Dziga Vertov filled the 1920s with newsreels, documentaries, and sheer footage of astonishing beauty and wit and convinced himself that all of this was to promote and accelerate the immaculate Communist plans, no matter that the real Soviet Union was being beset by the ugly compromises of a revolution making its way. So he fell out of favor and helped crystallize the growing Party dismay over “formalist” tendencies that were ignoring “social realism” (albeit a realism constantly burdened with propaganda). So Vertov’s passion for documentary—the unblemished record, the unprejudiced observation—was betrayed by his own brilliance as much as by Party-line brutalism. When Lenin had identified film as vital to the Revolution, he believed in impartial truth for maybe a day. But as Stalin took over, the truthfulness of film was twisted out of all recognition. A film, it was clear, could mean whatever the state wanted it to mean. In which case, that volatility had to be under state control.
Some innocent audiences see The Man with a Movie Camera as characteristic of the young Vertov and the younger Revolution. But it was made in 1929, close to the end of his working life, and it came about not from an official state commission but as Vertov wandered away from official attention. Much of it was shot in Kiev and Odessa. For a moment, Vertov was free, and it is our good fortune that the film escaped intervention or state destruction. It is a tribute to the idealized figure of the cameraman, advancing with his camera and tripod, filming in the most extreme positions with cheerful aplomb, and delivering to the editor a catalogue of what the camera can do. And by then Vertov was blissfully resigned to his trusted spinning top as a compendium of trickery. So he exposes that falsehood in the beauty and the thrill of being depicted. The Man with a Movie Camera is far from an endorsement of film’s evenhanded way with reality. It takes orgasmic delight in the confusion of the real and the cinematic. A heart beats within it that says art is so much more important and useless than cockamamie claims for political salvation. As it was, Vertov lived on until 1954, in a merciful obscurity oddly indicative of the strange exile enjoyed by one of his greatest successors, Jean-Luc Godard, who wearied of being a conventional filmmaker and withdrew to his own Swiss laboratory finally aware that the world had declined to be saved, in part because film itself had done so much to spread a new alienation. People ready once to remake the world would instead gaze at screens as an alternative. It is a key transaction of the medium, the more profound for being inadvertent. A state of film had eclipsed state film.
The totality of Dziga Vertov’s work is still not widely known, in part because its beauty is monotonous but also because its topics—the incidents of revolutionary history—are now as obscure as they are fraudulent. All too often, Vertov was documenting official lies. Still, his career is a vivid demonstration of the conflict between formal excellence and propagandistic meanings in state film. Vertov might receive more attention if we did not have Sergei Eisenstein to study.
And Eisenstein is not just a significant artist; he is the hero in his own melodrama—a role that would become nearly compulsory in the lives of filmmakers. Fortunately, his legacy as a human being is more interesting than his films.
Eisenstein was born in Riga, in Latvia, in 1898, and he deserves to be regarded as among the most diversely talented and broadly educated of all filmmakers. He was the son of a civil engineer and architect, a man he adored. It was a comfortable family, and the boy traveled a good deal: in 1906, in Paris, he saw his first film, a piece by Georges Méliès. He loved to look through his father’s photograph albums, and he developed a precocious talent as an artist, often in the form of grotesque caricatures. But the likelihood remains (and is substantiated by sketchbooks exhibited in recent years) that Eisenstein could have been a graphic artist of the highest order. That skill, or talent, was shared with Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, and we should not underestimate the impact of drawing (or storyboarding) on early films. Of course, its greatest exponent would be a kid from the Midwest just three years younger than Eisenstein yet far more sweeping in discarding reality. His name was Walt Disney.
