The Cinematic Urbanism of the Kaufman Brothers:

Global Context and Personal Visions

Author

Anna Hurina

Abstract

This article reconsiders the city symphony as a genre through the lens of urban and film studies, focusing on the interplay between cinematic form and the production of socialist urban space. Rather than treating canonical examples such as Liudyna z kinoaparatom / Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) as isolated masterpieces, the article situates them within a broader network of films and filmmakers, including Mikhail Kaufman, Alberto Cavalcanti, and Jean Vigo. Employing methods of shot-by-shot analysis, historical contextualisation, and discourse analysis, the article argues that the shared cinematic tropes – such as rhythmic montage, polyphonic structure, and the city as protagonist – allow for a coherent attribution of the city symphony despite the genre’s elusive definitions. Special attention is paid to the contrasting urban imaginaries constructed by the Kaufman brothers, particularly in Moskva: Probeg Kino-Glaza / Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye (1927), Man with a Movie Camera and Navesni / In Spring (1930), which reveal divergent visions of utopic, socialist urbanism. The article proposes that these films not only reflect but mediate alternative spatial and ideological realities that persist on screen and in cultural memory.

Keywords

Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Kaufman, Soviet cinema, city symphony, socialist urban space, urban film studies, visual urbanism, Kinoglaz, Cine-Eye.

– Я, скажімо, часто згадую уроки німецької. Це взагалі якась така дивна штука була в радянській педагогіці – вивчати німецьку. Був у цьому якийсь нездоровий антифашистський пафос. І ось десь у четвертому-п’ятому класах у нас були такі завдання: нам роздавали поштові картки з видами різних міст, такі, пам’ятаєш, вони тоді продавались у всіх поштових відділеннях, цілими наборами?

– Не пам’ятаю, – відповіла Ольга.

– Продавались. Скажімо, картки з видами міста Ворошиловграда. Тепер уже й міста такого немає, а я кілька років розповідав про нього німецькою мовою. Цікаво, правда?

– Дуже.

– На цих картинках, як правило, були зображені які-небудь адміністративні будівлі або пам’ятники які-небудь. Ну, які могли бути пам’ятники у Ворошиловграді? Мабуть, Ворошилову. Я вже не пам’ятаю, якщо чесно. І ось потрібно було розповісти про те, що ти бачиш. А що ти бачиш на такій картці? Сам пам’ятник, коло нього клумба, поруч хто-небудь обов’язково проходить, позаду може їхати тролейбус. А може, до речі, і не їхати. Тоді гірше – немає про що розповідати. Може світити сонце. Може лежати сніг. Ворошилов міг бути на коні, а міг бути й без коня. Що знову ж таки гірше, оскільки про коня можна було розповісти окремо. І ось ти починаєш розповідати. А що можна розповісти про те, чого ти насправді не бачив? І починаєш викручуватись. Можна було спочатку розповідати про сам пам’ятник, себто про того, хто на ньому був зображений. Потім доводилось братися за випадкових перехожих, що потрапили в кадр. Причому що ти міг про них розповісти? Ось, мовляв, жінка, на ній жовтий светр і чорна сукня. А в руках у неї, скажімо, торба. Скажімо, з хлібом. Потім, коли й про перехожих переповідалось, можна було сказати ще кілька слів про погоду. Але головне, що я хочу сказати – все це було настільки не по-справжньому, розумієш – усі ці картинки, всі ці розповіді, вся ця мова, набір із кількох десятків слів, акцент, намагання якось наїбати нещасну вчительку. Я з того часу німецьку мову терпіти не можу. І у Ворошиловграді жодного разу не був. Та й немає тепер ніякого Ворошиловграда.

– І для чого ти мені це розповів? – запитала Ольга.

Сергій Жадан, Ворошиловград (2010)¹

Introduction

Adhering to the methodologies of visual, film and urban studies after the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities, my article charts the interdependency of two fields – urbanism and cinema – in the production of socialist urban space. From the onset, city symphonies have excited the minds and eyes of both viewers and film critics alike: so familiar, but estranged cities are shown logically from dawn to dusk, yet with the teasing rapid montage sequences keeping them entertaining, thought-provoking and enchanting. The review of the city-film panorama of the 1920s and 1930s should start with the discussion of the film which helped define the genre of city symphony as such, and which deals explicitly with cinematic urbanism. The documentary Liudyna z kinoaparatom / Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) treats urban life as material for the film, as opposed to using the city as a backdrop for the film’s narrative. However, before contributing my reading of the film grounded in urban cinematics and sequence analysis, it is necessary to touch upon the genre of city symphony and analyse other less studied examples of the genre made by kinoki (i.e. Mikhail Kaufman and Il’ia Kopalin’s Moskva: Probeg Kino-Glaza/Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye (1927) and Mikhail Kaufman’s Navesni / In Spring (1930)) in order to situate Vertov’s film in dialogue with them.

