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53 VertovSestaja_booklet:ef 14.12.2009 11:42 Uhr Seite 14 Im Projekt Digital Formalism wurden zum ersten Mal systematisch und ausführlich die widersprüchlichen Literaturangaben über die ursprüngliche Länge des Films überprüft. Dazu wurden zunächst alle Schnitte von Odinnadcatyj manuell annotiert (insgesamt 654 Einstellungen) und diese anschließend mittels automatischer Shot-Erkennung mit Im Schatten der Maschine verglichen. Insgesamt konnten 30 Einstellungen in Im Schatten der Maschine als aus Odinnadcatyj stammend identifiziert werden, die bis auf eine alle aus dem letzten Akt stammen. Wir können also sicher sagen, dass Blum 39,5 Meter Vertov in seinen Film kompiliert hat, was – bei 20 Bildern pro Sekunde – etwa 103 Sekunden entspricht. Das Finale von Im Schatten der Maschine besteht darüber hinaus aus 39 zusätzlichen, rasant montierten Einstellungen. So gut wie alle diese Bilder verweisen auf Vertovs Film, wie wir ihn kennen – manchmal sind sie mit Einstellungen aus Odinnadcatyj ident, in manchen Fällen sind es Variationen auf uns bereits bekannte Einstellungen. Wir können also annehmen, dass zumindest ein Teil des verlorenen Finales von Odinnadcatyj in Blums Kompilation erhalten ist. Laut eigenen Angaben hat Blum aber 86 Meter aus Odinnadcatyj entwendet – eine Metrage, die sich selbst unter Einbeziehung dieses vermeintlichen Finales nicht verifizieren lässt. Hat Blum sich bei der Niederschrift dieser Meterangabe schlicht geirrt? Oder bezieht sich seine Längenangabe auf das gesamte Teilstück, das er zur Nachbearbeitung aus der Kopie entfernt hatte? Manche Fragen bleiben auch weiterhin offen. Adelheid Heftberger, Aleksandr Derjabin Der ROM-Bereich auf Disc 2 enthält ein ausführlicheres Dossier zur „Affäre Blum“ Shadow of a doubt Odinnadcatyj and Im Schatten der Maschine The Blum Affair When Dziga Vertov traveled abroad for the first time in May of 1929, screening excerpts of his film Odinnadcatyj (The Eleventh Year) during his lectures at German film clubs, the press accused him of plagiarism. He supposedly used scenes from the German film In the Shadow of the Machine by Albrecht Viktor Blum and Leo Lania in his film The Eleventh Year without crediting them. Vertov was perplexed because the opposite was true: his film had not yet been shown in Germany, and was ransacked by Blum and Lania for their compilation. In mid-October of 1928 Austrian communist activist Albrecht Viktor Blum received the commission to produce an “exemplary short” for the VFV (Volksfilmverband) entitled In the Shadow of the Machine by the head of VFV, author-playwright Leo Lania. The film was produced as a compilation film. Blum reported in Film-Kurier (5.11.1928): “It will be assembled from excerpts of partly unpublished Ukrainian films. […] Some American footage has also been used. To get material as impressive as possible, a number of films, 50–60, have been viewed.” What is interesting, from a methodological point of view, is the fact that Blum, through his editing, instills the images with a reverse meaning: enthusiasm for technical progress turns into its criticism. As he described it in his own words: “The machine invented by man to serve man progressively turns into man’s master. Indeed, in the end, man will be no more than a handyman, a slave of the machine itself.” This concept stems from Lania who had developed it earlier in his report “Machine and Poetry” (Arbeiter-Zeitung, 22.11.1927). Presseartikel aus der Vertov-Sammlung / Press clippings from the Vienna Vertov Collection
53 VertovSestaja_booklet:ef 14.12.2009 11:42 Uhr Seite 16 The film’s techno-critical intention is due to the German proletarian context for which the film was made: Under capitalist conditions, workers perceive technology as mere rationalization and Taylorization. Blum’s film consists mainly of the 5 th reel of Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (SU 1928) and the last part of Dziga Vertov’s Odinnadcatyj. According to Blum, he had inte grated 282 feet (= 3’50’’ at 20 frames per sec) from Vertov’s film almost unaltered into his own film, as “these passages already included the thoughts to be expressed.” But there is no mention, for example, of his intervention in the footage by inserting title cards. This prompted Vertov to defend himself vehemently in the press against these accusations, although the Soviet Trade Commission wanted to hush up the affair for political reasons. Vertov regarded the matter as a legal affair of copyright infringement