The National CollegeArt and Society: Inside and Out
Brecht and Vertov: Evolution of a Truth in Art
Andrew Keogh
Bertolt Brecht is regarded by many as the most influential playwright/poet of the last century. He argued for an 'epic', political theatre that documents the society of its time and through historic objectification enlightens the audience.1 Although the influence Brecht has had on theatre has become enshrined in history, his effect on filmmaking and cinema is still quite understated. Brecht never produced a critique of the medium; however, Marc Silberman in Brecht on Film and Radio informs us, 'both his practical work and his commentaries on it were devoted to articulating media-specific modes of representation and reception' (Silberman, 2000, p. IX). Brecht had helped to develop the 'epic' theatre in Weimar with the theatre director Erwin Piscator. They saw a need for a political theatre, documenting society through objective historic reference. A number of devices were created to reinforce the audience's contemplative frame of mind and break from the traditional or Aristotelian theatrical form of a continuous narrative, where the audience are drawn in to empathise with the characters and provoke a morale through a cathartic response. Epic theatre utilises Verfremdungseffekte (v-effects), a deconstructing of the spectator and 'making strange' of the social world. Effects such as an episodic narrative, frequent interruptions by voiceover or inserts, drawing analogies between sport and art, non-naturalistic acting, separation of sound and image, self conscious staging of scenes, quotations from diverse sources, to-audience addresses (breaking the fourth wall) and taking a didactic stance were employed in the work. Brecht went further in developing an epic theory than Piscator.
'Brecht embraced the new technical adjuncts more as a means of breaking the audience involvement and recalling it to the critical attitude i.e. the new technical means were, above all, to give documentary backing to the story - the aim must be to get the audience as closely involved in the argument as if it were a political meeting'. (Willett, 1986, p. 111)
Were Brecht and Piscator alone in their thinking? Indeed, were these ideologies even uniquely recognised, are they a development in art based on its traditions? One of the most renowned filmmakers of the twentieth century - film's first - had already been applying quite a few of the mentioned devices to his filmmaking, thus inventing such devices referred to as Brechtian today.
Dziga Vertov (this pseudonym roughly translates as 'spinning top') was a constructivist, who carried out groundbreaking work concerning the documentary. He applied many and varied v-effects in his work, most notably in his classic film Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1928, USSR). Man with a Movie Camera was released before Brecht had established himself and used epic devices in his theatre. Vertov must thus be viewed as a filmmaker of the first order with regard to revolutionary technique and ideology, complementing Brecht's 'epic' approach. John Willett addresses Brecht's hegemony in The New Sobriety,
'It is fairly clear that in Brecht's case the practice came before the theory, for his actual composition of the play, with its switching around of the scenes and characters, even the physical cutting up and sticking together of the typescript, shows that montage was the structural technique most natural to him. Like Hasek and Joyce he had not learnt this scissors-and-paste method from the Soviet cinema but picked it out of the air' (Willett, 1978, p. 110)
Brecht himself does, however, admit to the inspiration of the Constructivist movement regarding an artwork subservient to society, documenting it in a non-narrative form. Vertov was a member of the communist party, Lenin's state cinematographer, a constructivist and member of the Soviet Futurist group. All this informed his work with his Kinoki or 'cinema-eye' group. The importance and relevance of Man with a Movie Camera can only be approximated when a number of issues are regarded. One must be aware of the politics and economy of the Soviet Union in the twenties, the ideology of the Kino-Eye group and strongly held beliefs of Vertov, Elisa Svilova, his wife, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, documented in the numerous manifestos and articles they printed. Kuhle Wampe (Dudow, 1932, Germany) was Brecht's most successful effort in filmmaking and quite a few of his epic devices can be seen here, which Vertov had already devised while implementing and evolving his Kino-Pravda.
Vertov had been working editing newsreels in the Soviet Newsreel Studio on the production of The Film Weekly since 1918. This was basic editing, but nevertheless proved to be valuable experience for him, especially in such hard times when film stock and equipment were difficult to acquire. Things were so desperate that positive stock had to be re-emulsified and re-used to make short agit-prop films (agitki) for the party. Electricity was even in shorter supply than film: one can imagine the viewing conditions of such 'agitki'. Mikhail Koltsov, with whom Vertov had studied at the Psycho-Neurological Institute, had appointed him to this position. Vertov then went on to work under Koltsov at the Moscow Cinema Committee, where he was in charge of preparing subtitles and directing cameramen documenting the fighting on the various fronts of the civil war. Vertov still was not satisfied with the banality of how the newsreel captured and showed the revolution. He wanted to express the meaning of the revolution with more passion and truth, as he saw it. This lead him to his proposal for a series of film journals under the general title of Kino-Pravda in 1924, making him the first to edit a newsreel into a documentary on a fixed theme.