The central concern of this article is to examine the unique contributions to the utopian, socialist urban space made by the Kaufman brothers’ productions and how their material is distinct from other contemporaneous city symphonies. The article relies on shot-by-shot analysis of the primary filmic materials, historical contextualisations, both visual (e.g. research of the archival photos and city maps to compare with the directorial re-signification in the film on screen) or biographical (interviews or first-person declarations of the authors under consideration) as well as the discourse analysis of theoretical discussions of city symphony genre definitions or the relevance of the political framework in terms of capitalist/socialist urban space production. Considering the scope of the article, a ‘roadmap’ is provided below.

The article begins by addressing the definitional challenges surrounding the genre of the “city symphony”, surveying various attempts to fix its meaning. It argues in favour of an open-ended, flexible definition that recognises the genre’s inherent formal and ideological variability, allowing each film to reinvent the genre according to its specific historical, political, and aesthetic context. The article proceeds with analysis of concrete examples, starting with the first European city-symphony by Alberto Cavalcanti Rien que les heures / Nothing but Time (1926). It merits a close reading as the pioneering work in the genre. Next, an attempt will be made to trace the Vertovian influences already evident at this early stage. The second film to undergo in-depth analysis – and the first by one of the Kaufman brothers – is À propos de Nice / About Nice by Jean Vigo (1930) whose cinematographer was Boris Kaufman (Dziga Vertov’s and Mikhail Kaufman’s youngest brother). The film seeks to locate the sparks of revolutionary socialist urban potential in the cradle of the bourgeois touristic destination – Nice. Analysis progresses to what is arguably the first real symphony of the socialist city and the problems it has raised: Kaufman and Kopalin’s Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye (1927). Although Man with a Movie Camera is not the article’s primary focus (mainly because it is the most over-analysed example of the city symphony genre), it is nonetheless the core point of reference, especially with regard to the cinematographic and urban material it provided. Analysing the disputed structure as well as the specific sequences of the film, we will compare it to the final film examined here: Mikhail Kaufman’s In Spring. Briefly touching on the artistic sibling rivalry between the Kaufman brothers, this article will also evaluate the invaluable contributions they made to the genre of the city symphony and the utopian socialist space they strove to construct on screen. This line of enquiry seeks to avoid any anachronistic discussion of Man with a Movie Camera as a unique ‘masterpiece’ and is intended to inscribe Vertov’s film in the broader contexts of his own oeuvre and the epoch’s artistic and political environments. ²

City Symphony as a Genre: Problem of Definition

A city symphony was identified as a genre of the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s after two films Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt/Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis by Walter Ruttmann (Weimar Republic, 1927) [hereinafter Berlin] and Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov [hereinafter, MWMC]. Yet, as catchy as the name sounds (other possible names are “city-film” (Weihsmann 1997, Strathausen 2003, Werth 2013) and “city documentary” (Croft and Rose 1977), the precise origins of the genre and critical consensus regarding the body of films which are exemplary of it have yet to be established, if it is at all possible to do so.³ Frequently mentioned examples of the genre include Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, USA, 1921), Nothing but time, About Nice and Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye. In terms of defining the above films as city symphonies, Adams Sitney argued that this genre is “specifically avant-garde” (Graf 2007: 77). In order for a film to be regarded as belonging to this genre, it should be situated at the intersection of several recurring attributes identified by scholars: (a) a unity of place and time — typically portraying ‘a day in the life’ of a city from dawn to dusk; and (b) rhythmic or associative editing. These features are consistently highlighted in discussions of the city symphony genre (Penz 2003: 144; Alifragis and Penz 2009: 3; Crofts and Rose 1977: 15; Donald 1999: 77; Roberts 2000: 1). As Graf succinctly puts it: “It is within this area of tension, somewhere between photographic mimesis and pure motion energy, that city symphonies are located” (Graf 2007: 89). Graf also points out the formal devices city symphonies have in common: the aim of developing a new film language and resorting to music rather than art as the source of possible functioning principles.

