Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film

Hicks, Jeremy. (2007). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction (1-4)
In this book, Hicks focuses on the question as to "how Soviet journalism inspired his creative transformation of newsreel into the new form of documentary film" (p. 1). Contrary to the general assumption that Vertov obviated performance, Hicks argued that Vertov balanced between "recording and reworking and his greatest works combined with unstaged footage to unleash an influential rhetoric force.
The birth of documentary from the spirit of journalism: Cine-Pravda, Cine-Eye (5-21)

In 1922, Vertov began to work on news series Cine-Pravda with his future wife and his brother Mikhail Kaufman. Hicks commented:

"It is with Cine-Pravda that Vertov truly begins to realise cinema's power to exhort in images. Cine-Pravda no. 1 (June 1922) sets the tone for Vertov's newsreels in its sharply rhetorical style, downplaying the registering of events and instead editing together shots taken at different times and places so as to construct an argument. (p. 6-7)

Hicks argued, "The camera does not record an already existing causal relation, it creates it" (p. 7). He found the root cause of this transition from recording to discursive force, persuasion and exhortation in cinema in Soviet journalism.

"Vertov's transformation of what to become known as documentary cinema is inconceivable outside the context of the Bolshevik approach to journalism. Stylistically and in its approach to information, persuasion and communication, Vertov's film-making of the 1920s extends the model of the Bolshevik newspaper." (p. 8)

Hicks stressed that in stark contrast to the liberal conception of journalism in the West, the Bolshviks never considered objectivity as a primary consideration. Lenin stated "A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser" (as cited in page 8).

Hicks finds the similarity between Soviet Journalism and Vertov's renewal of newsreel as:

"[T]hey start from the fact, but elaborate on it so as to present it as powerfully and as engagingly as possible. Vertov too maintained a similar dual commitment, on the one hand to the capacity of cinema to record as a starting point, and on the other hand to exploring and unleashing its creative, persuasive, analytical potential." (p. 10)

In this context Hicks saw Cine-Pravda as "a revolutionary newsreel entailing a root and branch reassessment of the possibilities of film as a medium" (p. 11)

Hicks saw that Vertov achieved a higher stage with Cine-Eye (1924), which was an "attempt to create a manifesto for a grassroots movement of cine-journalists whose purpose was to transform society, along with relations to creativity and technology" (p. 15)

Hicks finds the background of Vertov's Cine-Eye movement in Soviet journalism which emphasized the worker correspondent movement. This movement in fact began with the situation that the population found the press difficult to understand, thus the Bolsheviks created new dailies aimed at peasants and semi-illiterate strata of the working class by urging them to write letters to the press. Hicks wrote, "This served to encourage reader participation, and at the same time enabled the setting up of an amateur correspondents' network" (p. 17). The Cine-Eye movement is a precisely embodiment of this movement in Soviet cinema. However, Hicks further pointed out that Vertov went a step further and emphasized the participatory model of news-gathering to make this grassroots movement far more effective. Vertov stated that he tried to

"create an army of cine-observers and cine-correspondents with the aim of moving away from the authorship from a single person to mass authorship, with the aim of organising a montage vision--not an accidental but a necessary and sufficient overview of the world every few hours" (as cite in pages 17-18)

Hicks paid particular attention to the use of the Pioneers (Soviet scouts). They are observed and at the same time observers who undertake amateur journalistic research to show every day life. Hicks wrote "Cine-Eye reveals that everyday life, the normal appearance of bread, masks the labour invested in it" (p. 19). The choice of the Pioneers was significant to Vertov, argued Hicks. It represents Vertov's emphasis on teaching the next generation the methods of making cinema. The Pionners, while being filmed, were also learning about filming.

Nonetheless, by 1925 the Cine-Eye movement was close to end because of state control over media to disseminate the views of the Party.