The Ear against the Eye: Vertov’s Symphony

Vertov defined the basic qualities of his Cine-Eye by means of a simple negation: it sees what remains inaccessible to the human eye. This means that in his films we see media-based and media-produced images that have nothing to do with the imitation of human perception. According to Vertov, such filmic, telescopic, or microscopic perception develops, educates, and expands the viewer’s analytical abilities. Thus, we have on the one hand a media-induced perception and on the other a new assemblage or montage of the fragments of this mediated perception. This new montage is based on a specific interaction and follows poetic rather than prosaic rules. It is freed from such constraints as time, space, causality, or speed. In other words it is based on properly media-specific qualities and, following the terminology of the Russian Futurists who influenced Vertov in his youth, it constitutes zaum or transrationality. This montage creates a new filmic, i.e., media-shaped, reality and a message or an illusion of a message—a semantic field. The seemingly contradictory division between an epistemological and analytical comprehension of media-shaped perception and the trans-rational nature of the montage structure reproduces the same split or shift that can be found in Vertov’s biography (the tension between the absolute film that he envisioned and the political news reels he had to produce) and in the contradictory interpretations of his notion of “cinema truth,” which was understood both literally and as a media-specific mode of representation.


Oksana Bulgakowa (Berlin)
Vertov defined the basic qualities of his Cine-Eye by means of a simple negation: it sees what remains inaccessible to the human eye. 1 This means that in his films we see media-based and media-produced images that have nothing to do with the imitation of human perception. According to Vertov, such filmic, telescopic, or microscopic perception develops, educates, and expands the viewer's analytical abilities. 2 Thus, we have on the one hand a media-induced perception and on the other a new assemblage or montage of the fragments of this mediated perception. This new montage is based on a specific interaction and follows poetic rather than prosaic rules. It is freed from such constraints as time, space, causality, or speed. In other words it is based on properly media-specific qualities and, following the terminology of the Russian Futurists who influenced Vertov in his youth, it constitutes zaum or transrationality. This montage creates a new filmic, i.e., media-shaped, reality and a message or an illusion of a message-a semantic field. The seemingly contradictory division between an epistemological and analytical comprehension of media-shaped perception and the trans-rational nature of the montage structure reproduces the same split or shift that can be found in Vertov's biography (the tension between the absolute film that he envisioned and the political news reels he had to produce) and in the contradictory interpretations of his notion of "cinema truth," which was understood both literally and as a media-specific mode of representation. 3 In his first manifesto "We" (1922) Vertov defined film as "dynamic geometry," as "the race of points, lines, planes, volumes." In order to "represent a dynamic study on a sheet of paper," he searched for a "film scale," for "graphic symbols of movement." Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye 9. But as a director of a screen newspaper Kinopravda he was "bound hand and foot. …Neither political filming […] 2. Futurist musicians must substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today, the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms. 3. The sensibility of musicians, being freed from traditional and facile rhythm, must find in noises the means of expanding and renewing itself, given that every noise offers the union of the most diverse rhythms, in addition to that which predominates. 10 Vertov's interest in sounds started in his youth. As a student at the Neurological Institute in Petrograd in conception of sound was started by the distinction between music, sound (zvuk), and noise (shum), between the "music of nature" (Kul'bin) and the "music of objects" (Lourié). Helmholtz's differentiation was redefined since the hierarchy of sound and noise was dismissed. 11 Bekhterev's laboratory researched the psycho-physiological and therapeutic influences of sound combinations on the "excitability and inhibition of the human cerebral cortex," but Bekhterev's experiments focused largely on music rather than noises. 12 At this time Vertov was dreaming of sound as a powerful form of expression: I decided to include the entire audible world into the concept of "Hearing." It was during this time that I attempted to draw up the sounds of a saw mill. [...] I tried to describe the audio impression of the factory in the way a blind person would perceive it. In the beginning I used words to record the sounds, but then I attempted to capture all of these different noises with letters. The existing alphabet did not suffice to write down all of the sounds that you hear in a saw mill. 13 Vertov founded a "Laboratory of the Ear" but had difficulty capturing sound in a mode other than that of the sound poem-namely with a wax disc recorder; not until the emergence of sound film did he find the opportunity to realize his noise collages. 14 Vertov was uninterested in using imitative instruments to recreate these sounds and was irritated by such imitations in early sound films. Commenting on Ruttman's Melodie der Welt (1929), he noted that the "sound part of the film was composed of music and artificially imitated sounds" and that he, Vertov, had been the first to "walk out of the muffled coffin of the sound studios" and to record "authentic" sound on location, the "iron clanking and fearful roar of Donbas." 15 The principles that Vertov developed by transforming noises into a musical symphony were based on montage and relied on varying the speed of recorded sounds in post-production. Montage allowed him to combine established quantities of selected and recorded noises, which he treated like leitmotivs (to use traditional terminology) or samples (to use a more recent term). He could cut them, put them in loops, and combine them according to principles of musical composition. The repetitive structure of the rondo form was particularly appealing to Vertov. By varying the recording speed, he was able to change the sound pitch and introduce gradation similar to ascending or descending scales. Russolo and Avraamov obtained a similar kind of gradation by other means: Russolo built a machine, and Avraamov adjusted the whistles or sirens like musical instruments to obtain differentiation. 16  With ENTHUSIASM Vertov proved that it was possible to record actual noises. His film did not lose its dynamics, but since he shot some of the images and sound separately, it was in some sense a "fraud." From late September to early November 1929 Vertov shot in Donbas with a silent camera. During this time he filmed the transformation of a church into a workers' club. This means that he produced the images of the first part of ENTHUSIASM, "The Birth of the Radio-Ear," by means of silent film. 18 From late November to late December he and the composer Nikolai Timofeev developed a musical score that integrated the noises and their transformation, distortion, and variation. 19 The score defined which noises would be used as leitmotivs and established a precise structure of repeated patterns of different lengths in analogy to musical measures.
