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Discourse 24.3 (2002) 95-113



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Wittgenstein and Vertov:
Aspectuality and Anarchy

Thomas W. Sheehan


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, arché): it is an-archic; 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 arché) 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 [End Page 95] 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 "châine 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, François 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...

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