However, the critical literature on the genre, its formal characteristics and the set of stylistic criteria are so scarce and dispersed that a ‘safe’ definition of city symphonies is “Montage-based films without human leads where the city is the subject”(Penz and Lu 2011: 10). This ‘safe’ assumption would exclude many films — notably those that mix fiction and documentary, such as Rien que les heures/Nothing but Time (Alberto Cavalcanti, France, 1926), or even Vertov’s classic itself, since the Cameraman could be considered a legitimate ‘human lead’. However, the following discussion is consistent with Penz and Lu in their suggestion that “[…] Every new city symphony is having to reinvent the genre”, perhaps more so because of the modernist stance of those attempting it, and the looseness of the genre’s definitions (Penz and Lu 2011: 11). Taking the problems with the genre into account, it must also be remembered that the productivity of the categorization depends on the dialectics of generalizations and specificities, theories and historical contexts which, while they might not offer absolute conclusions, do at least help us ask the right questions. Thus, before proceeding to a more formal discussion of the three Soviet city-symphonies that I will address – Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye, MWMC and In Spring – a brief characteristic of the predecessors will be made against the foil of John Grierson’s complaint in ‘First Principles of Documentary’ (1932) that “[…] Berlin still excites the mind of the young, and the symphony form is still their most popular persuasion. In fifty scenarios presented by the tyros, forty-five are symphonies of Edinburgh or of Ecclefechan or of Paris or of Prague” (Grierson 1966: 150).

The very first films, which concerned the everyday life of a city as their main subject, were made in the genre of actualités – ‘visual newspapers’ – and travelogues as a form of visual tourism. Although they could be considered as supplying the foundation for city symphonies, they influenced the latter to the same degree as European avant-garde art (Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism) (Penz 2003; Strathausen 2003). In fact, the first city symphony film Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, USA, 1921) was more literature-centred, with the film serving as a 10-minute illustration of Walt Whitman’s poem Mannahatta (1880) where the lines of the poem are present as intertitles. The close-ups of architectural details of Manhattan take the place of the rhythmic montage and camera movement of later city symphonies. The film’s photographer, Charles Sheeler, soon joined the Precisionists, whose visual characteristics included the abstract presentation of functionalist architecture and details of machinery. This film was the first to portray the everyday life of a city from dawn to dusk, but it lacked the polyphonic qualities and associative montage of the films to come (for a close reading of the film see Suárez 2002).

Nothing But Time, Space and a ‘Clumsy Social Document’: Alberto Cavalcanti’s Nothing but Time (1926)

Nothing but Time is a 45-minute semi-documentary cross-section of Paris with an engaging mix of the aesthetic and the social. Cavalcanti pioneered the city-symphony genre and thus must be included in the analysis. The possible inspiration from the Kinoglaz/Cine-Eye (1924) shows that Vertov and his clear belonging to the left ideological project inspired Cavalcanti’s film (see Note 5). However, for Cavalcanti, living in the very different social context of the bourgeois Paris of the 1920s, it was impossible to completely ignore the diseases of the capitalist society: the class discrepancy, poverty and prostitution, as well as artists of the Montmartre who were the epitome of the artistic bohemian and also time left-idealistic life. Paris also represented a tourist mecca and a commercialised the city, which he witnessed in front of his eyes and therefore had to be included. As Cavalacanti was not living in a socialist society, he responded to the realities of his own social context. This kind of engagement with capitalist modernity finds parallel in Jean Vigo’s About Nice, the film analysed next.

The title is presented in a constructivist style, with strict geometric lines and a globe made dynamic with the help of flickering lightning (Fig. 1).

The film’s opening intertitle provides a radical, cunning renunciation of narrative in the Zeitgeist discourse of the avant-garde: “This film contains no story. It is just a sequence of impressions on the passage of time”. The statement is actually misleading since the story of a prostitute and her procurer killing a female newspaper vendor is the main storyline which motivates many of the camera angles in the film. Yet both the disruptive and associative montage, as well as the non-linearity of the narrative, contribute to a hindered understanding of the story which can be easily missed on the first viewing. The film has a prologue and an epilogue, which are interrelated and demonstrate the author’s strong views on international urban modernism, fragmentation and the commercialization of cities as objects for touristic consumption.