But there was no end to the young Eisenstein’s appetite: he graduated from high school in Riga, and went on to study architecture in Petrograd. But when he joined the army, he found his facility in languages. And after all that he went into the theater, at first to do sets and costumes, but then to take a growing interest in direction, under the tutelage of Vsevelod Meyerhold. There’s no doubt that the first step on Eisenstein’s part toward montage was in seeing how experimental theater could be self-interrupting, putting incongruities together (what he called “collisions”) to jostle audience preconceptions. So, almost in advance of Communist needs, Eisenstein was possessed by an urge to reorganize human perception. This was as much Picasso-like as it was prompted by Lenin.
Suppose he had left the Soviet Union on any of the occasions that offered. Suppose he had become a Parisian, rather freer to indulge his Jewishness and his gayness. He might have become a famous painter or stage director—yet all his formal ability lacked was a touch of narrative sensibility. He made up for that, or tried to, by dedicated intellectual enquiry and a capacity for discussing theory. And so it was after early short films and the shooting of material to be used in stage productions (sometimes at the Proletkult Workers’ Theatre), and assisting on re-editing Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler for showing in Russia, that in the summer of 1924 (he was a year older than Orson Welles at the time of Citizen Kane) he made his first film, Strike, like a kid demon scoring goals at soccer.
Years later Eisenstein would say that Strike (1925) was like so many first films, “bristly and pugnacious,” the way he was at the time. Let’s add “beautiful” and head over heels in love with its own medium. You can say that Strike is grief-stricken for the fate of its heroes, the strikers. But you don’t feel too much grief amid all the exuberance of making a picture, and putting it up. Strike feels like an unbroken screening of a spectacular lecture-demonstration by a group of agitprop players bowled over by the fun of what they are doing. There are horrible scenes—an infant dropped to its death by a policeman on horseback; the ritual beating up of a striker; the pell-mell heap of dead bodies—but at every step, we feel the coup of its achievement and the flourish with which it’s delivered. When the baby is dangled over an abyss at the workers’ tenements, Eisenstein and his great cameraman Eduard Tisse revel in the depth and the light of the shot. When the strike leader is brutalized, the beating is staged as a kind of dance number. And in the field of corpses, you can’t miss the marvel of all those extras and Eisenstein, with a megaphone, urging them, “Be still! Be quiet! Don’t anyone move!” Some of the corpses are smiling! They all seem to be playing a game at a picnic. And you wish you could have been there.
It’s a film in six parts, like the six steps in a lesson—and what is the point? You know what to feel in advance; it’s the great handicap that the film never quite confronts. The strikers are virtuous, brave, earthy, good-looking, energetic. They are wonderful. The bosses, the stockholders, and the police are ugly, fat, decadent—one has the lousiest teeth, which he bares as if they were weapons—prone or slouched in chairs, drinking, smoking, carousing, and issuing toxic orders on the telephone. Sooner or later you’ll get the message. The strikers are honest and noble and saints. The bosses aren’t. This could soon become tedious (and a threat of monotony hangs over state film), but for the rapture with which Eisenstein films it all, the unstoppable inventiveness of the actors, and the swaggering impact of the whole thing thrown up on a screen as if it were a blackboard in a classroom. This is theater, or pantomime, for a young experimental nation more than grown adults who realize that the struggle between capital and labor in a modern economy is very complicated. In 1925 no Soviet authority was prepared for the complexity. To strike was to overthrow corruption. Life was still very simple, even if the cinematic energy was without rival. So we never see the strategizing of union leaders or commissars. We are offered a plain choice, backed up by the terrible cr
uelty of the police. Yet in the real life of the Soviet Union, strike leaders became policemen soon enough. Nothing in Eisenstein’s way of seeing was prepared to notice that in 1924–25.
