: 1718 m.; 35 mm, 1513 m., 60’ (22 fps), Österreichisches Filmmuseum.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

JOHN MCKAY / CHARLES MUSSER (GCM): "The opening shot of A Sixth Part of the World — actually a bit of borrowed German newsreel footage of an airplane (presumably photographed from another airplane) hovering above a city "in the Land of Capital"— can stand as an emblem for what we might call the "totalizing" methodology of Vertov’s film. High above ground, we are able to see, if only briefly, the shapes, the patterns, the pathways of a modern urban space. Retrospectively, this panorama becomes a figure for that that larger structure — the "golden chain of Capital" — in which we (or people like us) live and work, but on the larger contours of which we normally have little perspective."

"Needless to say, Vertov would prefer that we think of this vision as less a static "perspective" than a conscious act: we are both told that seeing is happening ("I see," declares the second intertitle) and are made to see ourselves seeing, as the airplane on view emerges as a second, embedded figure for our own suddenly broad-ranging gaze. Georg Lukács, great theorist of totality, in "What is Orthodox Marxism?", came close to defining knowledge (for Marxism) as "seeing [our italics] the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and [integrating] them in a totality". A Sixth Part of the World, though surely free of any direct Lukácsian influence, can be thought of as a cinematic attempt to make just this kind of active Marxist knowledge concretely manifest."

"There are plenty of signs in Vertov’s own writings of his interest in totality, of course. "Kino-Eye" cinema, he declares, was to be (among other things) at once a "Communist decoding of world relations," and the establishment of "a visual bond between the workers of the whole world". These two ideas — of "decoding", and of "visual bond" — point to two different though related notions of totalization, which we might provisionally call "analytic" and "performative," respectively. The first is all about generating understanding of the social whole by bringing together its otherwise alienated components; to realize this integration, Vertov was provided with concrete "materials" by at least ten different expeditions of cameramen to points as distant as the Russian Far East and Western Europe. As a sample of the results of Vertov’s totalizing labor, we might single out that sequence in the fifth reel of A Sixth Part, when the dizzying proliferation of living detail, deriving from everywhere between "bourgeois" Europe and the Samoyed fur trade and far beyond, suddenly finds a comprehensive linkage at the Leipzig market as "pelts [. . .] are exchanged for machines for the Soviet nation"."

"For its part, the "visual bond" involves creating the (perceptual, conceptual, affective) sense of living in a single (though diverse) world, and acting as part of a common project. The film’s uniquely complex, Whitmanesque play with pronominal address — frequently derided as pretentious and obscure by members of its earliest audiences — plays a vital role in this "bonding" process, as do those moments when the human objects of our gaze return the glance, whether with sympathy, perplexity, coyness, or rage. (Incidentally, a note by Vertov from December 1925 indicates that it was precisely these moments of "reaction to the camera" that formed the germ of Man with a Movie Camera, whose first, unrealized version — under the working title The Movie Camera’s Race Across the USSR — was shot concurrently with A Sixth Part.)"

"A Sixth Part also reflects a development in Vertov’s film theory, from kino-eye to kinopravda, or film truth. In his early writings (1922-23), Vertov used the term kinopravda primarily to refer to the newsreel (a film equivalent of the Communist newspaper Pravda) while his manifestos emphasized the idea of the film eye, the machine that liberates the human eye. It is only after 1924 that he writes about "truth through the means and possibilities of film-eye": "to show people without masks, without make-up, to catch them through the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting, to read their thoughts laid bare by the camera." Vertov mobilizes this method in the early scenes of A Sixth Part of the World. On one hand, Capitalists make slaves of black peoples; on the other, black people perform on stage for them — dancing and smiling: either concealing their enslavement or appearing to enjoy it. Their masks of performance entertain the wealthy and conceal the truth of economic relations. Likewise, the bourgeoisie conceal their hate for these oppressed peoples under their own masks of geniality. It is these relations that A Sixth Part of the World exposes and analyzes — a Communist decoding of the world."

"What, though, is the "common project" advertised by A Sixth Part, and how common was it? Commissioned by the central State Trading Organization, or "Gostorg" (an abbreviation of gosudarstvennaia torgovlia, state trade; the working title was Import Export Gostorg) in early 1925, the film was charged with performing multiple discursive tasks from the start. The main goals were the promotion of Soviet products abroad, and secondarily the promotion of Gostorg as a major, active player in the realization of the New Economic Policy (NEP). In the process of achieving these pragmatic aims, however, the film was to offer a justification and visualization of one important aspect of NEP itself. Through the State-organized collection and sale of locally and individually-produced surplus production (of fur, fruit, grain, tobacco, and so on) to the western Capitalist countries, the Soviet Union would be able to modernize (so the argument went) through the purchase abroad of industrial and agricultural machinery."

"A Sixth Part shows Socialism emerging out of the quotidian, out of the nearly invisible coordination of a million ordinary actions; Lev Roshal eloquently describes Vertov’s task as one of "[raising] the ordinary person to the dimensions of the owner of a sixth part of the world precisely at the moment he is living his ordinary life". Yet the unglamorous, everyday character of much of the activity shown in A Sixth Part, and especially the focus on "primitive" peoples, proved deeply offensive to some of the film’s first audiences, who felt that Vertov almost wholly neglected the great industrial achievements of "the center", choosing instead to depict a USSR so thickly populated by "savages" (dikari) that building Socialism there was a clear impossibility. "Visual bonds," it seems, are harder to fashion than effective analyses of economics — although Vertov’s interpretation of Capitalism (and of Socialism) came in for criticism as well."

"The ambiguity of the relationship of the USSR to the rest of the world lurks within the film’s title: is the USSR but one large if significant and distinctive part of the global economy (A Sixth Part of the World), or so large a "part" that it could legitimately aspire to an autonomous existence (One Sixth of the World)? In the midst of the very complicated and problem-ridden production of the film, the 14th Congress of the Communist Party (December 1925) famously decided in favor of the second alternative (which had been seriously entertained since at least the beginning of 1925): it was definitively possible, Stalin declared, to build Socialism in one country. This intervention from above had a strong impact on the film, and Vertov spent much time integrating lines from the party’s new resolutions in the last reel of the film, a reel he came close to disavowing in some prefatory remarks prior to a screening in early 1927."

"There were also serious problems involving both the eastern- and western-most kinoc expeditions (see the exchange between Vertov and N. Lebedev in Yuri Tsivian’s collection Lines of Resistance for detail on the European debacle that seem to have lessened Vertov’s ability to map out the "world system" in the way he wished). Early on, Vertov had the idea of organizing the representation of Gostorg’s work around the voyage of a cameraman from London to Moscow and on to Shanghai or Peking; and plans were made even during the filming of A Sixth Part for a kind of sequel about the Voyage of the [ship] "Decembrist", involving a sea trip from Odessa through the Bosphorus to Suez, the Red Sea, and Indian Ocean, and on to Singapore, Vladivostok, Japan, China, and back to Odessa. Vertov was dismissed from Sovkino (for reasons far too complex to go into here) at the beginning of 1927, thus scuttling these and many other plans. But it would appear that A Sixth Part of the World was eventually going to expand into a film about the whole world — what a totalization that would have been! As it stands, Vertov’s film provides an occasion to reflect on the power of an "integrating" social knowledge, on its shortcomings, and on the historical factors that change the conditions of seeing, even as the spectator (or filmmaker) struggles to find a stable vantage point, a point from which he might confidently say "I", "you", and "we”." – JOHN MCKAY / CHARLES MUSSER (GCM)

AA: Bad definition, high contrast, duration of the screening: 1:08'23" = 69 min.