The opening intertitle states: “All cities would look the same were it not for the monuments that distinguish them”, and the subsequent images include – in a manner of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage in Oktiabr’/October (1928) – an Eiffel tower thermometer and a snow dome with a La Madeleine (église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine / the Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine) in it framed by two schematic maps of Paris for tourists (Fig. 2).

The epilogue’s intertitle says: “We can fix a moment in space to freeze a moment in time but space and time both elude our grasp”, and is followed by a globe and a map of the world with only Paris and Beijing marked on it. Paris is represented by an aerial view of the Arc de Triomphe and the boulevards radiating from it, while the image of Beijing is constructed within one collage shot of oriental postcard views (Fig. 3).

After the prologue, the film keeps positioning itself within the cinematic, artistic and political contexts of the era. It starts with what looks like typical actualités footage of Paris that had been produced in abundance since the invention of cinema, only for such clichés to be wiped away by hand immediately, thus separating the film from other products for touristic consumption (Fig. 4).

The film proceeds by showing some well-dressed women of the bourgeoisie and an intertitle denying that they are going to be the central characters of the film (“This is not a depiction of the fashionable and elegant life, but of the everyday life of the humble, the downtrodden”), and the freeze-frame shot of the women transformed i into a film still torn to pieces (Fig. 5).

The film’s manifesto concludes with a proclamation of the superiority of film as a medium over painterly art. The intertitle states: “Painters of every nationality depict the city”; followed by a close up of an eye and a gallery of urban landscape paintings before an intertitle asserts “But only a succession of images can bring it to life” (Fig. 6).⁴

When the main part of the film begins, it indeed concentrates on the representation of a typical day in the city from morning till night – early morning hours with the last party-goers, empty streets, the appearance of the first workers, working hours, lunch, afternoon swimming, and leisure in the evening. Some fragments exhibit quite interesting Vertovian influences: for example, in the noontime sequence when affluent people enjoy their lunch at a restaurant, Cavalcanti comments on the production of the steak on the plate by showing the butchery (Fig. 7). It is highly evocative of the bull/time-turned-backwards sequence in Kino-glaz/Cinema-Eye (Dziga Vertov, 1924), but with very different ideological connotations.

In addition, the typical visual tropes of the city symphony such as sleeping homeless people and swimming at leisure (including diving) can also be traced back to Vertov (Fig. 8).⁵

However, in between these documentary fragments, three staged narrative stories are inserted and intersected. The theme of all three are women and time: an old destitute woman who stumbles through the city to the river and embodies everything modernity is not supposed to be: slow, decelerating, inefficient movement, decay and death (the intertitle states she is “Indifferent to time”); a female newspaper vendor whose job is structured by the time of modernity (newspaper’s early publishing hours, quick selling pace and short-lived sensations) and who wants to know her future, as she visits a fortune teller who foresees her death; and a prostitute whose job is also structured around time, but in a reversed way (she is shown trying to get her last customer in the early hours of the morning, and the elements of her flat indicate the passage of the day: a puffed out candle, the view of the city from her window with blinds drawn, etc.). The strong presence of the staged narrative caused Alan Harry to label the film as “subjective” and a “romance” (as opposed to the “objective” and “document” – like Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt by Walter Ruttmann (Weimar Republic, 1927)), nonetheless, the film effectively launched the city symphony genre (Harry [1930] 2009: 373).

Cavalcanti’s film does not envisage a revolutionary solution as the answer to the social inequalities presented. The director prioritises the formal experimentation with montage that offers spatial and chronological displacements (such as its disjointed and non-linear temporality). He also refrains from deploying fast montage rhythms to emphasise the machine-like qualities of the contemporary city until the very final shot of the film, which uses multiple exposures to articulate its vision of modernity’s fast-paced city. In fact, the film could be said to exhibit a more ‘human’ rhythm, that is, a rhythm that is structured around a ‘natural’ progression through a day, albeit disrupted by the narrative of the story. The only instance in which one sees cars and trams – quintessential markers of modernity – together is in another collaged shot in the film’s epilogue, which corresponds to the constructivist structure of the opening title and serves to summarise the main topics of the film itself (time, modernity, universal values) (Fig. 9).

All in all, the film might be a “[…] clumsy social document” (as Cavalcanti once described it), but it is certainly a successful city symphony (cited in Graf 2007:78).

