The Soviet Union in the 1920s

1. The Soviet Union in the 1920s

2. Events leading to the “October Revolution” • 2/15 March February 1917 - Emperor Nicholas II abdicates. • Provisional government continues war with Germany. • 3/16 April Lenin returns to Russia. • July a large demonstration in Petrograd is put down. • Lenin goes into hiding.

3. The October Revolution and After • 25 October/7 November 1917 - The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seize power in Petrograd. • First shot fired from battleship Aurora (photo). • The provisional government is overthrown, and Prime Minister Kerensky flees.

4. The Civil War (“War Communism”) • 3 March 1918 - a Bolshevik delegation led by Trotsky signs an armistice with Germany and Russia pulls out of the war. • 17 July 1918 Nicholas and his family are executed. • From 1918 to 1920 the Bolsheviks (“Reds”) and anticommunist forces (“Whites”) wage a war to control Russia. • Bolsheviks tighten control of the country, nationalize all industries. • 1920 the last White forces are driven out of the Crimea.

5. NEP (“New Economic Policy”) 1921-1927 • To get economy going, the Bolsheviks proclaim a new policy. • They allow private enterprise. Controls over culture are relaxed: artists need not necessarily be bolsheviks, just “fellow travellers.” • A new wealthy bourgeois class appears, to the disgust of radical bolsheviks.

6. The Power Shift • In 1924 Lenin dies. • Everyone expects that Leon Trotsky, creator of the Red Army, will be the new leader. • Instead Josef Stalin emerges and takes control. • Trotsky becomes an “unperson”: first exiled, then finally murdered in Mexico City in 1940.

7. Preparing for Conflict • Stalin perceives that Trotsky’s idea of universal revolution will not work. • Fascism is emerging as the new political reality in Europe: Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany. • The Soviet Union has a largely agricultural economy with relatively little industry: it must industrialize.

8. The first five-year plan • 1928 the first plan begins. Objective: to build dams, canals, power stations, factories. • “Collectivization” begins: the peasants must give up all their equipment, animals and land to “collectives.” • Mass arrests take place of “kulaks” (rich peasants. • Grain shipped abroad to pay for machinery. • In 1933-34 millions of peasants starve to death.

9. Dziga Vertov(David/Denis Kaufman)1896-1954

10. Dziga Vertov • Real name David Kaufman • Born in Bialystok, Poland • Pseudonym means “spinning top”, references his Jewishness (dziga = “dreidal” = “top” in Yiddish); also references the turning of the movie camera

11. Vertov after Revolution • 1918 began working for Kino-Nedelia (Cine-Week), editing newsreels, later working on the film car of an agit-poezd (propaganda train) during Civil War. • Partners with his brother Mikhail Kaufman and wife Elizaveta Svilova.

12. “Cine-Eye” • 1922 They issue The Kinoks (Cine-Eye) manifesto (from kino “cinema” + oko “eye” and okno “window”). • Photo Dziga and Mikhail

13. Kinoks Aesthetic program • Programmatic "Manifesto” • “Kino-glaz". Documentary truth. Films as “wall-newspapers” • Using one's eyes (lens as an eye). • "It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple." (Dziga Vertov)

14. Cine-Eye "Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope...now they have perfected the cine-camera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten." (Dziga Vertov)

15. Kino-glaz / Kino-Pravda • “Helping the poor widow” • “The Young Pioneers” • Kino-Pravda #1

16. Man with a Movie Camera(1929) An Exercise in Pure Cinema

17. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) • Begins with a statement of values: Against theatre, acting, scenarios • No intertitles (but many bits of text tell the story) • Continuation of "Kino-Pravda” concept

18. Genre and devices • Documentary in the genre of “Life of a City”, perhaps inspired by Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: the Symphony of a big city (1927) • “Retro” return to the beginnings of film making: the Lumière Bros. • Actually, several cities shown (Moscow, Odessa, Kharkov)

19. Devices Much more use of tricks than Eisenstein: • Rapid cross-cutting – “wake-up therapy” • Manipulation of film: splicing together of two shots

20. Ideological message • Down with NEP (New Economic Policy); • Down with bourgeois values, including feature films; • Frequent shots of advertisement for Woman’s Awakening (Das Erwachen des Weibes, Fred Sauer, 1928) – the kind of narrative film Vertov hated. • Manual labour versus service; down with bourgeois service industries (shots of beer parlours, beauty salons, etc.); • Lev Trotsky’s quote illustrated (vodka, church and cinema as “drugs” used by world capitalism against the working class).

21. Artistic message:“Laying bare the device” • Film about film-making (self-reflexive). • Begins with a shot of the movie theatre and reel of completed film. • Heroes are the film editor (played by DV’s wife Elizaveta Svilova), cameraman (played by Mikhail Kaufman, DV's brother) and the camera itself.

22. Constructivism • Glorification of technology, delight in watching machines • Camera, machines, trains, trams • A “choreography” of machines • Machines as “perfect hands” – humans become machine-like • The camera “orders” the events to happen • "I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only I alone am able to see it." (Dziga Vertov)