Dziga Vertov in the Japanese 1960s
A short section of a recently published article in the journal Film History
I recently found out an article that was two years (!!) in the making has been finally published, in print, by the journal Film History. After pretty extensive re-writes and re-thinking, the article has found a great home
.Of all the articles I’ve ever written, this one probably has the most academese, and is the most historical.
I did, however, get to do something very fun, which is include graphs (!) by scholars John MacKay and Naoki Yamamoto. We love visual representation of abstract concepts, don’t we folks:
You can read the entire article if you have an academia.edu or university library account (here is a link), or I’d be happy to email a PDF. Until then, here is a (relatively) short teaser, since reading a 25 page peer reviewed paper is probably not every single person’s idea of fun…
The films of early Soviet avant-gardist Dziga Vertov are some of the first in media history to playfully manipulate documentary footage for political and emotional effect. One might recall, for instance, the earliest use of the reverse reel in his first feature-length film Kino-Glaz (Kino-Eye, 1924). Vertov's camera portrays a woman buying meat from a non-union, non-co-op butcher, so the film reverses her pathway to the shop and brings the meat back to the bull, and the bull back to life. Using nothing but actuality footage and editing tricks, the film corrects—and indeed, reverses—a behavior deemed improper in the context of Soviet policy. Yet the trick appears far from didactic; this results in the communist whimsy typical of Vertov's avant-garde productions. This trick tickles the senses, yet reminds the viewer of the camera's ability to shift reality to suit its own devices. The reverse reel draws attention to film as a thing both caught and created; that is, Vertov's film uses actuality footage captured in the real world, but his myriad cinematographic techniques craft something entirely new. One can also describe Vertov's film technique as fundamentally animated, connecting to the Latin origins of the term animare—to refresh, to revive, or to bring to life. [ 1]
Reverse reel and other tricks of editing and cinematography, including animation, are prevalent in Kino-Eye since it is a film manifesto that encapsulates Vertov's film theory. Vertov's films aim to emancipate the viewer's political sensibility, heretofore chained to the "ballast of habit" (in the words of Samuel Beckett's 1930 essay on Proust) through a series of disruptive and playful aesthetic techniques. What Vertov called the kino-eye is meant to produce a more active viewer, released from the drudgery of everyday life. Although Vertov's films were virtually ignored in the USSR after socialist realism emerged as the single Soviet international aesthetic par excellence, his films recirculated after the death of Stalin—thanks in large part to Vertov's widow, editor, and kinok (cine-eyes, Vertov's neologism for his creative collaborators), Elizaveta Svilova, and the French communist film critic Georges Sadoul.
That 1960s France experienced a veritable Vertovophilia is now well-known. First, Edgar Morin used the French translation of Vertov's newsreel series Kino-Pravda (Cinema-Truth, 1922–25) to describe a new style of documentary filmmaking called cinéma vérité. [2] Next, in the wake of May 1968, the media philosopher-theorists of the ultra-left journal Cinéthique viewed Vertov as a precursor, with Cinéthique favorite Jean-Luc Godard even using the name the Dziga Vertov Group for the post-May radical filmmaking collective he created with Jean-Pierre Gorin. Godard's reason for using Vertov's moniker is tied to his understanding of Vertov's iconoclasm, fervent experimentalism, and apparent anti-Stalinist politics. [3] He chose the name Dziga Vertov to "indicate a program, to raise a flag, not just to emphasize one person. [4]
Japan, the leading film industry in 1960, was immersed in its own new-wave movement by the time François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard released their cataclysmic debuts. At the time, Vertov's films and theories were less available in translation, However, as I will demonstrate, Japan's comparatively piecemeal interaction with Vertov's films was highly fruitful—not despite its distance from the mediation of the French Vertov scholars, but because of it. The films and theories of the Soviet avant-garde were recirculated for the first time since the early 1930s at an exciting and highly political moment where discussions of both documentary and experimental film technique already held court in film community debates, especially via theorists such as Imamura Taihei, Hanada Kiyoteru, and Matsumoto Toshio. This atmosphere created an especially fertile ground for the reception of the Soviet avant-garde, and of Vertov in particular, who was interpreted as an avant-gardist rather than a forerunner of cinéma vérité. Indeed, Vertov was even linked to surrealism.
