Booklet - Österreichisches Filmmuseum

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”.