The images in the sequence were to follow the rhythm of the sound score. In early March Vertov took a crash course at the lab of inventor Alexander Shorin, a key figure in Soviet sound recording who developed special portable equipment for Vertov's use. Shorin's system of radio microphones allowed him to record actual urban sounds: industrial noises in the harbor, sounds of the railroad and the railway station, streets, trams, the Eastern Church service, and the May First rally. These sound recordings were screened without images at the "House of Film" movie theater in Leningrad. The critic Rafailovich described the event: The screening was unusual. In the dark room the rectangle of the screen was shining in its white virginity. But nobody was interested in the screen. The bells sounded, a choir sang a religious choral, a glass was broken, somebody was beaten, and when, in this symphony of a drunken scandal, a traditional Russian word of insult was heard clearly, nobody doubted the documentary nature of the filmed material. We saw a recording of authentic sound. 20 and intensity, but rather assigning a degree or pitch to the strongest and most prominent of these vibrations," Art of Noises, 27. About Avraamov's Symphony of Sirens, see "The Symphony of Sirens," Wireless Imagination: Sound Vertov was able to carry out the first synchronous shooting in Kharkov in early June; from July on he filmed in Donbas. The team "filmed" noises in the mines and foundries: whistles, lorries, shunting engines, sirensall very noisy objects, but they never had an opportunity to listen to the rushes. Vertov used three types of recording without giving preference to any single method. He recorded image and sound separately, image and sound at the same time but with different cameras (image with the silent camera and sound with the sound recording apparatus), and image and sound synchronously. 21 Some of the filmed material turned out to be defective, so if the sound could not be used, then the visual sequences were thrown out as well.
Next the sounds and the images were joined together generally in an asynchronous way: the noises of the party convention were paired with the images of the iron foundry; the sounds of church service accompanied a group of drunks, etc. In this context each synchronous image functioned as a surprise, and a special value was attached to each synchronous object (a bell, a factory siren, drums, and crowds). Vertov filmed in Donbas for one month. By late August he started post-production in Kiev. He noted in his diaries that he needed 50 days and nights. 22 But the film premiere, scheduled for October, was deferred until February 8, and the film was released only on April 1, 1931. (There was one preview in Kiev on November 1). This three-month delay was probably caused by problems with the sound equipment in the movie theaters. The film was literally deafening, and projection difficulties were predictable: in most cinemas ENTHUSIASM's Bruitist symphony could be presented only in a distorted way. Vertov aimed at a grand scale-his film ranged from very low to very high sounds, from very intense noises like buzzing to extremely quiet ones.
But the loudspeakers in the movie theaters were adjusted to "golden average" frequencies, so high and quiet sounds remained imperceptible while low sounds and excessive volumes mutated into undifferentiated rattle. 23 This noise was perceived as a defect not of the projection, but of the recording, and Russian critics spoke of the film's unbearable cacophony.
After the first public screenings in 1931 numerous reviews and lively discussions formulated the reproaches against Vertov. (The first screening took place in Kharkov in January; the second in Moscow in February.) The critics stressed the chaotic nature of the film that failed to give the spectator any political guidelines or any aesthetic (in this case acoustic) organization. It was said that the film represented the production process as hellishly difficult forced labor and that the industrial noises exceeded the capacities of human perception.
