Do you think that John Grierson's work, as director and producer, had a major influence on Italian neo-realism, as well as others working in the British documentary movement like Basil Wright and Robert Flaherty? I never really looked at the link with Vertov before, but it must be all interconnected.
Sorry i couldn't be much help with your research.

Just a guess here, but you might start your investigation with Visconti, who was a Marxist and surely would have known and studied Soviet cinema. Does anyone know of anything he wrote in that regard?

Vertov's influence on Grierson is equally interesting, Seferad, even if it is a little tangential to Yilmaz's original question. I see Vertov's specter all over the place in Grierson's Drifters.

Have any of the writings of the neorealist theorists (Zavattini, Visconti, Antonioni, et al) from the early 40s been translated into English? That seems like the place to start.

Google scholar is a decent place to look for a few leads (scholar.google.com).

What level of paper is this? A PhD thesis, a high school term paper, or somewhere in between?

Besides through his writings on "cinema-verite", Dziga Vertov had an indirect effect on French New Wave through his brother Boris Kaufman who shot all of Jean Vigo's films and also worked with Abel Gance on "Lucrezia Borgia. Vigo's films greatly influenced the New Wave and Gance was also a favorite of those directors. Boris had fled Russia during the Revolution and in later years he would speak of how he had learned cinematography by corresponding with his brothers Denis (Vertov's real name) and Mikhail (Dziga Vertov's cinematographer on "The Man with a Camera"). Boris fled Europe at the outbreak of WWII and he became a Director of Photography in America filming motion pictures like "On the Waterfront", "12 Angry Men" and "The Pawnbroker".

Perhaps you might check out Vertov's "Kino Eye" even more than "Man with a movie camera", as this earlier film has him much less play around with montage and cinematic effects, and the idea of 'catching life unawares' (and it's rural life, for the most part) is more immediately pronounced.

I'm not sure that MAN W MOVIE CAMERA could be tagged as the first cinema-verite film, even if one accepted that appellation for such a highly stylized & editorialized film. There is such a long stream of "actuality" films going all the way back to the EDISON labs along with Biograph, Mutoscope, plus the Lumiere's at al. How, in terms of a non-editorialized lens of reportage, is MAN W CAM any more objective and unobtrusive than the reportage of the Lumiere's TRAIN PULLING INTO THE STATION (1895)? If anything the hyperstylization, the director/cinematographer/editor forcing, in directorially omnipotent & manipulative fashion, the viewers en masse to make certain conclusions and connections about the content they would not had certain cinematic devices not been employed-- which by nature is precisely what cinema verite is not... this from the very first disqualifies Vertov's film from jump. The filmmaker wants the audience to see the filmmaker-- the filmmaker films the filmmaker and his participating staff... editor, cameraman, director.. and films him filming the subjects. The filmmaker portraits himself in omnipotent allseeing poses above the city, uses special effects (always a verite no-no), causes us to see from-- repeatedly reminds us that we are seeing from-- his eye, not ours. If anything is more anti-verite's ethic I simply cannot think of it. The verite filmmaker honors the aesthetic of remaining completely invisible, of never editorializing, of never polluting the natural flow of captured reality by becoming a part of it.

An example: in the acknowledged verite masterpiece SALESMAN by the Maysles, there's a scene where Paul Brennan, the least successful salesman of the bunch & primary subject of the film, is riding a train on his way to a regional sales conference. We quietly watch as Brennan sits in melancholy ruminating his arrival at the conference with a poor couple of weeks of sales behind him. Intercut with this footage-- in the lightest possible hint at montage of two clearly-linked actualities-- is footage from the actual conference itself. The Maysles caught static for this schematic due to it's unnatural arrangement in time (the train ride came before the conference and therefore they should not be staggered into each other in pieces), and due to the suggestion that the film can see that Paul "sees" what's coming in his head (verite does not speculate on such intangible matters that cannot be mutually, physically seen by all), i e see into the future.

In MAN W MOVIE CAM there are so many association-blocks, completely volountary conclusions & playful embellishments (and literal head-games and showoffy moments, let's face it) far beyond what is considered acceptable for straight reportage... never mind cinema verite, that I think you'd have a very hard time getting away with that appellation on this film.

