Figure 4.1 Mikhail Kaufman on the cover of Sovetskoe Kino 1 (1927)
After its release in 1926, Moscow was embraced by opponents of the films of Dziga Vertov and his group of kinoks, even though it had been made by two members of the group: Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov’s brother and cameraman, and Ilya Kopalin. In the second half of the 1920s, the kinoks were embroiled in an increasingly fierce battle over the “correct” direction of Soviet cinema and art, and Vertov’s films were subject to growing criticism as they became more formally audacious. Yet, some of Vertov’s most outspoken antagonists heaped praise on his brother’s film. In enumerating the kinoks’ “mistakes,” for example, Sergei Eisenstein singled out for exception “Kaufman’s brilliant work Moscow,” arguing that, unlike Vertov’s films, it “shows kinoculism the healthy path and the area—newsreel—which it should occupy in the construction of Soviet cinema.”1 Another major Soviet montage filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov, paired Moscow with what he viewed as the apogee of Soviet documentary of the period, Esfir Shub’s compilation newsreel film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). Referring to both works as “the greatest cinematic impression on our screens,” he celebrated Moscow for opening “our eyes to the routine Moscow that we see so often,” and contrasted its editing with what he derided as the “subjective- artistic montage” practiced by Vertov.2 And Ippolit Sokolov, a journalist and screenwriter who was one of Vertov’s most vociferous opponents, commented approvingly that Moscow had been made “according to principles that are completely opposed to those of [Vertov’s film] A Sixth Part of the World,” which was released around the same time.3
Contemporary commentators, however, have tended to emphasize continuities between Moscow and Vertov’s films, especially his city symphony Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Annette Michelson suggests that Moscow’s “structure, relating a day in the life of a great industrial city, seems to have influenced both Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929),”4 a claim echoed by Richard Barsam, who writes that Moscow “influenced the city-symphony genre.”5 And Graham Roberts concludes his discussion of Moscow by observing both that it is “very derivative” of Vertov’s work, and that a number of its “sections are repeated in very similar style” in Man with a Movie Camera.6
As we will see, there are many similarities between Kaufman and Vertov’s films, especially Man with a Movie Camera. What, then, explains the admiration of Vertov’s critics for his brother’s work? Doubtless, they were using it to score points against Vertov in the highly combative climate of the late 1920s and perhaps drive a wedge between the brothers. Indeed, Kaufman would go on to break with Vertov after the filming of Man with a Movie Camera. But is this all there was to it? Or is Moscow, despite its resemblances to Man with a Movie Camera, a significantly dissimilar work that deserves to be considered in its own right? After describing Kaufman and Kopalin’s city symphony, I will argue that there are differences between it and Vertov’s films that were genuinely important to Vertov’s detractors given their ideological and aesthetic commitments and that, at least in part, motivated their positive reaction to Moscow.
For its first two-thirds, Kaufman’s film follows the “day-in-the-life of a city” structure that became a convention of city symphonies in the 1920s. It begins with shots of trash and street cleaning in the morning before focusing on Moscow’s transportation network starting up. Trams, taxis, and other types of vehicles are shown as the workday commences and people arrive at a train station. High angle shots, some of them pans, of major transportation hubs and intersections in Moscow are intercut with shots taken from the front of moving vehicles as they traverse the city’s roads and waterways. The film momentarily singles out people doing their jobs in the street—postmen picking up mail, drivers, newspaper and cigarette vendors—as well as a homeless boy riding between carriages on a tram. A sequence devoted to shopping and trading, in which we move inside a department store and out again to a street market and storefronts with mannequins, is followed by a section on communication that includes a busy post office as well as telegraph and telephone operators. The film shifts to industrial labor. Shots of machines introduce a sequence devoted to the manufacture of cigarettes. A section about textile production precedes one about steel.
