Country: Soviet Union
Director: Dziga Vertov
Time: 1 hour and 7 minutes
What Does It Elicit: Speed and excitement and the surprise that silent films are awesome
Where To Watch: Amazon ($3.99 to rent the restored copy) or YouTube (free but not restored)
I know, I know, I know: Silent film is boring. Except it’s not when you’re in the hands of the rebellious film pioneer Dziga Vertov and his exploration of the city and movement in the 1920s Soviet Union. Vertov was cool. He said cool things like: “The film drama is the opium of the people...down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios.” He had a theory of filmmaking and a manifesto to back it up. Per the British Film Institute, he also pioneered slow motion, split screens, dissolve cuts, double exposure, stop motion and other neat effects which have since become staples of cinema. In fact, he’s so cool I’ve adopted his first name into my “nom de plume” (a very uncool term) for this Substack.
Watching this film, you get the sense a camera was dropped into the lap of an energetic, brilliant mind who decided to do everything you’re not supposed to with it, while exploring the frenetic pace of city life and (drumroll) modernity at a time when the future looked thrillingly malleable. His great competitor on the Soviet scene was the very serious Sergei Eisenstein who made, most famously, Battleship Potemkin (1925), which is a serious treatment of the serious 1905 Russian Revolution—not the big one, that happened in 1917—but instead a precursor which would later be invested with a lot of meaning by the early Soviets. Vertov was the opposite, instead of inventing an art form, he tried to break its rules before they’d been established. In so doing, he altered the trajectory of cinema and its possibilities forever, creating a world in which, as he put it, “Our eyes, spinning like propellers, take off into the future on the wings of hypothesis.”
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Eisenstein —Battleship Potemkin (1927)
Fritz Lang —Metropolis (1927)