Notwithstanding the fact that, going back to my original statement, there are quite a number of films which long predate this film, which are far truer representations of the pure verite spirit, that it renders the proclamation that


completely erroneous. (and as for influences on neo-realism, French NW, you're leaving out the towering influence of the Swedes & especially von Stroeheim, who's GREED was an enormous influence on those two schools for obvious reasons).

If you're looking for a bevy of influences on the verite movement I'd suggest you buy two sets: Kino's 4-disc EDISON THE INVENTION OF THE MOVIES, as you'll see how much true verite there was in the one reelers going straight to the very birth of cinema. Even the first "acting" was done by regular folks doing what they do in real-life... hammering steel on an anvil, cutting hair, boxing, performing the acts they performed in music halls, but called into the studio to do the same for the camera. Fictional stories came later, as the initial attraction of the "movies" was the simple awe over the invention-- to see something that had happened in the past, as if it were happening all over again before your very eyes. People would pay a penny or nickel and put their eyes to the viewer to watch footage of folks strolling on a sunday in front of the Eiffel Tower, a snowstorm, etc.. and simply not be able to believe it. It was only after the novelty wore off with the public and spectacles became more competitive, that they had to start making shit up to keep making money.

The other set I'd reccommend for your paper is UNSEEN CINEMA. Or, if you don't have the funds, at least pick up PICTURING A METROPOLIS, which is available seperately.

And of course, pick up the masterpiece which is a feature the same length of Vertov's film, which is far closer to the verite ethic in that the footage is not editorially interrupted by the director as the string of actualities play out, predates and had an obvious influence on Vertov's film right down do all that hypergeometric machine (probably Freund's leftover's from METROPOLIS) footage: Walter Ruttmann & Karl Freund & Carl Mayer's magesterial BERLIN; SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (which I like infinitely better than Vertov's film, as the filmmakers truly let the city tell it's own magnificent story.. whereas the subject of vertov's film is himself, Kaufmann and vertov's wife, his amazing editor). This film created the term "city symphony", which MAN W is an obvious, but highly stylized specimen of.

I'm sure that the Soviets, in particular Vertov, were a major influence on Neo Realism, as well as films like Renoir's Toni, but I'd be interested to know if any Chinese films from the 1930s had any part at all in that movement. I know it is unlikely that Visconti, Rosselini et al actually saw any Chinese cinema in their developmental stages as filmmakers, but many films made in Shanghai before the war bear strong resemblances to Neo realist films in their style and subject matter. Some of the most famous took prostitution as their themes, The Goddess and Street Angels for example, and their is an unusual amount of naturalism to the acting as well.

Prostitution does not a neorealist film make. Nights of Cabiria is about prostitution and is pretty far removed from anything in neorealism. What aspects of Goddess reminded you of neorealism?

Superatomic wordup. STREET ANGEL is about as drippy a piece of Borzage's famously gauzy pictorial romanticism as exists. Pabsts PANDORA, TAGEBUCH, Kirsanoff's MENILMONTANT take the decadent in brechtian style of elevating (or simply portraiting in grand strokes) the low and minimizing the wisdom-assets & inner goodness of the "high"... it's an idea that finds it's seed on the working class stage and has been reproduced in all manner of pictorial and acting style on film. I see a closer link to neorealism in the hardboiled pre-noirs (whose lack of hyper visual excesses keep them closer to neorealism than your highly stylized noir) going back to Tod Browningesque whores (i e THE WICKED DARLING, floozies like "Barbary Nell" in Worseley's magnificently gritty THE PENALTY), and some of the ruddy early exploitive pieces running from the whores in TRAFFIC IN SOULS all the way to Dwain Esper's NARCOTIC & SEX MADNESS.

