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Dziga Vertov: Soundtrack from Enthusiasm! Symphony of the Dombass (1931)

From the album Baku: Symphony of Sirens. Sound Experiments in the Russian Avant-Garde (2009)

Dziga Vertov (born Denis Kaufman, 1886-1954) was one of the most important figures of 20th-century cinema. Though overshadowed by his famous countryman Sergei Eisenstein, Vertov was the premier documentary filmmaker of young Soviet Russia. Based on the camera’s ability to report the truth of things in an entirely objective way—what Vertov called the “Kino-Eye”—he envisioned cinema as a vessel of knowledge about social reality directed at the sense of sight. But already in the years before the Revolution, Vertov also had an interest in the artistic potential of new sound technology as well, and around 1916 he began to experiment with phonograph recordings under the auspices of his so-called “Laboratory of Hearing.”

Vertov’s first sound film, Enthusiasm, in addition to being a visual tour de force, is one of the most remarkable musical experiments of the first half of the 20th century. For Enthusiasm, Vertov used the world’s first mobile recording station to carry out an “assault on sounds” in the coal mines of the Dombass region in the Ukraine. (“Mobile” is a relative term here, as the recording apparatus weighed about 2800 pounds.) After finishing the recording, Vertov worked for fifty days to edit the image and sound, which he reconfigured into an asynchronous, “contrapuntal” relationship in accordance with the theories expressed in the 1928 “Statement on Sound” written by Soviet directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov. Vertov called the resulting soundtrack a “symphony of noises.”

Enthusiasm is a document of the industrial fervor of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, comparable to such orchestral works as Alexander Mossolov’s Zavod or Julius Meytuss’ Dnieprostroi, a symphonic tribute to a newly constructed hydroelectric power station. However, the film met with the censure of the emerging conservative aesthetic of socialist realism, with Soviet critics denouncing it as a “concert of caterwauling.” Outside the Soviet Union, in the avant-garde film circles of Europe, the film was more favorably received. Charlie Chaplin said of it, “I would never have believed it possible to assemble mechanical noises to create such beauty. One of the most superb symphonies I have known. Dziga Vertov is a musician.” 

April 05, 2011, 11:04am