Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2005 Sommario / Contents

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Durante il restauro, non è stato eliminato dalla copia originale del Gosfilmofond neanche un fotogramma. Il set di 2 DVD pubblicato dal Filmmuseum di Vienna permette allo spettatore di vedere sia la vecchia copia che la nuova e include – per la prima volta su video – una dettagliata spiegazione da parte dello stesso Kubelka del restauro da lui condotto.A oltre trent’anni dalla conclusione del suo lavoro sul film, egli torna con l’archivista del Filmmuseum nella sala di montaggio per discutere e illustrare il primo impiego del cinema sonoro fatto da Vertov. Come extra, sono inclusi nel secondo disco vari documenti della collezione Vertov conservata dal Filmmuseum e finora mai apparsi in DVD. – MICHAEL LOEBENSTEIN Last year’s landmark Dziga Vertov retrospective at the Giornate gave spectators an unprecedented opportunity to see and think about the Vertov silents, all the way up to the silent version of Three Songs About Lenin (1935). This year’s DVD release by the Österreichisches Filmmuseum of Peter Kubelka’s 1972 restoration of Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1930) offers us the chance to revisit Vertov’s work in light of his pioneering experiments in documentary sound cinema. Enthusiasm, Vertov’s greatest paean to the Soviet First Five-Year Plan for economic development (1928-32), is such an overwhelming and (for many) disorienting work that a few guides to interpretation might prove useful, especially for those encountering the film for the first time. As a whole, the film has a tripartite or “three-movement” form, as Vertov himself indicated in various talks and articles from the period. Beginning with an overture (Reels 1 and 2) on the elimination of all the old detritus impeding full socialist construction (specifically religion, alcoholism, and various tsarist residues), the film moves into a long middle section (Reels 3 through 5) that passes through many of the stages of heavy industrial production, from the initial call to industrialize, through mining, smelting, and the emergence of iron itself, culminating (in Reel 6) in a final movement, where the products of industrialization flow back to the USSR (most notably to the countryside) and are celebrated. This much is fairly clear; yet from a historical perspective, the relation between this basic form and what Vertov actually intended – and even what he perhaps managed to film and to edit – remains a point of controversy.The Five-Year Plan began to be actualized in earnest in late 1929, with anti-religious, industrialization, and collectivization campaigns breaking upon the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine (where most of the film was shot) simultaneously. These campaigns, and the resistance to them, generated large-scale chaos in the Donbass and elsewhere, and did not leave Enthusiasm unmarked. Enormous problems involving transport of equipment, scheduling, and massive loss of shot and recorded material led Vertov to call Enthusiasm “a film somewhat maimed in battle. Torn apart. Grown hoarse. Covered with wounds.” Apparently, some of the wounds were made worse later on in the studio; documents reveal Vertov complaining bitterly to administrators at the Kiev studio about late preparation of prints, lifting of stills for use in other films, and (most importantly) poor synchronization. Matters are further complicated by the fact that, after some harsh criticism offered after a 127 screening of a rough cut in Kiev in November 1930, Vertov himself apparently cut the film from (according to one source) 3100 to 1800 metres – a very drastic abbreviation indeed. Most crucially, perhaps, the difficulties encountered during shooting seem to have affected the very structure of the film in fundamental ways.The planned itineraries for spring 1930 make it clear that Vertov intended Enthusiasm to encompass far more diverse material – including footage of schools, nurseries, sanitoria, the activities of cultural centers – than we see in the finished film. A whole additional section of the film was to be dedicated to workers’ leisure, with a representative worker of the Donbass (“I, a worker of the Donbass”) ascending a marble staircase to his new palace of culture, where he would enjoy playing chess, listening to the radio, making music, singing, poetry, and so on (we might turn to the “workers’ club” sequence in Man with a Movie Camera for an analogue). It seems that Vertov couldn’t decide if this celebration of leisure would occupy the first or the last section of Enthusiasm, but it was certainly central to his conception of the film, which ended up showing all work and no (or almost no) play, so to speak. At the same time, Enthusiasm is no mere casualty of the excesses of the Plan period, but fully participates in it by (to use the rhetoric of the day) “fulfilling and overfulfilling the Plan on the sound-cinema front”. Enthusiasm is a breakthrough work, and a quality of strain, of deliberate overreaching, was virtually explicit in the project from the start. (And was entirely deliberate:Vertov and his co-workers officially declared themselves “shock workers” [on the pages of Pravda] midway through the production.) For Soviet filmmakers the main target to be reached in 1929-30 was sound film as such; needless to say,Vertov’s own kino-eye convictions led him beyond this goal toward the truly “impossible” feat of documentary sound/image recording, including live sync sound. Documentary sound film had widely been dismissed as a fantasy, most famously by