First of all, I'm not talking about Borzage's Street Angel, I'm talking about Yuan Muzhi's Malu Tianshi, also known in English as Angels of the Street. Secondly I'm obviously not suggesting that the subject of prostitution is exclusive to neo realism, or has been depicted only in a realist fashion either before or after the coming of sound. However, The Goddess was one of the first films anywhere that didn't depict prostitution as a moral disease, but a sad yet necessary practice that the heroine has to perform for the good of her son's future. It is also one of the first, as this is where the links to neo realism come in, to show the social conditions that lead to prostitution and crime.
Many of the Chinese films of the thirties dealt exclusively with working class characters and situtuations. The examples I've given just happen to be about prostition. I know neo realism had many different techniques to these films (non-actors and real locations for instance) but filmmakers such as Sun Yu and Wu Yonggang had similar aims with their films, to depict the lower rungs of the society they lived in. Unlike in the USSR, these films weren't made for the purposes of propoganda either. They could be melodramatic, but so could the Italian Neo Realist films.

What I am basically saying is that Chinese cinema was one of the closest to Neo Realism of all of the pre-war period, certainly in terms of a non-documentary cinema that produced, at its best, films largly dealing with stories of social problems of the working classes in a more realistic and less moralistic way than most other countries of that period.

What makes you say that? What is prostitution thru anybody's set of seeing eyes but a "sad but neccessary practice that the heroine has to perform for her own (or anyone elses) future"? Borzage's earlier film takes the precise same concept but instead of a neccessary evil to secure a sons future, does it to get medicine for her ailing mother. What films worth any mention whatsoever claim prostitution is a result of anything like "twisted desire" ie the hookers "love it", i e a "moral disease"? Some films like TAGEBUCH even proclaim a kind of liberation from the hypocracy of bourgoise values-- and their message is aimed directly at the heart of the "morally concerned" bourgoise. The message of The Goddess as described is neither unique or pioneering in the annals of film--

Going back to 1915's TRAFFIC IN SOULS we have an explicit warning illustrating how whorehouses operated, shanghaiing naive beautiful immigrants in NYC right off the boat into white slavery... which is in the precise tradition of all exploitation films, which cloak their tittilating footage under the guise of "warning" how a perfectly normal person could be driven to this "sad" behavior via the use of drugs & alcohol stealing the rent money... This was a very realistic (and far more globally accurate even to this day vs. GODESS' sentimental message) portrayal of the actuality, the verite truth, of what prostitution is and how it thrives on the confusion of helpless, weak women with no protection.

And I may be misreading you but you seem to have running beneath your post a sense that prostitution was only realistically dealt with when the masses ceased viewing it as "morally" impoper, and began to see it as "sad" instead. Lurking beneath I sense a vague defense of prostitution, which I'm not necessarily condemning (should've been legalized long long ago), and may be merely confusing with your conditional defense of it within the parameters of "buying the welfare of a loved one" via the practice. Or perhaps you're simply stating that it was the first time that they were portrayed sympathetically as real human beings not to be despised, which is way off the mark in terms of cinema.

But the image of the tired, otherwise good woman, driven by fate or war or poverty or other uncontrollable circumstance, hunched over in solitude in gloomy chiaroscuro, ruminating in exhaustion the pathos of her fate, and the callousness of the masses-- it's appearance predated cinema itself. Only the very worst of lying, scandalous exploitation films intimated that the prostitutes were engaging in their trade for reasons of preference or moral deterioration.

What I am saying, perhaps I didnt word it properly, is that The Goddess was one of the first films to focus more on the cause of the prostitution, not the prostitution itself, nor the 'prostitute with a heart of gold' image, which obviously had been around since time began.

I'm beginning to wish i hadn't mentioned prostitution, because that's not what my arguement is about, its about pre-war Chinese cinema in general. I'm not defending nor condemning prostitution, nor am I making any condescending remarks about how 'the masses' viewed it. I'm simply using it as an example of the predominantly socially conscious cinema of China during that period.

I KNOW there have been films about sympathetic prostitutes long before The Goddess, and I am also aware of it's sentimentality, that doesn't detract from the film's importance. Traffic in Souls deals with a different problem, women who are literally forced into prostitution, rather than it being the only choice that their poverty offered. The film condemns prostitution but not the prostitutes. The Goddess condemns neither.
Griffith and others made many 'socially conscious' films around that time, but 'The Goddess' uses the heroine's plight to critique the social conditions of the period in a far more delicate way than those early films which were foremostly about the agenda.

