Pablo Gómez-Pan MA Documentary Film · UAL / LCC · 2012

Q: Examine the aesthetic and ideological role of the soundtrack (e.g. voiceovers and music) and the way it interacts with the film image in Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm. Symphony of the Dombass (Entuziazm. Simfonija Dombassa, 1931).

Focusing on its aesthetics, Enthusiasm. Symphony of the Dombass (1931), by Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) is undoubtedly an avant-garde documentary film. The fact that it is considered the first sound documentary ever makes it instantly in front of the rest, hence etymologically avant, ahead. At the same time, if we focus on its ideology, it can be read as Soviet propaganda, clearly in favour of Stalin's five-year plans. We could call Vertov's film a piece of avant-propaganda, unfortunately made in a time in which both terms did not go together well any more.

As Jorge Larrain states, "ideology is perhaps one of the most equivocal and elusive concepts one can find in the social sciences"(Larrain, 1979, p. 13). Some have employed hundreds of pages trying to define it, and others have even discarded it. We will try to understand this concept following Larrain, Nichols and Eagleton1.

Eagleton explains that ideology "very often refers to the ways in which signs, meanings and values help to reproduce a dominant social power. But it can also denote any significant conjuncture between discourse and political interests" (Eagleton, 1991, p. 221). "For ideology to be present" points Larrain, "the two conditions which Marx laid down should be satisfied: the objective concealment of contradictions, and the interest of the dominant class" (Larrain, 1979, p. 210). In the same vein, Nichols states that "to serve ideology, representations must be to appear to be other than what they are. Above all, they must appear as signs of eternal values" (Nichols, 1981, p. 290). Ideology, continuing with Nichols, is used to naturalize signs "as timeless, objective, obvious" (Nichols, 1981, p. 2).

Ideology is depictured as a "veil to be lifted" (Nichols, 1981, p. 292). Understanding ideology the way these authors do, it is licit to see Enthusiasm as an ideological film. Communism was the dominant social and political power in 1930's USSR, Stalin's Five-Year Plans were the official economic policy and contradictions were definitively concealed (it is justifiable to think that "The Plan" just cared about the growth of the Russian economy regardless of the individual human costs, and we see little concern for that in this film). It evidently tries to serve the political interests of the dominant class (the proletariat, the Party), not an example of l'art pour l'art.

Enthusiasm is clearly agitprop, a propaganda film made precisely to enthuse the population to "overfulfill" the Plan, as a worker puts it during the movie (31'20"). The problem is that in the 1930s, Soviet propaganda was expected to be done in a very different way. Soviet realism had already begun to consider avant-garde aesthetics as undesirable in any art form, films included. As Roberts reminds us, Stalin had said, in the 13th Party Congress

                                                                                                               1 Other authors, especially postmodern and pragmatic thinkers like Richard Rorty, directly disregard using this concept :"On the uselessness of the notion of ideology see Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory." (Eagleton, 1991, p. iii).

(May 1924): "The cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands" (Roberts, 2000, p.5). Krinitsky, head of the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee, proclaimed in March 1928's All-Union Party Conference on Cinema Affairs that "films should be comprehensible to the millions" (Roberts, 2000, p.30). The term "simply and clearly" (prosto i iasno) became the slogan of the cinema press around 1929 (Roberts, 2000, p. 30), soon before Enthusiasm was made. Formalism, aestheticism and the other "vices" of bourgeois art for art were not accepted anymore, and Vertov's films were considered exponents of this wave. Some of his recent films, like The Man With The Movie Camera (1929), had been criticised for being "devoid of social content" and for their "technological fetishism". "Vertov remains the ‘artist child’ of the ‘artistic infancy’ of Soviet cinema", said an important soviet critic (Roberts, 2000, p.94). In the early 30s, Vertov was tolerated, but his aesthetics was despised (Roberts, 2000, p. 37).

Aesthetics is a less ambiguous concept than ideology. We can understand it as the set of stylistic decisions taken in order to convey meaning through the senses (sight and hearing, in our case). There are many elements of Enthusiasm's aesthetics that point it as an avant-garde film. First of all, lets remember that avant-garde and documentary films were not so clearly separated yet. It was precisely the coming of sound, as Nichols underlines in his paper "Documentary and the Coming of Sound"(1995), what made these two tendencies diverge.

