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FIVE Esfir Shub, Factography, and the New Documentary Historiography Today it’s utterly inconceivable how we could get by without the photographer who takes pictures of the Five-Year Plan, who takes pictures of the launch and growth of our industrial giants, and thereby carries out a great and authentic agitation through display. The juxtaposition, for example, of a photograph of a tiny village on a putrid little river with one taken a year later in which a glass building has replaced the village—such stunning juxtapositions force you to radically reconsider the obsolete notion of a “human lifetime,” for our century equals a millennium in earlier times. —Sergei Tret'iakov, “From the Photo-Series to Extended Photo-Observation” (1931) The “play” side of art shouldn’t be exaggerated. The phenomenon of “play” is inherent in art, but art itself periodically reorientates itself towards the material. —Viktor Shklovsky, “Lef and Film” (1927) The Kaleidoscopic and Collective Knowledge Title: buses assemble at the soviet. Tight shot of a truck bearing down on us. Trams hastily leave their station. Title: in place of public 156 Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film speakers. A low-angle image of a loudspeaker. Title: in place of applause . Increasingly rapid close-ups of a hand squeezing a horn, a finger pushing a horn button, a pulsing cone-shaped amplifier, and the loudspeaker . Title: welcoming you. Six shots of circular automotive parts. Loudspeaker. Title: in the name of the soviet. Loudspeaker. The Moscow Soviet symbol appears. It becomes superimposed over a wheel. It reemerges on its own. Superimposed again, this time over steps on a bus. Loudspeaker. In 1925, the Moscow Soviet, faced with an election in 1926, decided to commission a documentary film that would portray its numerous accomplishments during the past year. This resulting film was Dziga Vertov’s Stride, Soviet!, and the sequence I describe above is Vertov’s way of “covering” the election rally of 1925 held in front of the Mossoviet building. There are no people present at this rally. Machines speak to machines, which listen (cone motif), watch (circular motif), and applaud (horns and pulsing). For Vertov, the replacement and combination (via superimposition) of the human with the mechanical points to the possibility of what he called “the perfect electric man.”1 Not surpris3 .202] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16:17 GMT) Figure 5.1-Figure 5.3. (left and above) Attentive automobiles at the Moscow Soviet election rally of 1925 in Stride, Soviet! 158 Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film ingly, members of the Mossoviet Presidium were dumbfounded to see their well-attended election rally devoid of people. Various members described the film as “too kaleidoscopic,” “incomprehensible to peasants,” and just simply “too fast.”2 And they were keenly aware that machines could not vote. When one recalls the critical response to Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World discussed at the end of chapter 3, the reaction by the Presidium should not come as a surprise. But additionally, these reactions point to a larger concern about Vertov’s and other 1920s experimental artists ’ aesthetic and methodological choices. Many critics and political leaders felt that avant-garde art had become incomprehensible to the masses, and they sought a new dialogue between cultural producers and audiences that would result in the achievement of the contemporary watchword—intelligibility. In the pages of the journal Novyi Lef, critics encouraged the correction of what they saw as an inherent problem with the production art of the 1920s, which, they felt, had deemphasized the symbolic and ideological components of objects. They believed that many Constructivist artists (including Vertov), in their efforts to transform the intellectual and perceptual lives of their audiences, had created an uneven relationship with audiences. The conversation had become too one-sided, critics contended, recognizing “only the sensuous and somatic features of objects.” To rectify the situation, artists had to engage “not just with physical and dimensional bodies, but also with bodies of collective social knowledge and the networks of communication.”3 In order for work to perform a “great and authentic agitation through display ,” as Sergei Tret'iakov writes,4 they had to return the compositional aspect to the work. They had to find a place for the informational and discursive components of language if they were to generate productive conversations and productive citizens. This was especially true for discussions of nonfiction film, which was presumed to possess a unique capacity to aid in generating productive citizens. Shortly after Vertov was dismissed from...

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