These noises were likened to screeching, buzzing, thundering, shaking, or a horrible roar. They were labeled inhuman, mechanical, monotonous, primitive, confused, exhausting, soporific, aggressive, irritating, deafening, overladen. 24 Viktor Shklovsky wrote in his review that the film "crushed the spectators 21 Vertov, "Speech to the First All-Union Conference on Sound Cinema" 303. Vertov was able to regulate the sound. Thorold Dickinson describes a comic battle between him and the sound engineer over who would sit at the sound desk and regulate the volume. 26 Vertov himself admitted that he had heard his film for the first time abroad. Hanns Eisler wrote: "It is spectacular-the way the music attacks the image, the way the contradictions emerge between these two dimensions. This is all completely new, the most brilliant innovation that the sound film has delivered." 27 Chaplin was also filled with enthusiasm and sent a telegram to Vertov: "Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged so beautifully. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies. Mister Vertov is a musician." 28 As viewers and listeners today, we find ourselves in a difficult situation. Much of the sound track to ENTHUSIASM was destroyed and has been only partly reconstructed. We do not really know which passages should be asynchronous. Peter Kubelka's restoration (which is the version known in the United Stats) has followed the principle of synchrony. 29 The version suggested by the prints from the Russian film archive Gosfilmofond and from La Cinémathèque Française is, however, much more radical.
It is remarkable that this film, which breaks with the "limited circle of well-tempered sounds," is structured as a programmatic four-movement symphony in which leitmotivs and refrains develop a musical narration.
The four movements are as follows:  These four movements, which are not treated similarly (the overture lasts 21 minutes and the pastoral only 10 minutes), are both united and separated by the rallies that accompany the various production processes.
The rallies and the people participating in them suggest different places and different times. But similar patterns of framing and filming transform the movement of the masses into a visual compositional bracket.
(The camera always shoots the masses just slightly from above or below; the direction of the files of people Among primitive people, sound was attributed to the gods. It was considered sacred and reserved for priests.
[…] Thus was born the concept of sound as something in itself, as different from and independent of life. And from it resulted music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one.
[…] Let us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes. We will delight in distinguishing the eddying of water, of air or gas in metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping of awnings and flags. We will amuse ourselves by orchestrating together in our imagination 30  The woman without the "radio-ears" listens to the old sounds (or remembers them), and the radio-ear opens her ears to a new sound world that consists of industrial noises and the march music that will become the leitmotiv of the crowd. This woman with earphones functions as the mediator of filmic hearing just as the man with the camera acted as the mediator of filmic vision in Vertov's preceding film (MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, 1929). 33 In the attribution of senses he follows the traditional distribution of gender roles as suggested by Adorno: vision is male, and hearing is female. The eye demands analytical concentration, while the ear is undifferentiated, chaotic, emotional, and passive. This is why girls always take music lessons and boys learn to draw. 34 In this sequence, however, Vertov produced a non-traditional, media-related switch: his film starts by broadcasting the sound track, but we, the spectators, see what the girl-mediator is hearing, as if the circuits of perception were incorrectly connected. The eye and the ear exchange places so that the ear "sees." This exchange of the aural and the visual encapsulates "The Birth of the Radio-Ear as the Cine-Eye" as described by Vertov in his diaries. In remembering how he came to the idea of the Cine-Eye, he resorts not to visual but to aural impressions-noises, sentence fragments, sighs. It was sound that had originally inspired him to think about destroying totality and reassembling the fragments in a new totality.
One day in the spring of 1918… returning from a train station. There lingered in my ears the sighs and rumble of the departing train…someone's swearing… a kiss... someone's exclamation… laughter, a whistle, voices, the ringing of the station bell, the puffing of the locomotive… whispers, cries, farewell… And thoughts while walking: I must get a piece of equipment that won't describe but will record, photograph these sounds.
Otherwise it's impossible to organize, to edit them. They rush past, like time. But the movie camera perhaps?