Just as Antonio is forced by his desperation to steal the bicycle in Bicycle Thieves, the girl is forced by her desperation to kill. As I said before, the prostitution itself is not the issue of the film anymore than bill-posting is in De Sica's. It's a means to an end, and no moral judgement is made on the profession. Its the overall desperateness of the girl's circumstance which is the focus of the film. Therefore, prostitution is not the issue at all.

Neo realism,according to a dictionary defination, consists primarily of 'the simple direct depiction of lower class life'. Therefore the social concern films of the 1910s couldn't be classed in that catagory, as they were simply 'message' films. The Goddess and various other Chinese films of the time took 'lower class' situations such as prostitution as their setting, but used them to tell their story, often with more realism and naturalism than other films of the time, although nowhere near neo realist standards. Prostitution didn't come in for direct criticism as in Traffic in Souls, but was a part of the life of someone in those circumstances. As in neo realism, the story worked on its own terms, but at the same time gave a broader critique of the society the characters inhabited.

Well, that's a pretty poor dictionary definition, and it opens it up to a broad selection of films, in Hollywood and elsewhere.

There are some similarities between Goddess and neorealism, mostly to do with the subject matter, but there are also marked differences. Goddess (which, when I saw it, was actually introduced in the theater as the first major film with a completely sympathetic view of a prostitute) is on some level a film about ordinary people's problems.

But it shares being similar to neorealism in that regard with a lot of films (a good many Indian films have similar themes, I'm to understand. Does Mother India also count as a akin to neorealism?). And it's still a melodrama, with star actors playing to the emotions, and sets, and every other trapping of a non-neorealist film. The aspect of neorealism that really sets it apart is not that it focuses on poor or working-class people, but that it focuses on non-acting and the depiction of something of the real world behind the story, a sort of documentary-as-story. Neorealism isn't even the first film movement to have those things, but it is, to my knowledge, the first time that those things were brought together as an ideal of filmmaking (making it a movement).

The definition (from Webster's) is obviously far too broad to really apply, and I did earlier mention two marked differences that italian neorealism did not share with Shanghai cinema, actual locations and non-actors.
I should have referanced more films from that period in addition to The Goddess, Plunder of Peach and Plum or The Peach Girl for instance. I'm not claiming that the Goddess is any sort of milestone, but Chinese cinema of that period in general came closer to the aims of neo realism, as it dedicates itself more than any other previous national cinema to dramatizing the problems of the poor.
The Indian films that you mention were all made after both this period in Chinese film history and the advent of neorealism, and were influenced, I believe, by both. For example Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin of 1953 was a conscious attempt to apply neorealist methods to the popular Bollywood cinema.
So as not to take The Goddess in isolation, it seems that many of the Chinese filmmakers of that period shared a need to depict the problems of ordinary people, although, as you say, using classical studio methods. To my knowledge there is no pre-1930s national cinema that, while not quite forming anything akin to a movement, consistantly produced so many films depicting real problems that real people were facing, mixed with a certain amount of naturalism, rather than poetic realism, montage propaganda, expressionism, etc.

And as a side note, the lead players in Visconti's Ossessione, often held as the first neorealist film, had all acted before. This would make the definition of Neo Realism a bit more ambigious, and with it's melodramatic storyline about adultery and murder, brings it closer still to Chinese cinema (although there are still many other factors, such as the real locations used).

Ditto for the lead actors in Roma, città aperta. But there was something quite different about the way they acted. Granted, Ossessione is really a blend of noir and neorealism, in part because neorealism hadn't solidified yet (same for Open City), in part because of the source novel, and in part I think because Visconti never quite limited himself to the neorealist ideals (look at the sweeping cinematography in La Terra Trema, his most neorealist film).