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…1960s Japan witnessed a flourishing of avant-garde documentary form that rivalled the 1920s Soviet Union in its audacious experimentation. By first analyzing Vertov's playfully affective filmmaking experiments—oriented around what he termed kinooshchushchenie (cinematic sensation)—and then juxtaposing Vertov's work with the history of the Japanese avant-garde documentary, I will show significant overlaps between the two… I argue that Vertov's films and theories arrived in a 1960s Japanese media landscape already primed to understand experimental documentary as an inherently political practice. Vertov-like films appeared on Japanese screens even before his films were screened en masse; moreover, it is precisely because Vertov's works arrived in such fragmentary fashion, and with comparatively little engagement with Vertov's French interpreters, that the interpretation of Vertov's films in Japan became more thoughtful and capacious. In fact, Vertov's affectively oriented political aesthetics mirrored, ex post facto, the political, artistic, and ethical concerns of Japan in its turbulent and revolutionary season of politics. Thus, some of the most important works of Japanese film theory in the late 1950s and 1960s often reflect Vertov's arguments, despite rarely referring to him by name, and Japanese films from the 1960s astonishingly echo his avant-garde documentary film practice.
This connection to avant-garde documentary is especially salient when considering the films of self-styled neodocumentarist Matsumoto Toshio, whose most famous film Bara no sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969) uses a typically Vertovian film-within-a-film trope to reveal the creative and edited aspects inherent to all filmmaking, both narrative and documentary. In Funeral Parade of Roses, the diegetic world of the fictional collapses into the nonfictional, producing a powerfully exuberant and carnivalesque avant-garde documentary style. Contemporary Japanese film critic Ōishi Masahiko connects Matsumoto's film explicitly to the work of Vertov, noting that Funeral Parade is the true inheritor of Vertov's techniques, as both entail an "Ouroboros-like" structure and rejuvenate the techniques of the avant-garde documentary. [8]
What Oishi describes as Ouroboros-like—a perpetual self-reflexivity symbolized by a snake consuming its own tail—also reflects debates between avant-garde film and documentary that were especially heated during the Japanese postwar period. Theorist and art historian Hanada Kiyoteru was central to Japanese theories of the avant-garde documentary and greatly influenced Matsumoto. Hanada was especially interested in surrealism, where, as he wrote in 1950, one "could feel the discontinuity between the inner world and the outer world" [9]—the interior world of the personal and the exterior world of the sensible and political. However, surrealism did not go far enough for Hanada, who aimed for the "artist's avant-garde" to approach the "politician's avant-garde" and to "pour the same gaze toward the outside world [gaibu no sekai] as they [artists] have hitherto directed toward the inner world [naibu no sekai]." [10]
Given Hanada's interest in the connection between the political and artistic avant-gardes, it is no surprise that Furuhata claims that Hanada was influenced by the Soviet avant-garde and held Vertov in especially high regard among European filmmakers. [11] However, my research indicates that Hanada was less interested in the Soviet avant-garde than in the Western European artists and filmmakers of the same period, such as Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and Germaine Dulac. The Soviets do not appear extensively in his 1953 summary of the 1920s avant-garde movements. [12] In fact, Soviet avant-garde films would only reemerge as avant-gardist in Japan almost a decade later—and for the first time since the early 1930s.
The theory of Japanese avant-garde documentary in the 1960s therefore did not begin with a long-standing influence from the Soviet Union. Instead, it emerged independently, buttressed by an additional influx of avant-garde films and newly translated media theories riding the political new waves from Western Europe. These films and theories often enjoyed a much more receptive audience in 1960s Japan than they had in the early 1930s, when the influence of Stalinist socialist realism had already begun to take hold. What emerged from this 1960s transnational media ecology was a strong tradition of experimental documentary that traced revolutionary politics to tricks of editing and cinematography and disorienting self-reflexivity. While Soviet and Japanese avant-garde documentary developed independently, they nonetheless demonstrated significant theoretical intersections, resulting in a fascinating confluence of political avant-garde aesthetics. First, however, it is important to examine Vertov's film theory—especially its less-discussed but vitally important connection to Soviet affect and chuvstvennost' (feeling-ness)—before delving into the Japanese political, industrial, and philosophical context.
