the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Devin Fore

Dziga Vertov, First Shoemaker of Russian Cinematography

This lecture took place on October 6th, 2009 at 7:00 pm in the Rose Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

The documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov considered himself to be not a maker of “pictures” (kartiny), but a producer of “cine-things” (kino-veshchi), objects that were as everyday and concrete as stones or shoes. This is not surprising, given Vertov’s close alliances in the 1920s with production artists and theorists such as Aleksei Gan. Indeed, if we take Vertov out of the history of cinema as a medium and situate his filmic work instead within a genealogy of production art––for Vertov didn’t believe in the existence of the “medium” of cinema, but instead saw the movie camera as an experimental apparatus comparable to the microscope or the telescope––we make available new perspectives on the politics of the media in the 1920s. Above all, Vertov’s cine-things reconceive the relationship between political discourse and technical making by moving beyond a limited logic of the classical bourgeois public sphere that confines political activity to the realm of discursive reason. The challenge of redefining the relationship between politics and technology, between propaganda and production, led the Soviet documentarian to strikingly inventive redefinitions of media that were already long since ontologized in western Europe. To explain these points, this talk looks closely at a single sequence from Vertov’s 1930 Enthusiasm, and offers two frameworks for situating this sequence and Vertov’s work generally: (a) Lenin’s understanding of everyday objects as media for human communication that transmit across distances, and (b) contemporary theoretical work on media anthropology that helps us to locate Vertov’s work on cinema and radio within the historical context of the precipitous modernization of Russia and its provinces. Together these frameworks reveal how the productivists creatively redefined the media within a new Soviet empire that covered, as Vertov titled one of his films, One Sixth of the World. 

About Devin Fore

Devin Fore received his PhD in German from Columbia University in 2005, and joined the Princeton German Department after a year researching and teaching as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. He has been awarded grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Whiting Foundation, and was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2008-2009. He is currently working on two book projects: one examines New Objectivity and the various returns of mimetic realism in German cultural production from the late 1920s into the Popular Front era (Alfred Döblin, Erik Reger, Bertolt Brecht, John Heartfield, Carl Einstein); the other is a theoretical study of Soviet factography that focuses on the work of the operative writer Sergei Tret’iakov. Fore has published in the journals October, Grey Room, and New German Critique; he is editing and writing an introduction for the English translation of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s History and Obstinacy (forthcoming from Zone Books in 2011); he is also translator of a number of texts from both German and Russian.
Fore is an Associate Faculty member of the Slavic Department at Princeton and an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Program in Media + Modernity.

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