But despite all this, I think what really separates Ossessione from previous films is entirely to do with the acting. It strikes me that the fact that it was done on location isn't so much a critical aspect of the filmmaking as it is a requirement to effect the kind of acting contained in a neorealist film. You don't get the kind of scenes that you do walking around the city in Bicycle Thieves or fishing tuna in Stromboli unless you are filming as though you are making a documentary, and a film set makes that somewhat impossible. Later, the neorealists found that the easiest way to get the performances they wanted was with non-professional actors, but they started with stars (I'm sure it helped with the funding) and still produced good results.

The Indian film I mentioned (Mother India) does not strike me as having been particularly influenced by neorealism--though I don't actually know anything about its making). My (extremely limited) understanding is that it is quite simply the pinnacle of that particular kind of filmmaking that came at just the right time to strike a powerful emotional chord with the audience of the time, and that it has so frequently been likened to Gone With the Wind seems to me evidence of that. I don't know that its aims are to portray living in a poor Indian village as realistically as possible so much as to portray it in a way that would produce maximum dramatic effect. In the case of Goddess, there's an additional layer between the audience and the subject: no doubt most of the audience knows very little of the life of prostitutes, and I have my doubts that the filmmakers worked very hard to capture it "realistically" so much as plausibly for its (middle-class?) audience, which is the difference between Hollywood and neorealism. Mother India, at least, would be pretty familiar to a lot of the audience, who, I'm to understand, had been witnessing and had been a part of an ongoing transition from an agricultural economy to something more fluid, capitalist, and mechanized.

Many of Charlie Chaplin's films use poor or working-class settings as the backdrop for his films (I wonder if the neorealists liked his stuff--I'd bet they did), and there are similar motivations: to increase audience awareness of the lower classes. In that regard, you could probably say that Goddess is as similar to neorealism as The Kid or Modern Times. They are all much closer to neorealism than Sunrise or The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

I think you're going through a phase where you're overemphasizing Chinese cinema-- a smaller less diluted cinema far more easy to "tag" in the prewar era-- due to affection. Anyone whose seen enough German "street" silents, or dismal Kammerspiels of the impoverished to numerous to name, or the slum silents of Lamprecht, Pabst, or the cinema or Kirsanoff, or the American silent cinema like REGENERATION or ISN'T LIFE WONDERFUL or the gutter films of Browning.. etc etc.. would have that quiet understanding that what was called neorealism was unique only in that it became a national trend winning Oscars, became a global movement. Treatment of social problems in films was extremely prevalent in the urban decay of the pre-WW1 cinema.

THE EX CONVICT or THE KLEPTOMANIAC of 1905:


Or THE EX CONVICT:


What happens is his continually being turned away from jobs because he is an ex convict leads him to burglarize a home.. which turns out (of course) to be the wealthy home of the little girl he'd saved earlier. The father hears a noise and comes downstairs, discovers the burglar and calls the police. And in a scene that would move any father even today, the little girl comes downstairs groggy and sees the distraught convict totally freaking out, cornered, recognizes him, and runs up to him smiling, recognizing him from earlier in the morning. Her dad is utterly taken aback by his daughter telling him the good thing this "animal" did earlier in the day... naturally he is seen as a human being by the wealthy owner, and the two famililes become friends (naturally the cops are turned away when they arrive, the father feeling a debt to the man who saved his little girls life).

This film was a rehash of a vaudeville routine of the 1800's. Treatment of social problems, trying to drum it into the heads to the bourgoise that there are reasons that regular people disintegrate-- and that they stay human and maintain a basic form of humanity even when forced to do so-- is old, old old hat. Remember, the stage out of which the cinema evolved was the province of the huddled masses, not the bourgoise. It was shameful for a bourgoise to be a stage or film actor... thus these topics yelling at the stupidity of the haughty bourgoiuse is old old old hat, man. The whole idea that neorealism "took up the problems of the poor" for the first time is utter nonsense. Maybe versus the Hollywood of that particular moment.... but only just.