"Theoretical inquiry and the experimental film are often concerned with the nature of the medium itself and with self-reflexive textual mechanisms", says Nichols (1981, p. 170). Enthusiasm is self-referential from its very beginning (for example, the female radio operator as a reminder of the presence of a listening audience). Like Nichols tries to show, quoting Jean-Paul Fargier's opinion as the common view, "the first thing people do is deny the existence of the screen: it opens like a window; it is transparent. This illusion is the very substance of the specific ideology secreted by the cinema" (Nichols, 1981, p. 171). Vertov breaks this illusion of objectivity with its self-reflecting techniques, and also in the ways he combines images and sounds, frequently avoiding synchronizity.

Enthusiasm is considered one of the first experiments in industrial music, as The Wire magazine celebrated in his list of "The 100 Most Important Records Ever Made"2, predating Cage, Schaeffer and others in trying to remind us that "nature has voices, events sing and are music and dance", as Peter Kubelka says in Restoring Enthusiasm, a documentary about the 1972 re-synchronization of the film3. "The main message", says Kubelka, "is the music of the events".

Amongst the many elements that make Enthusiasm an avant-garde documentary, we shall focus in the different relations between its images and its sounds. Kubelka suggests that Enthusiasm, like Bach's The Art of Fugue, is great as a piece and also as an illustration of what can be done.

We could classify the different sounds we could find as music, voices or noises, following one of the many categorizations of sound that Chion employs in Audio-Vision. In Enthusiasm we find examples of the three of them. Noises, the "outcasts of theory", those elements of the sensory world that are "totally devalued in the aesthetic level" (Chion,

                                                                                                               2 http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/441/ 3 Included in the excellent Austrian Film Museum edition of Enthusiam (25'). All of Kubelka's quotes come from this source.

1994, p. 145) are especially well registered in this film, contrary to what would be the norm in documentaries until direct cinema and cinema vérité arrive in the late 50s.

In Chion's words, "to see or not to see the sound's source: it all begins here" (Chion, 1999, p. 4). So we'll classify most relations according to this maxim. Enthusiasm is famous for its non-synchronous sounds, but there are many moments in which audio and video are synchronized. Three examples: a train's front shock absorber hitting another train, (52'20") rocks shaking over a conveyor belt (38'20'') or three workers using a hammer (40'30''- 41'30''). As Kubelka found out, many of the images and sounds were poorly synchronized in the available copies. As soon as he moved one point of synchronization, many other things also began to be in sync. A clear example is the orchestra sequence (3'44) in which the conductor clicks his baton against the music stand. Kubelka justifiably considers that those original copies were wrong4.

When sounds are out of sync it can be because we do not see its cause, or they can be forced to be in sync with something different from its source. The first case happens very frequently, for example when music is been played and we don't see the band. We even have many cases of sound with no image at all (for example, in 51'45''). The other case (in sync but not with its source) is also present. One good example is the previously mentioned hammering sequence, that begins with hammering sounds synchronized with the images of the hammer hitting the ground but finishes with some slogans synchronized with the hammer knocks. Kubelka thinks that synchronizing the narration with the knocks makes "the hammer accent the slogan, it accents what has to be enforced". Chion calls this process synchresis (Chion, 1994, p. 63). Chion believes that "the possibility of reassociation of image and sound is the fundamental stone upon which the rest of the edifice of film sound is built, and without which it would collapse" (Chion, 1994, p. xix). In this process, he believes that "one perception influences the other and transforms it" (Chion, 1994, p. xxvi). Vertov makes very creative use of this technique. Chion also reminds us that film rhythm is an audiovisual product (Chion, 1994, p. 136). Enthusiasm's aesthetics is influenced by this fact. The final product is a synchretic creation in which images and sounds are equally important.

Chion uses the term acousmatic to talk about "the sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause" (Chion, 1994, p. 63). He opposes those sounds to visualized sounds. Amongst those elements that we could tag as acousmatic there is a most interesting case. The narrators in this film, usually with deep male voices, are acousmatic, we never see them. But what makes them different from the usual "voice of god" narrator is an astute strategy at the beginning of the film: the female radio operator hears them for the first time ("Attention, Attention! Radio Leningrad speaking", in 3'15"). So we know we are listening to the narrator through the operator's headphones (shown in close-up in 1'34"), through the operator's ears (shown in close-up in 3'05"). We could argue that everything is being heard through those headphones, everything is on-air sound. All of a sudden, there are no ideal beings that miraculously speak to us: it is human technology that brings sound to our ears. The difference is as big as that between Idealism and Materialism.