Time and again in Strike (and this still works) we exult at the way Eisenstein the caricature artist has dropped pen and paints for a camera and the light. And if the topic announces itself as grave and brutal, the movie remains gorgeous. Nothing illustrates this better than the terrific range of gesture, attitude, and violent physical elan in the inspired company of the supporting cast. (There are no stars.) These are the Proletkult Workers’ Theatre members, often staring straight into the camera, as bold as monkeys. In love with the screen, Eisenstein wants to advertise its stark role, so he rarely uses oblique angles to observe people “off guard.” (He never reaches for the privileged “intimacy” or private moments offered in American cinema.) This is film thrown in our faces. It’s like a balletic newsreel, jazzy with urgency and attack. (Had Sergei heard the first Hot Five recordings from 1925?) And in love with his players and the savage, uncritical “types” they present, Eisenstein wants to get closer to them, like a nose with cocaine, so he loves big close-ups and seething compositions where bodies writhe together in talk or battle. Never a dull or still moment. How could there be if you’re making a movie where political necessity requires that you keep a fierce hold on audience attention at all times?
The idea behind the film says the company spies are odious and treacherous, but in filming them, Eisenstein falls in love with their antics and masquerade, the dissolves that reveal disguise and cunning. You can hear the laughter between director and players—“Oh, yes, do that!”—even if you’re watching a version of the film that now has a driving, pounding score by the Alloy Orchestra, added only ten years or so ago.
When the police turn power hoses on the crowd of strikers, we see their humiliation and distress, but only for an instant, before we’re dazzled by the swirling white shapes of the water and the sight of drenched bodies trying to avoid it. It’s as if Eisenstein can hardly look at anything without being captivated by its cinematographic beauty. So the strike and its consequences become a show. There is the superb confidence of an expert circus in Strike. Imagine Cirque du Soleil putting on a new version of O—“Overthrow the Bosses”—at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and doing it in black and white with the raw glow of gold just mined. We ought to be horrified at the police brutality and the bosses’ cynicism, but the screen’s frenzy is overwhelming. That flat form is bristling, pugnacious, and alive. It crawls with vitality and exults in the imitation of realism. I’m not sure that in 1925 anyone anywhere had made a film with a greater sense of discovery and miracle. Kino, we love you, the picture says. Does it add, you’re better than life?
So why are we on our feet cheering at the end, when the portrait of working-class disaster is so grim? Of course that is the lesson meant for the huddled Soviet masses—believe in the great strike on which we are all embarked. Do what the union leaders tell you, and start off by seeing Strike! But then suppose the factory workers responded, “Great God! I don’t want to stay in a factory all my life—not even a place as pretty as Tisse saw. I want to make movies!”
I don’t think Eisenstein ever topped that debut. Of course, the next film, Potemkin, is better known. It made the director an international figure and the darling of film societies devoted to this lively Soviet art (and its promise of a new world), especially if they did not themselves have to live in Russia. For several decades, Potemkin and Eisenstein were emblematic of an alternative cinema to that of Hollywood—less controlled by money, more dedicated to the liberation of the human spirit, and supposedly more alert to social reality. For many judges, they were the acme of the art. That was wishful thinking, but we don’t have to blame it on Eisenstein or lose sight of the conundrum in Potemkin.
There really was a battleship named Potemkin, and its mutiny was an incident in the attempted revolution of 1905, if not as clear-cut or rousing as Eisenstein would have it. The ship was briefly taken over by an indignant crew. (The meat on board was bad.) The mutineers sailed to Odessa searching for supplies. That harbor city was indifferent. The ship sailed away. The mutineers quarreled, and the ship ended up back in the hands of the navy. There was no massacre on the Odessa Steps. But how many people would believe that now? Anything on film runs the risk of becoming a given for the future.
The film was shot in the late summer of 1925, and while Eisenstein had recently visited Odessa, he found more congenial steps in Sebastopol. Some commentators have claimed that the display of montage for which the film is most famous was the result of the prevailing shortage of film stock in the Soviet Union—so short ends of stock made for short shots? Not so. By the mid-1920s the Soviets had as much film as they needed. That’s how Boris Barnet and Fyodor Otsep were able to make Miss Mend only a year later, at four hours and with so many entrancing, extended shots. No, Eisenstein did montage for his best reason in the world: it was what he wanted.