Record the visible. Organize not the audible, but the visible world. Perhaps that's the way out? 35 The exchange is characteristic: only the apparatus that records images can retain these fragmented impressions. The gramophone, which was invented before the cinematograph, was incapable of producing a new assemblage of fragments. Vertov's note may be interpreted as an admission of the technical difficulties in creating a sound montage using a wax disc recorder. Sound montage only became technically possible with optically recorded sound. But we can approach this text from another point of view and read it from within the framework of a theory of the senses. It is the eye's prerogative to find and create a totality, for it is an analytical organ, while the ear's underdeveloped capacities of differentiation push the recipient into a 33 Fisher writes: "Just as in MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA we are made aware of the Cinema-Eye, so in ENTHUSIASM (or "Woman with the Earphones") we are forced to be conscious of the Cinema-Ear." Lucy Fisher, "ENTHUSIASM: From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye" 29. 34 Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Komposition für den Film (Leipzig: Reclam, 1977) 56-58 35 Vertov, "The Birth of Kino-Eye," Kino-Eye 40. In his talk of 5 April 1935 (see note 13) Vertov described this process in the following way: "Once, when I was sitting in the theater staring at the screen where they were showing the collapse of a mine shaft and other events in chronological order, the idea came to me that I could switch from hearing to seeing. I came to the following conclusion: here we have an apparatus that offers the possibility of recording this waterfall for the eye even though I cannot record it for the ear." chaos of sensual data. In the overture, however, Vertov reverses the established hierarchy between analytical vision and undifferentiated hearing: the sound destroys the image in its sacral visual splendor. The Imperial Russian anthem ("God Protect the Tsar") tunes in, but the director distorts the melody, decelerating the sound. The eccentric deformation is interrupted by a tolling bell that opens the acoustic channel for the liturgy, but the liturgy is in turn destroyed in the exact same manner-by a modification of sound speed. The bell is then "killed" by a factory siren that opens the aural channel for the march.
The sounds are imposed on the image like independent variables. They build an ironic, alienating, and analytical distance toward the images, while the camera imitates the movements of drunks and the subjective view of the praying people: it sways back and forth like an alcoholic and bows as if in prayer. The camera is mimetic, and in the Soviet discourse of the 1920s the (film) image is related to drugs. 36 The radio's sonic world is introduced as an anti-drug, though Vertov elsewhere attacked Soviet radio for broadcasting the same narcotic idiocy as the old cinema, namely Carmen, Rigoletto, and gypsy songs. 37 The overture introduces the radio in place of the visually splendid church. When the radio celebrates a victory over the church acoustically, the factory whistle gives a signal to start the action of disassembling sacral images. The overture that begins by switching the circuits of perception now stages the struggle between visual and aural media as an iconoclastic battle. The non-naturalistic sound, which is disembodied, distorted, superimposed, reversed, and used in abrupt contrasts or mismatchings both of sound and location and of sound and distance, emasculates and weakens the sound of the old world. 38 The new sound silences the old sonic world and demystifies the world of the traditional image. In Vertov's film the church's destruction becomes a complicated semiotic operation embedded in his film technique: the church is dismantled, but the filming devices actually produce and reinforce the dismantling. Using the technique of multiple exposures, he shows how several crosses are wiped out, one after another. The camera "splits" or pulls down the church. The film's reverse motion raises the red star to replace the cross on the church roof.
(In actuality, of course, the star falls down.) The film proclaims itself as a new visual art that reigns over the old images of icons, emblems, statues, and buildings. However, while the author created the aural chain, and sound can be silenced or distorted according to Vertov's will, the (documentary) image remains ambivalent.
This ambivalence is also maintained in language. The title of the march is Poslednee voskresenie, which can be translated either as "The Last Sunday" or "The Last Resurrection": the destroyed church celebrates its 36 Kazimir Malevich argued that the materialist consciousness was linked with abstract expression but the religious consciousnesswith the realm of the images; he illustrated the difference between the two by phenomenon of Lenin's cult created after his death. In his view, an artist in a materialist proletarian society should be not an image-maker, not a painter of its sacred images or its daily tripe -see In the first sequence the visual motifs (images with synchronous sound) are organized in rondo form. In the second sequence the sounds make up the rondo form, and the images are asynchronous. A caesura, the "march of the enthusiasts" (Vertov's usual refrain) separates the two sequences.
Three visual elements comprise the rondo's first sequence: 1. fire; 2. three men raising a hammer; 3. trucks (shot from below) that cross the sky in a diagonal (A-B-C-A-B-A…). The motion of the three men is always interrupted before the hammer arrives at its point of impact; the framing causes their bodies to become increasingly fragmented and abstract. The spectators do not experience where the raised hammer lands, a fact that is reinforced by the asynchrony between the image and the sound. (This asynchrony is corrected in Kubelka's version). The fragments of the men's movements form a mechanical ballet, and the visual rhythm can put the spectator in a trance. This principle is repeated in the second sequence, and the steelworkers' repetitive movements gradually lose their meaning until they become abstract parts. The sequence reaches its 40 Vertov cuts toy models of cars and tractors with close-ups of sweat-drenched faces. The false proportions make the workers appear like giants; the labor is staged as a mechanical theater with the toy models. In Part Four (the pastoral) a village idyll replaces these perfectly moving machines. Long synchronous shots dominate the section and underscore its illusionist character. Vertov is apparently unconcerned with feminine and masculine cultural types (i.e., the agricultural sphere vs. warrior nomadism). He is also uninterested in showing collectivization or the suppressed knowledge of its tragedy. Instead, he represents the styles of art that produced these cultural types: Naturalism and Constructivism. The songs-like the bell in Part One-are the collective's old forms of organization. In the new collective body they are replaced by marches that follow the same 2/2 rhythm as the machines.