critic Ippolit Sokolov, who claimed in 1929 that “natural sound was not phonogenic” and that sound recording outside the studio would yield only “caterwauling”.With these words, Sokolov threw down a gauntlet that Vertov was only too eager to pick up. After all, Vertov had been engaged in sound montage (in his still poorly understood “laboratory of hearing” of 1916, where he reportedly recorded water, sawmills, and other sounds, probably with a dictaphone-type device) even before he started making films.While conceiving the sound plan for Enthusiasm, he drafted and recorded a musique-concrète work (comparable in its aspirations to Walter Ruttmann’s contemporaneous Week-End) called the “sound march”, which incorporated (among other material) parts of an original score composed by Vertov and Nikolai Timofeev, and represented the transition from Old (church bells, alcoholic bellowing) to New (industrial sound, proletarian marches) in purely sonic terms. The piece was presented to a movie-theatre audience in April 1930; one reviewer present at that unique event noted that the sounds of authentic drunken profanity removed any doubts he might have had as to the “documentary character of the recording”. But why, we might ask, was documentary sound so important to Vertov; why did he so categorically reject all suggestions (offered by, among FUORI QUADRO OUT OF FRAME
others, Alexander Shorin, who invented the sound system used in Enthusiasm) that studio-generated simulations of industrial sound would be equally (or more) effective than on-site recordings, and far easier to realize? Comments offered in articles and discussions suggest that Vertov in Enthusiasm was intent upon making the lived experience of workers – experience that could in some way be captured, he believed, by mechanical registrations – manifest and comprehensible to a non-worker audience. Thus, no “simulation” of the sounds of industrial labor could suffice for Vertov’s purposes. On at least one occasion, he insisted that the film contained no “noise”, but did contain sounds whose logic and meaning were (as yet) unfamiliar to most of us.A new collective existence, Vertov seemed to believe, requires an education in the sensory environments of all the members of the society, in order that the “noise”, the misunderstood and dishonored perceptual worlds of others, might gradually be comprehended and incorporated into the creative imaginations of Soviet citizens as a group.This aspiration explains, in part, Enthusiasm’s extraordinary blurrings and overlappings of musical and non-musical sound: what we know (musical sound) is used to acquaint us with what we don’t know (non-musical, industrial sound) through cinema’s powers of registration, comparison, synthesis, and projection. At the same time, not all of society’s “tonalities” are incorporated into Vertov’s symphony: the film begins, as we have noted, with the preliminary exclusion of Russian Orthodoxy from the social sphere. Still more poignantly, the strange and disturbing “countryside” sequences in Reel 6 may serve to remind us that traditional peasant culture (the culture of the majority of Russia’s population at the time) could find no place, except for an aestheticized place, in the new culture ushered in by the Plan.The film was fairly widely exhibited in Germany in the autumn of 1931 (until being banned by the government on 5 October), and German critics felt freer than their Soviet counterparts to reflect on the social-historical implications of Enthusiasm as a “Plan”-film. Hermann Sinsheimer, stunned and astonished by Vertov’s achievement, wondered whether the film’s sensory overload betrayed something of the excessive burden being placed on Soviet citizens by the Plan; meanwhile, the reviewer for the Rote Fahne (who had panned Man with a Movie Camera a couple of years earlier) found Enthusiasm’s intensity purely sublime and an inspiration: “ein Reichtum, nicht ein Zuviel” (“an abundance, not an excess”).The critics’ contrasting responses remain provocative, I think, and help to focus important aspects of the ongoing reception of this evercontroversial film. A final note on the title(s). Both Enthusiasm and Symphony of the Donbass were attached to the film from the earliest stages of preparation and production. Symphony of the Donbass has been the primary Soviet title, with Enthusiasm as a frequently-added subtitle; that hierarchy has generally been reversed everywhere else the film has been exhibited. Apparently, Vertov’s own preferred title was Enthusiasm – a watchword of the First Five-Year Plan period, along with “shock work”, “socialist construction”, and so on – but Symphony of the Donbass seems to have won out in the USSR because of its more overt reference to the actual regional context out of which the film emerged. Enthusiasm 128 is a Ukrainian film, after all, and it would have been important directly to indicate that regional-national pedigree in the title – especially considering that (as Vertov’s archive indicates) mutterings had been heard about a “non-Ukrainian” directing the first Ukrainian sound film. – JOHN MACKAY The Restoration In 1972 Peter Kubelka, avant-garde filmmaker and co-founder of the Österreichisches Filmmuseum, began work on a restoration of Dziga Vertov’s Entuziazm. What has over the years become known as the “Kubelka version” of the film actually is a straightforward though striking “re-synchronization” of image and sound. Since his initial exposure to Entuziazm, Kubelka had always been puzzled by the seemingly arbitrary relation of sound events to images, especially in the long middle section depicting industrial work in