The question of why he wanted it is harder to answer. Strike is an accumulation of detail in which Eisenstein was less interested in developing a fluent sequence of events than amassing aspects of it. He liked to collage pieces of action. So the set pieces are a building up of angles and shots held in place by the scheme of the sequence. The editing in Strike seldom breaks into rhythm for its own sake, though there are cutaways near the end of the film to cattle being slaughtered in an abattoir—the slashing of throats, the rush of blood—that are cut into the reprisals taken against the strikers as nothing more or less than a metaphor or a symbol. The effect is clumsy and pretentious, a distraction from the film’s heady energy.
But in Potemkin, the massacre scene was conceived and then edited as not just an accumulation or a buildup, but a buildup that vibrates with cutting’s dynamic. If you need reminding, Eisenstein’s setup has a civilian crowd (essentially middle class) gathering on the Odessa steps to applaud the mutiny, with the crowd then being attacked and dispersed by the tsar’s troops (in white jackets and caps, dark pants and boots).
The script for the picture signals the design—both the termination of civilian life and the scourge of reprisal:
A small boy, wounded, falls nearby.
In terror the crowd runs down the steps.
The boy clutches his head with his hands.
In terror the crowd runs down the steps.
Relentless, like a machine, ranks of soldiers with rifles trailed descend the steps.
In terror the crowd runs down the steps.
Behind the balustrade a group of terrified women hide—among them the elderly woman in pince-nez.
Men leap from the balustrade onto the ground.
Behind one of the balustrades a man and a woman hide.
Behind the other balustrade an old man in pince-nez, a small schoolboy and a woman hide. The old man in pince-nez is unexpectedly hit by a bullet.
A rank of soldiers fires into the crowd.
And so on—six pages in the script and seven minutes on the screen. It is more decisive and cruel as a movie, of course, because while uninterested in depth of character, Eisenstein had chosen his extras and their expressions with greedy acuity. These screaming faces are among the enduring images of the twentieth century. They are like the agonized horses’ heads in Guernica, or the paintings Francis Bacon would make from Potemkin stills. And after Strike, no one could doubt Eisenstein’s ability to choose faces or to catch them at peak emotional moments—mirth or panic, frenzy or rage. Further, while it is clear that in 1925 no one had ever seen editing or montage performed with such relentless authority and plastic beauty, the impact of the Odessa Steps sequence is still so compelling that it’s easy to forgive the minor flaw: that the massacre never happened.
But massacres do happen, and it has been the automatic assumption of film commentary ever since that Eisenstein was possessed by the idealizing pathos (his word) of the event and only wished to make us feel that.
Consider a
little more: if you mean to put a massacre in a film, it is in many respects easier to make a great list of shots, angles, and close-ups and to tick them off. It may take time to shoot them, and more time to construct the edited assembly. But it is harder and far more dangerous to say to a few thousand extras, “You fellows, the ones in uniform, attack those in their own clothes. Here are your rifles, your bayonets and swords. Now, on the word, disperse the crowd. Camera! Action!”
Think of the shower sequence in Psycho (not so weird a companion to the Odessa Steps). It runs about a minute on-screen, yet Hitchcock took five days to film it, using a detailed storyboard as his guide. No knife pierced Janet Leigh’s skin, or that of her stand-in. The nudity of the character, Marion Crane, could be hidden because the angles were so precise, mannered, and brief. One day, another shard broke in—the screams and pounding of the music and the clear sound of a knife hacking through substance. (They used watermelon apparently, but they were out for blood.) The end result is devastating. But it may be an evasion or a fabrication compared with a single, unblinking, full shot that simply observes the ghost of Mrs. Bates murdering Marion. I think we know that would not have passed the censor in 1960, when films were still not supposed to show the act of murder. Instead, Hitchcock wanted to make it artistic.
But do we really need to be educated in the principle that massacres of civilians by armed troops are wrong? Is there doubt?
The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies Page 11