Dziga Vertov's films are full of explosive tricks of editing and cinematography—a barrage on the senses. With the use of these techniques, Vertov's films, from the film-manifesto Kino-Eye to the now-ubiquitous Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), and even to his formerly popular Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs about Lenin, 1934), strive to sharpen sensibilities and awaken radical political beliefs in their viewers. As MacKay contends, Vertov's kino-eye philosophy of experimental nonfiction filmmaking "is nothing less radical than a Communism on film." [13] Vertov and his followers, the fellow kinoks, "believed that such an approach to film would create new ways for a revolutionary society to represent itself to itself, by breaking away from the tropes, templates, types, and canons of 'art'" and generating "endlessly novel, sensuously captivating representations of the world."14 [14] As Vertov claimed, the dizzying range of experimental editing techniques in his films "[challenges] the human eye's visual representation of the world" and declares its own, distinct, defamiliarizing svoe "vizhu" ("I see!"). [15] Fast cuts, playful and experimental editing, and lack of narrative coherence in Vertov's films create an avant-garde distancing effect but one that is profoundly sensorial and affective. In so doing, Vertov's films exemplify a new type of direct, unmediated sensuality, or chuvstvennost', as opposed to cold and restrictive bourgeois art. As he declared: "We need conscious men, not an unconscious mass... submissive to any passive suggestion." [16]
For Vertov, revolutionary consciousness necessitated a pedagogy that was more affective than didactic. As Joshua Malitsky notes, specifically discussing the bull-animation reverse-reel effect described earlier, the scene "is not a dry, intellectual illustrated lecture of Marxist concepts" but is instead "jarring and speaks to the creative force capable in cinema." [17] Edward Tyerman, following Emma Widdis, ties the importance of the affective interconnectivity of chuvstvennost' with Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky's celebrated concept of ostranenie (estrangement). Ostranenie served as a device inherent in all art, one that estranges the familiar to create a way of perceiving that looks at the world anew. Tyerman identifies Vertov as a filmmaker prioritizing oshchushchenie (sensation), writing: "Just as Viktor Shklovsky celebrated the power of art to give back the 'sensation' (oshchushchenie) of things, so Dziga Vertov conceptualized film as offering a new mode of 'cinematic sensation' (kinooshchushchenie).... [A]rt's task explicitly links politics and aesthetics, connecting the revivifying powers of oshchushchenie to new forms of sociopolitical consciousness. A new sense of the world mediated through avant-garde cultural production transforms the individual's understanding... producing the contours of a new political subjectivity." [18] Shklovsky and Vertov, despite their differences,19 [19] intersect through their prioritization of oshchushchenie as a mode to link politics and aesthetics through "new forms of sociopolitical consciousness"—a connection that Malitsky made as well. [20] This sensation, which was a cinematic-specific sensation for Vertov, creates the foundation for "a new political subjectivity" that avant-gardists understood to be vitally important for the new Soviet era.21 [21] As Oleg Aronson notes, Vertov's "microrevolutions in the frame" are meant to overcome human attitudes and "return [human beings] to a perception not held captive (zakhvachenom') by ideology." [22]
The key to this liberation from the captivity of ideology is found in avant-gardist techniques. Widdis notes that Vertov's aforementioned bull-animation reverse-reel sequence in Kino-Eye creates "an affinity [that] works outside language, and through the body... the spectator is led to feel an embodied affinity with the commodities of meat and bread: a specifically communist relationship with the products of consumption." [23] Techniques such as reverse reel thus join an embodied and primarily affective mode of understanding with a higher, intellectual understanding, a Marxist hermeneutics.
As MacKay argues, the study of Vertov has been plagued by "serious mischaracterizations of Vertov's practice as primarily oriented around the purveying of 'news.'" [24] In reality, however, Vertov's filmmaking is full of avant-gardist triuki (tricks) of editing and cinematography: fast motion, freeze frame, slow motion, split screen, stop-motion animation, superimposition, drawn advertisements, animated intertitles, shouting mouths, and any number of other tools and techniques of technological manipulation. Additionally, the films show the process of their production, à la Man with a Movie Camera (this latter technique, importantly, will be hailed by enthusiasts of the Soviet avant-garde in Japan). As Vertov declared, these machinations served to "prepare the viewers" for "the reception (vospriiatie) of new things." [25] The playfulness of tricks, whether through printing, montage, or other editing techniques, leads to a more robust, entirely new Soviet mental activity and mode of perception—one that rejuvenates the senses and leads to a clarified understanding. MacKay argues that "these explicit efforts to startle, to provoke, to motivate... drew attention to themselves and broke up the expected unity of the filmic text." [26] Vertov's myriad tricks overlap with agitational strategies; they engage the affective potential of the cinematic medium to harness the viewer's political understanding, leading to proper political action (buying meat from a union-affiliated co-op butcher, for example). Vertov's "laboratories for experimentation" are precisely where agitational processes are most effective: avant-gardist tricks lead to what Widdis describes as a "revolution in sensory experience," "an alternative psychological model in which the psyche would be formed in direct relation to a sensory, embodied encounter with the world." [27]
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Importantly, both Vertov and the Japanese filmmakers of the 1960s draw a connection between liberation, both political and on the level of consciousness, and experimental documentary practices. The affects and effects of Vertov's playful and estranging experiments are meant to transition into social practice by provoking, disrupting, and reorienting our preformed ways of thinking and feeling. After all, Vertov is not really catching life unawares; objects cannot move on their own. Bulls do not come back to life after slaughter, nor do photographs spontaneously return to negatives. Both Vertov and figures like Matsumoto use the camera to create a new, fantastical world with the aid of tricks that allow us to perceive our own environments anew.
(Thanks for reading all this academese! Here are some screenshots from Vertov and Matsumoto as a lil’ show of thanks! These did not find their way into the article)