Then, as if to suggest that the workday is over, we travel with a tram to residential districts where new housing is being constructed, and the focus switches to leisure. People visit a museum to look at and discuss statuary, and the zoo, where a range of wild animals is on view. They ride bikes, watch races at the hippodrome, and enjoy merry-go-rounds and swings. Water sports, such as rowing and diving, are depicted, and a seaplane takes off, with the camera inside. Young people march and engage in athletic events in a field until, finally, the sun goes down. Lights come on and shoppers purchase food at a deli. As before, the camera films the street from the front of a moving car. Children asleep in a dormitory are juxtaposed with street urchins. Men and women drinking and smoking in a nightclub are contrasted with workers at a club, who read, play chess, and enjoy physical activities and a live orchestra before the sequence culminates with shots of city lights.
The final third of the film departs from the “day-in-the-life of a city” pattern of the first two, and is largely about official Moscow and the workings of government. Shots of the Kremlin introduce a long section depicting various ambassadors and other foreign dignitaries as well as their flags, embassies, and monuments. Trade agreements are signed, and delegations of scientists, workers, and students are welcomed from abroad. People are assisted at government offices, and a council conducts business. Lenin’s residence is shown, along with a chair on which he sat. We see a panorama of buildings, monuments, theaters, and churches, as well as a crèche where young children are cared for, and a laboratory where students conduct experiments. A fragment from a 1912 newsreel about the unveiling of a pre-revolutionary monument is followed by one from 1918 in which the monument is being dismantled. We then see the Soviet-era monument that replaced it. The film ends by returning to the seat of government with shots of Red Square, the Lenin Mausoleum, and the gravestones of officials around the Kremlin, as well as the hall where the Politburo meets along with portraits of a number of its members. The final low angle shots reveal a new radio tower extending high into the sky.
Those acquainted with Man with a Movie Camera will recognize from this description that Vertov’s city symphony covers many of the same subjects as his brother’s, and also employs its “day in the life of a city” structure, albeit more consistently. Man with a Movie Camera depicts buildings and streets being cleaned in the morning, and an urban transportation network starting up. Steel and textile production are featured, as well as telephone operators and storefronts with mannequins. When the workday is over, we see leisure activities such as swimming, diving, and athletics, and there are shots of horses racing at a hippodrome and people enjoying a merry-go-round. Like Moscow, Man with a Movie Camera singles out the homeless, and its sequence in which marriages, divorces, births, and deaths are registered showcases the functioning of government. The commonalities extend well beyond subject matter, however. As is to be expected given that Kaufman was Vertov’s cameraman, the cinematography of Man with a Movie Camera is highly reminiscent of Moscow’s to the extent that some shots look (and perhaps are) identical. In both there is a striking shot taken from beneath a train, and the camera is often placed on moving vehicles. The low-angle shots of chimneystacks and other structures in Vertov’s film echo the final footage of the radio tower in Kaufman’s, and both works frequently make use of high-angle shots of streets and intersections taken from atop buildings. “Life” is repeatedly “caught unawares” in Moscow, a method closely associated with Vertov’s films, and those who realize they are being filmed tend to look at the camera inquisitively. Stop motion is used to make a stuffed bear appear to move in Moscow and the movie camera walk around in Man with a Movie Camera, and the former contains at least one split-screen shot of the street taken from a moving vehicle, a schema that will be used on multiple occasions in the latter.
These are not the only correspondences between the two films’ visual style. Vertov famously advocated the use of slow, fast, and reverse motion because he wished to free filmmaking from the limitations of human perception and create a visual experience of the world as different as possible from our ordinary human one, thereby revealing truths inaccessible to the eye. “Until now, we have violated the movie camera and forced it to copy the work of the eye,” he proclaimed in 1923. “Starting today we are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite direction—away from copying.”7 Hence, in Kino-Eye (1924), reverse motion is employed to reveal the “origins of objects and of bread,”8 and slow motion in Man with a Movie Camera enables the viewer to see the movements of horses, athletes, and other bodies in motion in precise detail. Moscow, too, contains a slow motion sequence of a horse, and another of divers also utilizes reverse motion. There is even a freeze-frame in Moscow during a shot of a young woman on a swing, a technique that is famously exploited in Man with a Movie Camera to reveal that the appearance of motion in the moving image is created from a series of still frames. Similarly, in Moscow, the film is slowed both before and after the freeze frame to the point that the image flickers and individual still frames become visible.
