Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film

Previous interpreters of Dziga Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934; reedited in 1938 and 1970) have tended to read the film as either a drastic and regrettable break with his experimental practice of the 1920s, or (more rarely) as a grand summation of many aspects of that practice. Both readings have assumed that the figure of Joseph Stalin was essentially absent from the original 1934 version, while offering different reasons for that presumed absence. The present essay argues for a different reading of the film, one that takes into account both the continuities and discontinuities between Vertov's documentary practice in the early 1930s, and (as archival research reveals) Stalin's thoroughgoing onscreen presence in the original film. The 1934 Three Songs of Lenin was Vertov's most successful attempt to make his constructivist concerns with material change and motion cohere with the new Stalinist cultural order, specifically by recoding those concerns in terms of the value now placed on "individual experience" and "folk creativity".