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Article Excerpt
The goal was truth, the means kino-eye.
--Dziga Vertov
One kind of aspect might be called "aspects of organization." When the aspect changes parts of the picture go together which before did not.
--Wittgenstein
In these two quotes, the filmmaker and the philosopher both plump for a worldview in which truth is the main goal and meaning is secondary. This downgrading of meaning has epistemological consequences: truth has many meanings and/or none. Another way of saying this is that it has many aspects. Accepting this, we must acknowledge that truth has no one sole principle (in Greek, arch,): it is anarchic; it has many principles. Aspectuality, having many aspects, implies anarchy. Vertov, being a Bolshevik believer, of course would roll in his grave at the thought. But Wittgenstein's philosophy (or anti-philosophy, insofar as the philosophical tradition is built on arche) illuminates Vertov's cinematic practice and shows it to be a kind of aspectuality based on mechanical vision, the "kino-eye."
I must here define Vertov's "kino-eye." "Kino" is the Russian word for cinema. A camera is a "kino-apparat." "Kino-oko" is a way of saying "cinema-eye" or "camera-eye," and so by contraction those who perform camera-eye work are "kinoks." That is, they are themselves referred to as "cinema-eyes." Vertov and his artistic comrades called themselves this in all their manifestoes, publications, etc.
Vertov in large part defined himself through opposition to what another famous Russian film director and theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, was doing. Vertov objected to Eisenstein's use of theatrical effects in cinema, to his use of actors, to any kind of fiction film in fact. He was a purist who was after reality, "the truth," and scorned those who wanted playacting in revolutionary times: his films were made as "film-poems" to, for and about the people of the Soviet Union.
Now, the whole Soviet school of the 20s was based on the idea of "montage." What is montage? The New Little Oxford Dictionary (1986) states: "selection, cutting and arrangement of shots in cinema film" (349). Since "montage" is a French word, let's look at some of its meanings in French: "taking up, carrying up; assembling, mounting, setting" (Penguin French Dictionary 193). A "chaine de montage' is an assembly line, for instance. Montage is the mounting or assembling of a film or film sequences. More specifically, it is the "selection, cutting and arrangement of shots in cinema film." There is a certain instability here: is montage a part of the construction of a film or is it the construction or assembling of a film per se?
The Soviets advocate the latter position. Lev Kuleshov, for example, declares montage to be what cinema actually is--what distinguishes it from the other arts. He claims, "[m]ontage is the organization of cinematic material" (48). "[W]e came to realize that the source of filmic impact upon the viewer lies within the system of alternating shots, which comprise the motion picture" (47). Eisenstein is in some ways merely a more aesthetic and less narrow elaboration of Kuleshov's points. However, he rounds on Kuleshov's simplicity by declaring "for in fact each sequential element is arrayed, not next to the one it follows, but on top of it" ("The Dramaturgy of Film Form," I, 164). In an examination of an alternative version of this article which was not published, Francois Albera notes that Eisenstein is referring to what is now called in the literature the "phi-effect." This is the physiological basis of the filmic illusion of movement--the flicker of the motionless frames passing in front of the eye blends into the movement of a moving image. In a sense, all Eisenstein's film theory comes from this, as he says in this alternative version:
... the movement-percept (feeling) arises in the process of the superimposition on the received impression of the first position of an object of the becoming-visible new position of the object. (Qtd. in Albera 200)
Albera notes that Eisenstein's word for "impression" in this German text is "Eindruck," "the term used in engraving" (201). Eisenstein is also thinking of the photomontages of Alexander Rodchenko (I 34).
In the published essay, he cites an analogy to Asian ideograms:
As in Japanese hieroglyphics in which two independent ideographic characters ("shots") are juxtaposed and explode into a concept. THUS: Eye + Water = Crying (164)
More revealingly, "material ideogram set against material ideogram produces transcendental result (concept)." This is "intellectual cinema." Through dialectic, the superimposition of individual frames of film, Eisenstein moves through emotion to the intellect: it is notable that Eisenstein believes this can happen using the same method. Eisenstein states his goal clearly:
An intellectual cinema of unprecedented form and social functionalism. A cinema of extreme cognition and extreme sensuality that has mastered the entire arsenal of affective optical, acoustical and biomechanical stimulants. ("Perspectives," 1929: 168) Cinema can--and consequently must--convey on the screen in tangible sensual form the pure, dialectical essence of our ideological debates. (159)
Eisenstein's conception here can be highlighted by the word "affective." Eisenstein was fascinated by the biomechanics prevalent in this period which he learned from Meyerhold. This is a kind of acting technique that tries to organize the actor's body movements in order to organize the audience's reactions. Despite Eisenstein's opening up of Kuleshov's work through conflict, contradiction and dialectic, there is a basically similar intention: organizing the audience's reactions affectively. Kuleshov believes this can be done most effectively by clear and simple narrative; Eisenstein thinks he can work on minds and emotions directly through the use of the mechanics of film.
We can see here that Eisenstein's usual idea of montage involves an overdetermined organization that synthesizes juxtapositions or superimpositions, creating a graphic succession of frames that circle back around a single theme or meaning or idea or ideology. It didactically "leads up to" something. Vertovean "framing" (as opposed to Eisensteinian montage), on the other hand, "leads out of" something. There is an awareness of process beyond the frame, indexed by the movements of the frame and within the frame. It is awareness of "life"--of what always lies beyond the frame, discontinuous with what is framed, hovering and breathing, with the individual, in the individual, but never as the individual. Vertov conceives this in terms of the apparatus of cinema itself: Man With A Movie Camera. Cinema becomes the superhuman superannuation of the individual, his or her's new eyes and ears. (1)
Against Eisenstein's overdetermined organization, Vertov poses a kind of de-termined organization, an organization of framing which encompasses and surpasses Eisensteinian montage through an aspectual vision. An "aspectual vision" in both senses, a vision of aspects and an aspect of vision. I begin my investigation of Vertovean framing with an exploration of how he defines montage.
VERTOV
Our montage goes through...
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