the steel mills. After separating image and sound, and recombining them on the editing table, he found out that both could be re-combined to tremendous effect: Vertov’s quest for sync sound (considered either impossible to achieve or dubious in concept when he started shooting the film) becomes tangible reality in this reworking of the relation between hearing and seeing. No frames of the original Gosfilmofond print were edited out during the restoration. The new 2-DVD set published by the Österreichisches Filmmuseum allows the viewer to see both the old print and the restoration in a new transfer. It additionally includes – for the first time on video – a detailed demonstration by Peter Kubelka on his restoration. More than 30 years after the initial work was completed, he and the Filmmuseum’s archivist revisit the editing room to discuss and to demonstrate Vertov’s first deployment of sound cinema. As an extra, the second disc includes various documents from the Filmmuseum’s Vertov collection previously unpublished on DVD. – MICHAEL LOEBENSTEIN IL PADRONE DELLE FERRIERE (Itala Film, IT 1919) Re./dir: Eugenio Perego; scen: Giuseppe Maria Viti, dal romanzo di/from the novel by Georges Ohnet, Le maître des forges (1882); f./ph: Antonio Cufaro; cast: Pina Menichelli (Clara de Beaulieu), Amleto Novelli (Filippo Derblay), Luigi Serventi (Duca di Bligny), Lina Millefleurs (Athenaide Moulinet), Maria Caserini-Gasperini (Marchesa di Beaulieu), Myriam De Gaudi (Signora Derblay); ppp/rel: 25.2.1919 (Roma); lg. or./orig. l: 1670 m.; 35mm, c. 1383 m., 68’ (18 fps), imbibito e virato/tinted & toned, Cineteca di Bologna, Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino. Didascalie in italiano / Italian intertitles. Fecondo autore di feuilleton, Georges Ohnet è – tra Otto e Novecento – uno degli scrittori maggiormente apprezzati presso gli strati più popolari di lettori: con uno stile di scrittura semplice ed elementare, nei sui romanzi narra vicende romantiche e passionali, unendole a temi sociali fortemente ancorati ad una realtà in rapido cambiamento come quella che vede la progressiva decadenza
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CATALOGO CATALOGUE LE GIORNATE DEL
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Davide Turconi, Prophet of the Sile
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Introduzioni e note di / Introducti
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esplorato in due pellicole: il risc
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Premio Jean Mitry / The Jean Mitry
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Eventi musicali / Musical Events EV
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THE MUSIC OF COMEDY LIBERTY (Hal Ro
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Laurel & Hardy silents routinely fe
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SHOCHIKU 110 - NARUSE 100 ZANJIN ZA
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al film, vendendo le copie a 16mm a
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EVENTO FINALE / CLOSING EVENT L’H
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Quando la Garbo ricevette il copion
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discreto. La rifacevo un tre-quattr
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26 PRIMA MONDIALE / A WORLD PREMIER
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tedesca. Pur lodato come un capolav
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cooperation with George Eastman Hou
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pellicole, padre Bamberger, e David
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macchina da presa rimane sempre fis
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La luce dell’oriente: omaggio al
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Prog. 2 ASAHI WA KAGAYAKU [L’ “
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sequenza iniziale, con Omitsu che e
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and the happy ex-convicts who enjoy
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Giappone anche per la serie del “
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JP 1932) Re./dir: Hotei Nomura; sog
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di montaggio e alla costruzione deg
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Antoine cineasta e il realismo fran
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compreso quello del realismo nel ci
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which the action is played without
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of actions caught in flagrante, as
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scaturita dal restauro diretto da P
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Française celebrity Maxime Desjard
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Cineteca Nazionale. In 1973 a black
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The peasant films in particular doc
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L’Hirondelle et la Mésange, whic
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For one thing, L’Atre refuses the
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second film, that more accurately d
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dimostrazione il modo con cui il fi
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oscura la tragica sorte dello zio B
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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2005 Sommario / Contents

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