I wish you wouldn't keep assuming things about me, that I have a blinkered affection for Chinese cinema, or prostitution for that matter! I simply believe that these films had much more in common with neorealism than any of the western silent films you have mentioned. There is a realism and naturalism to them which isn't quite matched by any of the social issue films made pre-1920 or the obviously stylized German expressionist cinema that so influenced Hollywood. Because China was far removed from the influence of the likes of Pabst and Walsh, their films had quite a different approach. Also, there wasn't a link with vaudeville or sentimental Victorian-style melodrama, except perhaps indirectly through the films of Griffith and Chaplin.
Sun Yu in particular achieved a kind of realism, although poetic, that was unique. Daybreak is a good example of his work.
Because they were neglected for so long in the west, their rediscovery came as a suprise to western critics.

Quote;
During a 1982 retrospective of Chinese cinema at Turin, one astonished Italian critic exclaimed, "Neorealism was born in the 30s--in China!"

I know that exclamation is obviously an exagerration caused by the critic seeing such a rich era of cinema that had been hidden for so long, but the fact is that Chinese cinema of that period can't easily fit into the western-centric history of film. Neorealism was the closest movement that he could equate it with for all the reasons given in my previous posts, and more besides I'm sure.

Btw, although I am fascinated by this relatively undocumented period of cinema history, the reason I keep coming back to it is because I keep having to defend it's realism which I sincerely believe, not for some overburdening affection! I can't claim to have seen all the films that you cite, but I have seen many of them and I am certainly familiar of the kinds of films that you mean. I do see your point, but I still stand by my ideas.


The important thing I think is to define 'Neo Realism'.

This conversation keeps morphing and it's like trying to shape a feathered bed (watched TMEN last nite so forgive us... "Its like punching a feathered bed!").

This discussion was I thought a review of the suggestion by you (I think it was you, whereas it was Yilmaz who made the suggestion that Vertov's masterpiece was the first example of Verite in the history of cinema, which is a claim plagued with problems) that the Chinese cinema of the pre-WW2 years was the first one to deal with social issues in a genuine, real deal fashion, and the example of prostitution was held up as an example via the examination of the content of one film in particular.

This is not an interpretive suggestion. It's as simple as asking when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened. One need only examine the rich history of cinema, examine it's roots before it became a gazillion dollar industry that subsequently became adopted by and integrated into the social rituals of high society-- making films, acting in them, smiling in furs before the glitterati-- to discover the low nature of it's roots and audience, and how relatively common the social problem film was prior to the sound era.

And even though many of your allegations are not truly (to my mind, viz this subject) relevant-- i e who was influenced by whom, who saw Griffith & Chaplin and which cinema was isolated et al-- I wish you would back up your assertions with examples. Simply making blanket assertions along the lines of "yea but these films were not the same things" or "dedicates itself more than any other previous national cinema to dramatizing the problems of the poor." How in gods name are you quantifying such a statement. For heaven's sake what could match the Soviet cinema as a "national cinema" dramatizing the problems of the poor"?

A wiser statement would be to say "The Chinese cinema of the 30's was notable in it's willingness to allow a repeated return to the subject to the plight of it's own poor, whereby a sizable percentage of it's output at the time dealt honestly with this topic," rather than quantifying the topical output and alleging a global "topical win" of some kind.

There's nothing really to stand by. History is immutable-- social dramas exposing the plight of the poor from many brave angles were part and parcel of the cinema from it's very birth. There seem to be here and there conditions which pop up as regards what you consider "authentic" (for want of a better term) entries... what the style of shooting was, acting was, etc. Whether or not these films are Neorealist before the term was invented. If that is the question, then there's so much interpretation involved in the answer that I'll hand that off to someone else because that's a long, thesis-type discussion regarding poetics and style, and the joy of these things is the variegation of interpretation. Youre perfectly entitled to see honesty, hard-hitting straight-shooting in mise en scene, where another sees pure artifice and sentimental fluff. Just hunt up the thread here for the BICYCLE THIEF, a film I adore, and see the divergence of opinion on this archtype neorealism specimen, and you'll see the hopelessness of that conversational angle. If we here cannot see this film as a universal example of neorealism, forget it-- forget it. At least as regarding settling anything in "factual terms".

Cheers.

I think what we really need here are writings by the neorealists. I know they produced a lot of writing before they even began making neorealist films (much like the new wave), but I've never actually seen any of it. Instead, we have only their films, and we can only guess at what aspects of the films are critical to the movement, and what aspects are more or less incidental, or at least don't separate the movement from what came before.