Moscow also anticipates some of the editing structures in Man with a Movie Camera. On several occasions, it cuts between close-ups of a worker’s face and the dexterous movements of his or her hands as they skillfully and rapidly perform a task, for instance in the section about telegraph operators. Vertov’s film will do the same in the scene of the worker folding boxes at a workbench. And Moscow frequently uses editing to create ideological contrasts, as when it cuts from the decadent men and women drinking and smoking in the nightclub to the mentally and physically “healthy” activities of the workers in their club. Man with a Movie Camera contains an almost identical sequence, except that a disorienting hand-held camera is used to convey drunkenness. The editing of Moscow never becomes as rapid as Man with a Movie Camera’s, in which shots are sometimes less than a second long. But it is certainly faster than the comparatively sedate pace of the film with which Kuleshov coupled it, Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, which is why Kuleshov, who otherwise praised the film, faulted Moscow for its “failure to abandon a penchant for rapid montage.”9 None of this means, of course, that Man with a Movie Camera is derivative of Moscow. Many of the techniques employed in the earlier film had already been discussed in Vertov’s writings or had appeared in his work, such as the reverse motion in Kino-Eye. Stop motion is used to animate crates of goods in A Sixth Part of the World, for instance, while editing creates an ideological contrast between the Western bourgeoisie enjoying themselves, and laboring workers, including slaves in colonies. But without getting into the vexed issue of the authorship of Vertov (and Kaufman’s) films, it is clear that their work is of a piece in many ways. Why, then, did Kuleshov and other harsh critics of Vertov’s approach to cinema embrace Moscow?
Kuleshov, like Eisenstein and Vertov, was associated with the Left Front of the Arts (Lef), a group that by the second half of the 1920s was advocating factography, the “fixing of fact” through a documentary practice. Cinema and photography were valorized as “accurate, rapid, and objective means of fixing fact”10 along with nonfictional, often first-person forms of writing such as letters, memoirs, biographies, diaries, travel sketches, and journalism. As Leah Dickerman points out, the artist’s role, according to the factographic model, was a “self-consciously restrained” one consisting of the discovery, collection, organization, and exhibition of facts rather than their creation.11 This is one reason Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, which was comprised of re-edited newsreel footage rather than original content, was so admired by Lef’s members. Another is that Lef artists conceived of themselves as enabling “the frank perception of contemporary life” through the clear presentation of facts in their work.12 Artistic devices were supposed to serve this perspicuous presentation and not the other way around. Hence, in praising The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty in Novyi lef, Kuleshov argued that “the material must be revealed to a maximum degree by the montage, served to a maximum degree by the montage,” which, he believed, was the case with Shub’s editing.13
Vertov’s films increasingly came under fire from Lef and others precisely because their artistic techniques, particularly the editing, did not appear to serve the lucid exposition of facts. In 1926, Viktor Shklovsky started accusing Vertov of depriving newsreel of “its soul—its documentary quality.” “The whole meaning of newsreel lies in the date, the time, and the place,” Shklovksy inveighed, and it was this concrete specificity that was missing in Vertov’s films.14 In a critique of A Sixth Part of the World (1926), Shklovsky singled out Vertov’s use of “lyrical” intertitles, asserting that they merely “paralleled” subsequent shots in order to increase their “emotional significance” rather than identifying their content. “When they give us an intertitle, ‘The child sucks at the breast,’ and then show us the child, suckling at the breast,” he complained, “I realize that they have turned us back towards lantern slides.”15 Meanwhile, Kuleshov felt that, rather than serving “the material in the cause of its best possible presentation,” as in Shub’s films, “subjective-artistic montage” predominated in Vertov’s, remaining “an individual creative element of the work of the editor” and resulting in “a combination of gaudy shots or a succession of symbolic images.”16 Vertov’s editing, in other words, constituted a subjective artistic distortion of the facts rather than a clear presentation of them. Eisenstein, too, accused Vertov’s films of being too artistic in spite of the kinoks protestations to the contrary. Arguing that “controlling the emotions of the viewer, provoked by a particular kind of effect, is a purely artistic problem,” he maintained that Vertov’s films “make a pathetic attempt to move their audiences emotionally.” Moscow, by contrast, lacks “any emotional claims,” like a newsreel.17
