Dziga Vertov's Three Songs about Lenin (1934): A Visual Tour through the History of the Soviet Avant-Garde in the Interwar Years

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the relationship between the films of Dziga Vertov and Soviet photography during the interwar years. While Vertov's reputation has long been established in the film canon as one of the seminal Soviet Montage directors, analysis of his work is almost always reduced to a single film, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). This paper proposes to look at another Vertov film, the often ignored Three Songs about Lenin, and it makes a case for the latter film as the best and most comprehensive example of Vertov's aesthetic and ideological beliefs. Moreover, I also argue that Three Songs about Lenin provides us with the perfect vehicle to consider Soviet Montage Cinema within the larger frame of the Soviet avant-garde, and to understand its role, stylistic debts and influence. While all studies of Soviet Montage acknowledge the close relationship between film and the other arts, an in-depth study of this relationship is often lacking, as film studies and art history tend to follow strictly separate paths. Such a division has more to do with traditions in academia, than with the artists and directors themselves, who often collaborated with, mentioned and discussed each other's works. This is especially the case with photographers, who by the very nature of their medium are closest to film, and whose role in both defining the outlook and signaling the many transformations of the Soviet avant-garde cannot be overestimated. In fact, as this analysis of Three Songs about Lenin hopes to show, a study of Soviet photography is crucial to an understanding of Vertov's films and his stylistic evolution inside the Montage movement. This paper, therefore, proposes Three Songs about Lenin as the perfect site for an interdisciplinary approach that looks at Soviet Montage film as part of the Soviet avant-garde arts. In addition, it hopes to bring attention to the individual qualities of this long neglected, but brilliant film.

Few would dispute that in the years between the two world wars the Soviet Union witnessed one of the most innovative, prolific, influential and polemic periods of the modern era. The radical, effervescent, theoretical and practical activity in areas such as photography, cinema, literature and literary theory, painting, advertisement, design, theater or poetry (not to mention politics and economics), irreversibly affected both the art and the history of this century. Given the extent and complexity of artistic movements, artifacts and documents, as well as the sheer quantity of media involved, a comprehensive analysis of the period seems initially quite a daunting task. However, some general notions or directions can and have been perceived in the evolution of the Soviet avant-garde from 1971 to 1936, from the enthusiastic chaos of the Revolution to the centralized artistic doctrine of Stalinism.

As a necessary, unifying, initial perspective, one must realize that all cultural debates were played against the backdrop of the same highly charged political and ideological context. In other words, all artists across the cultural spectrum were searching for the same goals and discussing the same issues, particularly in those areas intrinsically related to each other. The historian of Soviet photography cannot afford to neglect the neighboring media of advertisement, design or, of course, the one Lenin defined as the most important for Communism, the cinema. Reciprocally, the film historian can greatly improve his/her appreciation of the period by looking at Soviet photography. It is the purpose of these pages to examine Dziga Vertov's last major film Three Songs about Lenin from the perspective of the history of photography. Three Songs about Lenin offers an insuperable compendium of the history of avant-garde Soviet photography between 1917 and 1936, and is therefore a quite extraordinary case study for the understanding of the practices and debates of the period...