Boris Kaufman’s Proto-Socialist Nice: Jean Vigo’s About Nice (1930)

About Nice is a 25-minute film whose cinematographer could be said to be the second ‘man with a movie camera’: Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman’s youngest brother, Boris Kaufman. In his manifesto “Towards a Social Cinema”, which was delivered to the Groupement des Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde at Paris’s Le Vieux-Colombier, Vigo proclaimed his intention to direct a film with a strong social statement before the film’s second public screening:

In fact, no sooner is the atmosphere of Nice and the kind of life one leads there – and elsewhere, alas – sketched out, than the film moves to generalise the gross festivities situating them under the sign of grotesque, of the flesh and death, which are the last spasms of a society so little conscious of itself that it is enough to sicken you and to make you into an accomplice of a revolutionary solution (Vigo [1930] 1993: 63)

The film focuses on Nice presenting its preparation for the carnival which in the film stands for the culmination of human perversion. Surrealistic and sarcastic imagery is distinguishes this film from other city symphonies (after all, during his speech (mentioned above) Vigo expressed his fascination with Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, France, 1929) and, in a fashionable avant-garde gesture of self-denial, proclaimed that he would prefer to show the audience their film, but had not obtained permission to do so). Playful, satirical juxtapositions abound in the film: a well-off woman proudly strolling the promenade is inter-cut with an ostrich; bourgeois men sunbathing on the beach in their clothes (contrasting the workers playing with a ball in the water) are compared to alligators basking in the sun; a woman’s outfits are interchanged and then made to vanish completely using the stop frame technique; the medals and crosses of victory on a general’s uniform are cross-cut with graveyard crosses (Fig. 10).

The Vertovian method of the cine-eye is clearly identifiable here too: the estranging Rodchenko-style shooting from a low angle, the filming of the carnival preparation and bored bourgeoisie scattered along the Promenade des Anglais in the ‘life caught off-guard’ [zhizn’ vrasplokh] manner.⁶ According to Kaufman, it was his decision to use a Kinamo (one of the first hand-held 35mm cameras, which Dziga Vertov had brought to him in 1927) ‘to get rid of the tripod, to be more flexible, and to avoid being noticed by the people we were filming’ (Fig. 11) (Film Reference Web Resource. “Boris Kaufman: Writer and Cinematographer”).

The film opens with two oppositional shots: one is taken from the ground, the other from the sky (Fig. 12). A long shot of fireworks and the subsequent aerial one of Nice contradict the vast majority of the film’s imagery, which maintains the grounded perspective of a city-dweller. Later it becomes clear whose perspective those shots represent: tourists’ stereotypical image of Nice as the city of carnival and leisure (fireworks) and the view from private seaplanes (aerial shot). Vigo uses the same ‘guessing game’ principle later when the viewers are shown the tracking shot of a cracked pavement, which later turns out to be the perspective of a newspaper vendor’s vehicle (Fig. 13).

Carnival is the most important period for the city in which it gets transformed into a space of excess. However, Vigo avoids travelogues and focuses on the abyss between the boredom of the bourgeoisie and the hard work of the common people in the backyards of the city. The absurdity of the city’s preparation for the carnival is constructed in the sequences depicting wiping sand from palm trees and chopping off their ‘unaesthetic’ leaves, re-painting the heads of gigantic carnival sculptures, using puppets to represent tourists being trapped in casinos straight after their arrival, and Nice’s hotels filmed lying on their side (Fig. 14).⁷ All of this is intercut with footage of the workers’ quarters of the city and the work that services the city’s touristic needs: women picking the flowers which are thrown away a few hours later in the carnival’s Battle of Flowers; the cooks and food transporters involved in catering for the event; and street musicians playing for a sleeping audience.

Vigo’s city symphony reveals Nice to be a space marked by the production of social injustice. Although it finishes with images of workers, chimneys and furnaces (almost identical to Vertov’s) and toppled carnival effigies — grotesque masks of bourgeois spectacle — they remain only hopeful hints towards a revolution (Fig. 15).