and plagiarism. Blum stated that his patron, Weltfilm, stopped him from naming the sources for his film because of import quota regulations. To be declared a German film by the censorship committee, it had to be free of any foreign material. Thomas Tode Trailing the footage As with many of Dziga Vertov’s films, the original shape of The Eleventh Year remains unclear. According to “Repertuarnyj bulletin“ and “Repertuarnyj ukazatel,“ the original length of the film was 5,250 feet. Other sources say it was only 4,685 feet. The print preserved at Gosfilmofond of Russia and the Austrian Film Museum measures 4,032 feet. As of yet, there is no definite explanation for these differences. There are no records of another version of the film to be found in the Russian press or the Vertov archive in Moscow. A comparison of the intertitles in the existing copy with a list of intertitles from a 1928 autograph in the Vertov collection at the Austrian Film Museum shows some interesting divergences. Seven title cards are missing from the print, which were all meant to appear at the beginning and end of a film reel. This is documented in the Rom section on this DVD. In any case, the existing copy of The Eleventh Year has most likely not been a victim of censorship. Already in the second half of 1931, the film was pulled from distribution; therefore there was no need to create a new version. It seems more plausible that VUFKU reused the footage for different purposes. Film director Abram Room used parts of the original negative when he edited his compilation film Pjatiletka. Unfortunately, this work cannot support a reconstruction of lost sequences from Vertov’s film – Pjatiletka is considered a lost film. It is also possible that Vertov himself reused parts of the negative in the making of Man with a Movie Camera (which he finished shortly after the premiere of The Eleventh Year), Enthusiasm and Three Songs of Lenin. Vertov’s concept of an “author’s filmotheque” which he documented in diagrams and writings as a register of shots which can be reused in various contexts, would solidify this theory. In the canonical “editing room” sequence of Man with a Movie Camera, which visualizes this concept, one can spot numerous duplicates and alternative takes of motives and subjects known from The Eleventh Year. In Three Songs of Lenin there is a long sequence of shots depicting the construction of the Dnepr Hydroelectric Station – which is quite similar to subjects described by Vertov in an autograph on Odinnadcatyj (V 72 in the Vienna Vertov Collection). The project Digital Formalism verified the contradicting references to the original length of the film for the first time, systematically and extensively. First, all takes from The Eleventh Year were manually annotated, and then compared with Blum’s German compilation film via automatic shot identification. Blum’s statement about the use of footage from Vertov’s film could now be evaluated based on the actual footage. Altogether, 30 takes from In the Shadow of the Machine were identified as stemming from The Eleventh Year; all but one from the last reel. Further, each of the identical shots was juxtaposed frame by frame (sometimes Blum only used parts of a shot) with its respective take from Vertov’s film to Odinnadcatyj, Im Schatten der Maschine determine the exact number of frames. We can safely say that Blum compiled 129.6 feet of Vertov’s film in his own film, which equals – at 20 frames per second – about 103 seconds. The ending of In the Shadow of the Machine consists of an additional 39 rapidly edited shots. Almost all of these images refer to Vertov’s film as we know it – sometimes they are identical to The Eleventh Year, and sometimes they are variations on familiar shots. We may therefore assume that parts of the lost ending of The Eleventh Year have been preserved in Blum’s compilation. According to Blum, he used 282 feet from The Eleventh Year – a claim which cannot be verified, even when adding the alleged ending. Was Blum simply mistaken? Or does the length specification refer to the entire length of the reel from which he ‘borrowed’ the original? So far, we have only identified a single take as stemming from The Eleventh Year, which as such does not exist in the film anymore. Some questions will remain unanswered. Adelheid Heftberger, Aleksandr Derjabin The ROM section on Disc 2 contains an extended version of this article as well as some original documents of the “Blum affair”.
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