There are plenty of human voices in Enthusiasm's soundtrack. Chion thinks that "the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception ... The first thing people hear is the voice" (Chion, 1999, p. 6). He reminds us that silent movies weren't silent at all: most of the time they had music. What they did not have is voices, that is                                                                                                                4 Other sequences are more loosely synchronized, so not everything is clear about Vertov's original intentions.

why sound movies were called "talkies" in some cultures.

At the same time, we find the "voice of authority" (in sync) type, incarnated in a young man, probably a political commissar, that addresses us a couple of times, the first of them in 27'54'' (quite late for a one hour "talkie"). The way he addresses us is direct, because we are "explicitly acknowledged as the subject to whom the film is addressed" (Nichols, 1981, p.171). Historically, this type of address has been the mode most used by documentaries (Nichols, 19812, p. 183) and Enthusiasm is no exception. There are also workers (male in 31'20", female in 32'10") that speak in sync.

Nichols reminds us that narrators are "individuals representing the point of view of the documentary itself, surrogate figures, usually, for the film maker's own interpretation" (Nichols, 1981, p. 182-183). "The adoption of direct address has run the perennial risk of dogmatism, using the voice of commentator to authoritatively, if not authoritatively, assert what is and what is not, the case" (Nichols, 1981, p. 183). Speech is certainly the sound element that brings Enthusiam closer to propaganda5.

There are no dialogues and no interviews at all, two types of speeches that populate later documentaries. Vertov seems to be closer to contemporary approaches than to his followers in vérité or direct cinema in the fact that he seems to acknowledge that direct sound is also a reconstruction, even if only by subtraction (Chion, 1994, p. 105-106). He is not ashamed of non-diegetic music, non-synchronicity or rendered sounds. Like Ruoff says, "music provides continuity, covers up edits, facilitates changes of scenes, provides mood, offers entertaining spectacle, allows for narrative interludes and montage sequences, and comments on the action" (Altman, 1992, p. 228). We find all those uses in Enthusiasm.

A sequence that illustrates the unifying power of music and its ideological implications is the one on which Vertovs joins religious people with drunkards (5'30" to 8'50"), in a metonymy that reminds us of Marx's famous quote in which he compared religion to opium. Vertov translates that and equates Eastern Orthodox Christians kneeling and praying with heavy vodka drinkers moaning and falling down. He also plays with contrast: we listen to prayers and holy music while we see drunkards, then we hear the cries and songs of drunken people while we watch the rituals of religious people. Significantly, Vertov ends the sequence cutting to a whistle sounding, while we see the image of a whistle (a call to action), wires (technology) and trees (nature).

As we have seen, in Vetov's Enthusiasm ideology and aesthetics don't go hand in hand. We are in front of a rare example. The ethics, the aesthetics, the political and the ideological all have one thing in common: the values behind them. Every aesthetics has its own ethics. Even art for arts sake adopts, in a negative way, an ethical position. We could say that Enthusiasm is stalinist in its content and anti-stalinist in its form. A rare case of ideology and aesthetics clashing while image and sound join forces, in an early example of the powerful possibilities of sound film.

                                                                                                               5 Just one example. In 55'10", a speaker addresses a crowd of peasants: "Kolkholz peasants, brigade #4 from the Donbass! Mind our mission! The harvest is our challenge. We, brigade #4, commit ourselves and declare ourselves shock workers. We commit to harvesting swiftly and meticulously. We call on brigade #6 to follow our example." The peasants clap.

Bibliography

Chion, M. (1994) Audio-vision: sound on screen. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chion, M. (1999) The voice in cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.

Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology. An introduction. London: Verso.

Larrain, J. (1979) The concept of Ideology. London: Hutchinson University Press.

Nichols, B. (1995) Documentary and the coming of sound. [Internet]. Available from <http://filmsound.org/film-sound-history/documentary.htm> [Accessed 10 March 2012].

Nichols, B. (1981) Images and ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Roberts, G. (2000) New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers.

Altman, R. (Ed.) (1992) Sound theory, sound practice, New York: Routledge.

Enthusiasm. Symphony of the Dombass. (1931) Directed by Dziga Vertov. Viena: Austrian Film Museum [Video: DVD]