![]() ![]() The kinoks also became preoccupied with finding ways to film people without their reaction to their camera registering in the shot. She joined Vertov and his cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman as the “Council of Three” responsible for the kinoks’ gathering of images for Vertov’s Kino-Pravda newsreels (1922–1925), which incorporated animation, quick-cutting, reverse-motion, and other techniques previously unseen in documentary. She became Vertov’s lifelong editor and, in 1923, his wife. He could find no one willing to edit it to his unusual specifications, until Svilova, a Moscow Film Committee colleague, offered help. The Battle of Tsaritsyn (1920) was his first film with footage shot under his supervision. ![]() Vertov creatively compiled the most compelling sequences into feature-length documentaries. ![]() The brief Film-Weekly segments resembled Gaumont or Pathé newsreels in style. Trains carried the latest edition of Vertov’s Film-Weekly series to remote locations, along with cameramen charged with capturing images for future editions. ![]() Even as a blockade made filmmaking materials from the West a scarce commodity, Vladimir Lenin declared to Soviet culture minister Anatoly Lunacharsky that cinema was “the most important of the arts.” Newsreels were crucial in relaying information and propaganda to Soviet citizens, both peasants in the countryside and soldiers at the various fronts. Vertov’s metamorphosis was inextricable from the massive upheaval and turbulence of revolutionary Russia. In 1918, he changed his name and became the filmmaker we now remember. Petersburg), before securing a job editing newsreel for the Moscow Film Committee. Kaufman briefly attended law and medical school in Moscow and Petrograd (now St. In 1915, his family fled the German army’s advance into Bialystok, moving to Russia proper. In one experiment, he arranged the sounds of a local sawmill into a composition of noise. Instead, he wrote fantasy stories and poetry and founded a “Laboratory of Hearing,” inspired by the Russian Futurists who used art to glorify the machine age. He studied piano and violin at the Bialystok Music Conservatory in addition to his regular schooling, but later described himself as a distractible pupil, interested in learning about everything but the task at hand. Then suddenly he would grab his things and be off-on a shoot, or off somewhere with a portable projector.”īorn in 1896, David Kaufman grew up along with his two brothers, Mikhail and Boris, in Bialystok, Poland, then a largely Jewish city within the Russian Empire. One minute you might find him sitting on a windowsill explaining loudly to someone just why his style of shooting was totally wrong the next minute he would retreat completely from the world and bury himself in an open book or manuscript. Before her death in 1976, his widow Elizaveta Svilova wrote: “He was always bursting with plans and fantastic projects. Vertov’s polemical filmmaker persona has eclipsed more personal impressions of him. In the new Soviet state, the onomatopoetic nom de plume of the 22-year-old son of Jewish librarians represented a pioneering band of documentary filmmakers he called the kinoks, or “cinema eyes.” By making films to stir the masses, they hoped to change the world, and their most ambitious visual manifesto was Vertov’s final silent film, Man with a Movie Camera. The spinning of a child’s toy top or the whir of a film strip running through the wheel of an editing table-differing legends explain the inspiration for David Kaufman to adopt the alias that history immortalized: Dziga Vertov. ![]()
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