Vertov used principles of program music in ENTHUSIASM, but he substituted noises for the melodies. He began his film with the destruction of icons-non referential images-and replaced these objects with asynchronous sound that remained without reference on the screen. 41 The second and fourth parts of the symphony soften this radical approach. Since the machines and the masses embody the programmatic music, they also make it diegetic: the sounds are visualized and seem less abstract. By the end of the film march music has pushed out the noises altogether; the abstract qualities of the non-referential sounds have been replaced by music that is perceived as "pictorial" in relation to the noises. Vertov's symphony thus moves from abstract to diegetic sound, from noise to music. This progression is reminiscent of Shostakovich's Third 43 Thomas Tode has pointed out that Shostakovich's music is never heard in the film. Comparing the lengths of the copies, he noticed that more than 200 meters were missing but was unable to discover in which part the symphony was supposed to be heard: "Today's copies are 1830 meters (67 minutes) long, but a consignment note from the 1931 European tour shows that the film shown in England and France was 2083 meters (76 minutes) long." Tode, "Musikalische Strukturen im Werk von Dziga Vertov" 27. Another note from 1931 offers different information about the film's length: the first version was 3000 meters long, the distributed version was 2000 meters long, Proletarskoe kino 3 (1931) 12. Valérie Poséner found in the Russian Film Archive Gosfilmofond a censorship card from 6 November1931 that indicates a length of 2600 meters.
In the 1920s the domains of image and sound were being defined in new ways. Modes of perception, production, and theoretical description needed to include new oppositions (seen/unseen, conscious/unconscious, micro/macro vision) as well as new qualities of visual and aural perception: fragmentation, discontinuity, shifts, distortion, ruptures, and the ephemeral. The era witnessed the development of utopian ideas about the new connection between nature, machines, and the human being.
Vertov remained a Futurist in his approach. A pioneer who had worked on a new approach to hearing, he meant to broaden and enrich the human senses. The Futurist mission aimed at expanding the human senses, discovering new visual and aural dimensions that would train modern eyes to perceive simultaneity and speed and modern ears to register non-tempered sounds. Vertov's previous films had seized upon the visual phenomena of modernity: speed, fragmentation, simultaneity, pulverization. 44 Now he focused on similar work with sound, educating the ear to perceive and differentiate among noises that it is not usually trained to hear. The radio-ear isolated these noises and presented them alongside a visual correspondence and in a musical composition (developing the leitmotivs, constructing a rondo form) that facilitated acoustic perception and allows to tame, control and formalize the noises. Vertov insisted that his industrial noises were unfamiliar only to an inexperienced ear and claimed that workers could differentiate among these noises precisely because they experienced machine noises as comprehensible signs with an emotional meaning. (He used the term smyslovoi znak, coined by his eternal opponent Viktor Shklovsky. 45 ) The notion of a new kind of hearing as staged in Vertov's film may be interpreted as an appeal to a new sensuality and to new bodily experiences, an appeal to create a utopian, "techno-equipped" human being endowed with cine-eyes and radio-ears who develops a synaesthetic apperception of the fragmented world of modernity. 46 As in earlier films, the perfect spectators and listeners are created in the course of the film as the film's consumer and producer (the conductor, the girl listening to the radio and sculpting the statue, the masses). The use of sound in ENTHUSIASM tested the possibilities for equivalence and prepared the way for Vertov's next film, THREE SONGS ABOUT LENIN, which develops the principle of equivalence on the levels of writing, voice, and image. In CINE-EYE (1924) he tried to substitute one recording technology with another by using intertitles in a new way. He employed titles not only as writing and graphic signs, but also as a set of sound associations, representing, for example, the sounds of stuttering and Chinese accents. The Donbas film defined itself as well in the switching between channels of perception and recording techniques. Only the free exchange between image, sound, and writing enabled Vertov to give a tight structure to the chaos of acoustic and visual impressions. Sounds provoke visual associations-this is why the sound of the bell can magically produce the image of the crown. Like the Cine-Eye, these sounds are freed from time, space, and causality, and they are able to create connections that we cannot actually experience. Vertov thus establishes a magic (and false) causality between sound and image.