'I am the Cinema I. I am the mechanical I. I am the machine showing the world as it is, which only I am able to see. From today, forever, I free myself from human immovability. I am in continuous movement. I approach and retreat from things, I crawl under them I climb on them. I move alongside of the galloping heads of horses. I cut at full speed into a crowd. I run in front of attacking soldiers. I throw myself on my back. I pace myself together with the aeroplane. I fall and I fly, together with falling and flying bodies'. (Marshall, 1983, p. 68)
This excerpt from a Kinok manifesto written in 1923 gives one an idea of Vertov's passion and determination and his approach to the medium. His ideas for a cinema serving the party and the masses made him a constant thorn in the side of his fellow filmmakers, or those who would not concur with statements like the following:
'Down with the actor! Down with make-up! Down with film scripts!….Cinema drama is the opium of the people. Cinema drama and religion are a deadly weapon in the hands of the capitalists. Down with the bourgeois fairytale scenario! Long live life as it is!' (Marshall, 1983, p. 69).
These statements appear very aggressive in their tone, and may have lost some of their prospective impact through a lack of open dialogue.
Vertov was a member of the Futurist movement and along with such renowned figures as Mayakovsky, Brik and Tretyakov, he went about producing works that were based on documentary facts. This is where a link with Brecht can be established: Tretyakov was a friend of Brecht's and,
'Tretyakov was among the handful of people whom Brecht acknowledged as his teachers, and his familiarity with the ideas of the LEF group [of which Vertov was a member] played a crucial part in the evolution of Brecht's theories. Not that this was Tretiakoff 's only contribution to German-Soviet relations at the time, for in the book which he wrote after his German lecture tour he also discussed figures such as Heartfield, Piscator, Eisler and Wolf, whom he presented along with Brecht as 'People of the same Bonfire' and did his best to help promote in the USSR'. (Willett, 1978, p. 217)
Herbert Marshall supplies us with an appropriate extract from Mayakovsky's epic poem of facts of the October Revolution called Very Good, which I shall quote here, as it may help with an understanding of Futurist ideology:
'Time
Is an unusually lengthy
Thing-
'Once upon a time' -
but folk poems passed by
Neither legends,
Nor epics,
Nor epopees sing.
Stanzas now
Like telegrams fly!
Bend down
And drink
Through lips parched and cracked
From the river
Known as - 'fact' (Marshall, 1983, p. 72)
Vertov wrote a description of Man With a Movie Camera. Therefore, rather than paraphrasing Vertov, I shall stay 'true to the fact' and insert relevant information where needed.
'The film actually begins in a cinema theatre with the public entering and taking their places. The projectionist loads the projector, switches it on and the screen lights up with the title part one' (Marshall, 1983, p. 72-73)
Again, Vertov is showing the 'workings' of film. This was to become a feature of Brecht's work, especially with his set designer Caspar Neher, who argued for a revealing of the structure of the play or film showing the viewer the apparatus used in the creation of the work. (Neher would highlight such features as half-curtains and the wooden supports holding up the set, incorporating these into the overall work). 'The screen in the cinema merges with the screen on which the film is being shown. It is the morning of the great city'. (Ibid.) This is a 'virtual city' - Vertov composes and cuts fragments of other cities (Moscow, Kiev, Odessa etc.) together to portray a new city.
'Throughout the film runs the theme of the man with the movie camera [he is played by Vertov's brother, Mikhail Kaufman]. He is 'catching life unawares' [Vertov's idea of catching life 'as it is', filming the unprepared, unorganized, elemental events in everyday life - this, to him, was pure documentary], on a moving crane, in a huge factory workshop, on a high factory chimneystack. He films beneath a train, bathes in the sea and comes out of a bar. At the same time the theme of the Kino-Eyeman is linked with the risks he runs, including, lying down under or near passing vehicles. Beginning with the theme of morning, it has parallel shots of a woman sleeping and flowers. Then the woman awakening is cut with shots of lilacs blossoming. She washes herself and the streets are washed with falling showers. The woman wipes her face and her eyelids open and close and the parallel window blinds open and close' (Ibid.)
Vertov uses this montage to show how the mechanics of the camera are based on the biology of the human eye. He uses this very simple example to show how a shutter like blinking opens and closes to record images and how a camera lens pulls things in and out of focus, much the same as the human eye. We also see Svilova cutting and splicing this film together within the film. How more visible could one make the joins than incorporating footage of the person who happens to be making these joins visible? Vertov is taking a didactic stance in the work, choosing to teach the viewer the techniques of filmmaking.
Vertov also applies v-effects such as freezing frames and double exposures. One example shows the Bolshoi Theatre collapsing in on itself. He also uses animations, where the tripod and the camera are given a life of their own and create 'characters' to amuse the audience. Nothing is ignored and the film almost exhausts itself in explaining the workings and devices in cinema.
Although Vertov's work differs from Brecht's as it documents 'life as it is', i.e. with a spontaneity, which is out of the director's hands, Vertov assumes control of his work through editing and montage, which are to provoke thought and a reaction to his work. Vertov often referred to montage as 'the manipulation of the viewer'. He acknowledges the importance of sports in a society (a forerunner to Brecht's athletic club scenes in Kuhle Wampe) and dedicates a whole reel to the leisure activities of the people he records in Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov's was a pure documented reality, all the joints of his work were visible, and his 'scenes' could be arranged in any order. The only suggestion of a narrative in Man with a Movie Camera is the fact that he is tracing a city from dawn till dusk.