Arguably, these criticisms display a profound misunderstanding of Vertov’s project,18 but they do allow us to pinpoint why Moscow stood apart from it in the eyes of Vertov’s opponents at the time of its release. First, Kaufman’s city symphony provides the concrete specificity that was perceived to be lacking in Vertov’s films, in part because of its intertitles, which usually identify the particular places, buildings, monuments, and other sights we are shown as if guiding us on a tour of Moscow. In the last third of the film, they also supply the names and titles of many of the ambassadors and other dignitaries. Moscow, in other words, is very much about the city of Moscow, its geography, the work and leisure activities of its inhabitants, and its political institutions. It is also, at times, about the history of parts of the city and the new, socialist purposes they are serving, as when it juxtaposes newsreel footage of the pre-revolutionary monument being unveiled and dismantled along with shots of the Soviet-era structure that has replaced it. This is perhaps why Kuleshov wrote admiringly of Kaufman’s film that it “opens our eyes to the routine Moscow that we see so often.”19 While the intertitles in A Sixth Part of the World and other Vertov films of this period certainly contain some expository information, they rarely if ever name an individual person or place, as Shklovksy complained. Meanwhile, Man with a Movie Camera rejects intertitles altogether, and it freely combines footage of several unidentified cities to illustrate city-life in general in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s rather than depict a specific city, as does Moscow.
Second, while it contains some intercutting, Moscow lacks what Vlada Petric aptly calls Vertov’s “disruptive-associative” montage style, which consists of the “apposition of often unrelated and contradictory” themes.20 Vertov often edits between two, three, or more seemingly unconnected subjects, thereby encouraging the viewer to find a link between them or retroactively supplying one through an intertitle. A Sixth Part of the World spends 12 minutes hailing different peoples throughout the Soviet Union engaged in a wide variety of activities—“you, who are eating your venison raw … /you, who suckles at your mother’s breast”—before making explicit the relation between them—“you, the owners of the Soviet land/hold in your hands a sixth part of the world.” And Man with a Movie Camera cuts between mining, steel and textile production, hydroelectric generation, trams, and filmmaking in a sequence that climaxes in an ecstatically rapid montage. Although Vertov did this in order to represent what he saw as an objective fact—that Soviet citizens are interconnected economically in the new socialist state as joint owners of the means of production—this style of editing made him vulnerable to the charge that he was subjectively manipulating footage in order to create his own metaphorical associations and symbols, thereby placing the factual material in the service of his art rather than the other way around. So did his use of reflexivity, which reaches its zenith in Man with a Movie Camera and its sustained depictions of its own making, but which is already present in A Sixth Part of the World in its titles (“I see you/and you/ and you …”) and its shots of viewers in a movie theater watching its footage. By incorporating the act of filmmaking and film viewing into his film practice and using overt, self-conscious techniques, such as split-screen shots, Vertov foregrounded his own role—and what his enemies disparaged as his artistic subjectivity—in the construction of his films. Except for the freeze frame and the occasional use of slow and reverse motion, the reflexive dimension of Vertov’s films is absent from Moscow. And while it sometimes makes use of contrastive editing to draw attention to ideological and economic relations between different Muscovites, as in the scene comparing the night clubbers with the workers, on the whole it is much more concerned with clearly displaying specific people and places in Moscow rather than their interconnections, which is why it avoids Vertov’s brand of disruptive-associative montage. It is doubtless for these reasons that Kuleshov wrote,
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 [as in Vertov’s films], but really are the best and clearest way to show contemporary Moscow.21
Moscow has a lot in common with Vertov’s films, and it is not surprising that contemporary commentators have taken note of the continuities between them. But the acclaim with which it was received by Vertov’s critics reminds us that its differences—its concrete specificity as well as its avoidance of disruptive-associative montage and reflexivity—carried a great deal of weight when it was released due to the ideological and aesthetic concerns of the day. It deserves to be considered an important contribution to the genre of the city symphony in its own right, and not merely a preparatory sketch for Vertov’s more famous example.
