Hello! Welcome to Comm 100b Documentary History and Theory. We will be blogging here, posting our film reviews and discussing the films together.

The fours films on which you can post your first review are Stranger With a Camera; Nanook and Nanook Revisited; and Man With a Movie Camera.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking:

How does Nanook raise questions about ethics, as discussed in class and by Nichols?
How does Nanook Revisited raise and address those ethics questions?

Man With a Movie Camera was made in a highly experimental style for its time. I forgot to mention that his camera was hand-wound! In fact his name, "Spinning Top," derived from the sound of he cranked camera. Vertov, Kaufman and Svilova, the director, cinematographer and editor, called themselves "the council of three"--Kafman and Vertov were brothers, and Vertov and Svilova married. They were interested in making films that brought men and machines together, and that celebrated labor and the worker in form, not just in content. By the mid 1930s Stalin was advocating for socialist realism in full force. Abstraction like we see in this film was repressed and considered not appropriate for the Soviet state ethos. Vertov embraced the former leader Lenin's view that communism had not only a humanist face but also a "face" brought to light by revolutionary artistic style. Vertov felt that fiction film was like "film vodka," inebriating people (he meant that as a bad thing). When other filmmakers and artists conformed to the realist and narrative fictional style of the repressive Stalisnist era of the mid to late 30s and 1940s, Vertov held true to his beliefs and faded into the job of staff editor for film newsreels. This was after making a kind of blockbuster hit Three Songs of Lenin, which Stalin's people had him re-edit to include a tribute to Stalin. He held his ground esthetically and unlike many artists did not bend to conformity with the realist style. He died in obscurity (from cancer) in 1954. But his values and ideas lived on in film styles and movements we will see throughout our quarter: cinema verité and the Dziga Vertov Group are two legacies we will discuss. 

I would love to hear your thoughts on Vertov's revolutionary style and his devotion to a kind of celebration of a "machine" vision of human labor and the work of the human hand on all sorts of jobs. Be sure to be descriptive, and to pose ideas for thought, debate and controversy!