Brecht wanted to show that his theatre was not a reality. He engaged with the audience's mental capacity by refusing to lull them into a state of distraction from reality. Similarly, Vertov tried to show film as a pure, documented reality. In his images, there is no ambiguity of fiction to distract the viewer from the real images. He does not pander to a passive indulgence of images at which the viewer can look in awe or wonder. Neither does he subject them to shocking imagery. Vertov merely juxtaposes images of everyday events, constantly explaining, revealing and provoking thought. This is a communist film, attempting to join the people in a celebration of 'life as it is', no matter how diverse.
Man with a Movie Camera pre-empts some 'Brechtian' epic devices. How important and relevant are these theories and practices today? It could be argued that there is even more urgency nowadays for a socially conscious artistic theory and practice than there was in the last century: with the proliferation of television, global communications networks, especially the internet, what were once sci-fi prophesies of virtual reality are becoming more tangible and relevant to the pressing question of what is and is not reality today. Brecht's theories served a political end. He had a social conscience and his drive was to inform people by highlighting the ills of the society they lived in through objective historical reasoning, thus, provoking thought and action. Stripping away ignorance, apathy and the passivity of the viewer, Brecht hoped to engage his audience intellectually and use his work as a didactic means.
As we have entered the new millennium, Nintendo warfare, factory farming, virtual and simulated realities, to name but a few aspects of contemporary life, are all, one could argue, characterised by distraction and escapism from harsh realities. The Western, capitalist society concentrates on the individual. It is the insular nature of such a way of living, the ease of access to distraction devices and escapism that Brecht's works and theories tries to counter. His is a social wake-up call that will no longer distract people from the sweat shop labour history behind their trainers, the cruel factory farming that is responsible for their burger, the fact that daytime TV is not their reality, nor Nintendo warfare just that thing that appears on your TV screen.
Perhaps this message has not been lost. One can see Brechtian devices alive and well in contemporary Hollywood. Scorsese's juxtaposition of violence with love songs, Tarantino's use of an episodic narrative in his innovative editing of scenes in Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1995, USA) and Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1996, USA) have set an example for other Hollywood directors and thus commercial film-making to follow. Indeed, most recently one can see such Brechtian devices as to-audience addresses in Fight Club (Fincher, 1999, USA), where Tyler Durden explains projectionist film changeovers, and in American Beauty (Mendes, 2000, USA), where Sam Mendes incorporates a contemplative piece of art in the form of a two-minute explanation of the beauty of a plastic bag blowing in the wind. A further break from simulated reality may be seen in the considerable interest in feature length animated films like Toy Story (Lasseter, 1995, USA), A Bugs Life (Lasseter, 1997, USA) and Antz (Darnell & Johnson, 1998, USA). That all of these come with their scathing political undertones seems to be heartening. Indeed, 'Vertovian' documentary is equally alive and well as can be seen in TV channels like the Discovery Channel and the latest candid (hidden) camera sketch. The onset of DVD with accompanying production footage and 'behind the scenes' documentaries on the making of films are nearly as popular as the films themselves. This reflects the informed viewer of the TV generation, who now has a hunger for the technical processes behind the images they receive in various communication media.
Forty-five years after his death, Brecht's ideology and technical apparatus for a political and socially informing art form is still extremely relevant. Brecht was a very strong-minded individual who never doubted his cause, even at a time when his colleagues were under the strain of fascism and two world wars. Brecht was a firm believer in the common good. A belief that he sought his whole life to convey to others. He was a strong-willed in the face of ignorance and oppression. His criticism of contemporary society, which he saw as mindlessly accepting without question or objection, he brought with him to his grave on 14th August 1956. His legacy survives him. Bertolt Brecht's epitaph states the facts:
Here, in this zinc box,
Lies a dead person
Or his legs and head
Or even less of him
Or nothing at all
For he was a troublemaker.
(Cook, 1983, p. 211)
1 Indeed, he would have argued against my use of capital letters here claiming they were 'decadent remnants of Roman Imperialism'.
2 In his commentary on the film Yuri Tsivian, leading historian of Russian silent cinema, tells us that he wouldn't be surprised if the theatre shown in the film was actually the same theatre the film opened in April 1924.
Bibliography
COOK, Bruce, Brecht in Exile. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston 1983.
MARSHALL, Herbert, Masters of the Soviet Cinema. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1983.
MICHELSON, Annette (ed.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. California: University of California Press 1984.
WILLETT, John, The New Sobriety. London: Thames and Hudson 1978.
WILLETT, John, The Theatre of Erwin Piscator. London: Methuen 1986.
SILBERMAN, Marc (ed.), Brecht on Film and Radio. London: Meuthen 2000.