Have these writings ever been translated into English? It seems much harder to track down than new wave writings. I'll have to poke around--I've never looked for them very seriously, even though it would probably be pretty important to me.

Here's one: Some Ideas on the Cinema by Cesare Zavattini

Pather Panchali, however, was influenced by Ray's viewing of the early neorealist classics in London.

Back to the main debate, I actually find the idea of a stylistic link between Vertov and the neorealists or nouvelle vague a bit of a red herring. Surely Vertov's lasting cinematic legacy was in extending film grammar and technique in exciting new areas, not in achieving any deeper or new form of realism. 'Reality' has always been captured by movie cameras, and cinema history is crammed with movements that defined themselves, at least in part, by a 'return to realism', from the open-air Scandinavian pioneers, to Grierson's gang, to neorealism, to Free Cinema, to Cinema Novo, to cinema-verite, to direct cinema, to the New German Cinema. Auteurs as diverse as von Stroheim, Renoir, Straub, Cassavetes and Pialat have defined themselves in similar fashion. If anything, I see Vertov working in the opposite direction, by revealing, through cinematic innovation, the fantastic (and specifically the synthetic, cinematic fantastic) in the everyday.

There's certainly an element of that cinematic playfulness in the Nouvelle Vague, but I'd be wary of laying it all at Vertov's feet. Vertov was just one amongst the NV's cinematic pantheon, and the self-reflexive vitality (now that's a core Vertov value) we see in the films seems to me more an expression of the filmmakers' rampant cinephilia than an explicit homage to a single figure. Who's to say if a particular dazzling, self-conscious move is derived from Vertov, or Eisenstein, or Ophuls, or Welles, or Fuller? I also think that any thesis that assumes stylistic consistency within the Nouvelle Vague is on shaky ground. Were it not for their historical context, would we really see such great similarities between Breathless, Hiroshima mon amour, Les 400 coups and Le Beau Serge?

The direct link lies in the translation of "Kino-Pravda" into "cinema verite." But cinema verite as expressed by Rouch et al., is quite distinct from the Nouvelle Vague proper (and quite distinct from what most people now understand by "cinema verite", which is more likely to be "direct cinema" - Pennebaker, the Maysles etc. - and in turn is not to be confused with "cinema direct"!)

Thank you very much, solaris72. I will print that out and read it. Though I'm extremely glad to have a Zavattini piece at all, what I would really die for is some of the stuff they wrote prior to Ossessione, whereas it looks like "Some Ideas on the Cinema" was written pretty much at the end of the movement.

I think its too easy to judge Man With A Movie Camera by the same standards that you may judge urban symphonies like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City or Manhatta by. The important difference between Vertov's film and these other works is that he isn't trying to capture a single city, but capture an entire nation, which is a much more ambitious undertaking. Given that the Soviet Union is of greater scale than Berlin or New York, Vertov uses footage from several cities (Moscow, Leningrad etc: ) interchangably to create simultaneity between them. The editing technique of Movie Camera is also really interesting in that it promotes an image of the Soviet Union as being dynamic and modern, as opposed to say the structured editing of Triumph of the Will (Which is in itself partly an urban symphony, at least in that sequence of Nuremberg at dawn.) which depicts the Nazi state as ordered. While Vertov and Ruttmann et al. can be compared in their filmic technique and its effectiveness, its important to remember that they are working on different subjects within the same genre.

Gregor,

A small point perhaps, but do you really view Movie Camera as an attempt to depict the Soviet Union in its entirety? I agree with your point that it's much more ambitious in scale than a typical city symphony, but I've always viewed it as a depiction of an idealized Soviet city, not the nation at large. Otherwise, Vertov is giving short shrift in this film to the rural communities that he has depicted elsewhere (Kino-Eye, etc.).

Sure, but I mean that Vertov is presenting a specific image of the Soviet Union as opposed to a single city. He focuses on cities throughout (although not entirely, as in his scenes of hydro-electric dams) but this may be because his filmic interpretation of the USSR is focused on its modernity and as such is rooted in urban experience.