Blog Post 3: Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov and the Documentary as Archive
It seems fitting that Dziga Vertov’s coverage of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries took place the same year. While originally newsreels, there is a documentary spirit at play here as Vertov covers the actual court proceedings. Like Flaherty, Vertov documents, but he also created a narrative. Christina Vatulescu concludes that “With his knack for cinematic pioneering, Vertov breached different directions to be taken by kino police: his camera caught criminals/enemies off guard, indexed them, edited their public images, and maybe even made them up when in short supply, while also casting the audience in a carefully scripted role” (Vatulescu pg. 92). This argument makes it clear that Vertov was trying to capture a moment, to record something happening in real time and to put it on film, but it goes beyond just the urge for ‘pure’ documentation. Vertov intentionally created a courtroom drama with a cast of characters that served to entertain and educate the public about the Soviet legal system and their role within it as Soviet citizens.
Both Nanook of the North and Vertov’s Kinopravda are also deeply marked by what they exclude on screen. While I acknowledge that it could be stretching concepts too far, I find the idea of thinking of these films as some kind of archival project productive. Jacques Derrida writes in “Archive Fever,” “Because the archive…will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory” (Derrida pg. 78). Documentary films, including Flaherty and Vertov, necessarily cannot be spontaneous, alive, or an internal experience, there always must be editing that structures the film, picking and choosing which clips go where and which material is excluded from the final product. In Vertov’s case, he excluded footage of the defendants on trial speaking. I imagine that footage could have been discarded for practical reasons, the exclusion of the subjects of the trial sends a strong message that they are not the subjects of the film and no doubt shaped the audience’s perception of the defendants.
Film may not be the traditional form of the archive, but it can highlight this destructive impulse laid out by Derrida and it also exposes the constructed nature of documentation. Even if Vertov’s project had been about capturing a trial in some ‘true to life’ fashion, I imagine the newsreel format would have still required exclusions and edits. Vertov, as the archivist, must choose which part of the memory to destroy. In this context, the inclusion of actors (with himself playing a character in the film) to react to the verdict of the trial can perhaps also be thought of as some kind of destruction of truth. Perhaps these scenes represented similar reactions from the public. Perhaps somewhere, two young men bet on whether or not the defendants would be executed, but it was not captured by Vertov. The blending of documentary footage with scripted footed alongside the overall heavy editing makes for a highly curated archive, one constructed by Vertov and the Soviet State with an intentional narrative baked into its documentary elements.