This brief history of the city symphony genre serves a dual purpose: on the one hand to characterise examples which precede and follow MWMC; and on the other hand, to reinforce the statement that “every new city symphony had to reinvent the genre”.⁸ This statement could not be truer for Mikhail Kaufman, someone who is still inscribed into the history of Soviet cinema as Dziga Vertov’s younger brother, the embodied “man with a movie camera”, but not so much the “director of the experiment” [rukovoditel’ eksperimenta]. In keeping with our stated preference for contextualising MWMC against its historical and artistic environment, the following analysis includes a discussion of In Spring. Despite its many similarities with MWMC, this lesser-known work explicitly challenged Vertov’s ideas whilst adhering to the kinoki cinematic method. However, before undertaking this comparative reading of MWMC, Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye will be considered first not so much as an ‘origin’ of the former, but in relation to the city symphony genre per se.

Guidebook to the Socialist City: Mikhail Kaufman’s and Il’ia Kopalin’s Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye (1927)

Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye could arguably be labelled the first symphony of the socialist city. It was Mikhail Kaufman’s and Il’ia Kopalin’s first full-length feature-documentary.⁹ The film was favourably perceived at the time by the majority of film critics and directors mostly because it complied with their ideas of what documentary should be. Firstly, it dated and signed ‘facts’ (as opposed to using the material in a ‘creative’ way as Vertov did), thus indirectly answering Osip Brik’s and Viktor Shklovskii’s complaints (Brik [1927] 2004: Shklovsky [1926] 2004). Secondly, it was relatively ‘objective’, thus adhering to Kuleshov’s (and indeed many others’) ideal that “The non-fiction film should not show the subjective impression the artist has of events, however correct the artist’s convictions may be” (Kuleshov [1927] 2004). Even Vertov himself considered his ‘pupils’ work as a ‘model of newsreel cine-things’, albeit ‘the most simple’ (Vertov [1927] 2004). Last, but definitely not least, in the resource-limited 1920s the film was praised for being not only well made but also for being made “cheaply and quickly” (Sokolov [1927] 2004). Even Eisenstein, well known for his fierce debates against kinoki, emphasised the film’s merits:

Without any lofty emotional claims, beautifully shot, well edited, [Moscow], naturally, resolves the task that it has set itself — showing Moscow — by means of location shooting…. Moscow shows kinoculism the healthy path and the area — newsreel — which it should occupy in the construction of Soviet cinema (Eisenstein [1927] 2004).

Indeed, the film is finely tuned between logically structured intertitles which identify all the locations being filmed, and rapid montage sequences which convey the affective experiences of the city dweller in urban space. Three-quarters of the film follow a ‘day in the life of a city’ structure, starting with the early morning sequence of cleaning the city and finishing with the sequence providing clumsy, but essential attempts of filming at night.¹⁰ The final third is dedicated to the re-signified spaces of the new Soviet state. Beginning with chronicle footage of the foreign embassies and their ambassadors in Moscow as the capital of the world proletariat and finishing with the new uses of old buildings reclaimed by the Bolsheviks (Fig. 16). Katerina Clark summarises the film thus:

Kaufman, then, was presenting a Moscow which was little changed in externals (its architecture) but where the function of its buildings had, in his account, been transformed. This emphasis on ‘transformation’,

on the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of a new, socialist Moscow, was to become a central organizing principle in film and literary representations of Moscow in the thirties, but by then the transformation was an external, material one that stood for the social and psychological (Clark 2006: 185).

The importance of this ‘before’ and ‘after’ ideological message for Kaufman and Kopalin was one of the reasons why they had to resort to using intertitles. The changes were not visual enough; the majority of them could not be grasped by filming the exterior; while filming the interior was not always possible. Whenever a political persona appears on screen, he is identified by intertitles, thus bringing the new governing bodies ‘closer’ to the people (this chronicle approach was first used by kinoki in Cine-Pravda newsreels).

Now let us consider the city symphony part of the film in more detail. As mentioned above, the film has a predictable chronological structure, but very shortly after the beginning (after the traditional sequences of cleaning the city and people starting to work), it is intersected with a rigid spatial narrative. The film traces, almost street by street, the main routes to Red Square from the train stations which act as the vital nodes of connectivity between the centre and the periphery. It is this loyalty to the actual urban topography of Moscow which made Bulgakowa pinpoint the difference between the imaginary spaces of Cine-Eye (Dziga Vertov, 1924) and Moscow. Even though they both adhere to representations of the topoi of modernity, but:

The choice and representation of these topoi [train station, market, fire station, hospitals (Sklifosovsky, Kashchenkova dacha, a syphilis clinic), bakery, the slaughter-house in Vertov’s Cine-Eye] were a little archaic. The topography of a nineteenth century city with its juxtaposition of dark stinky cesspools and healthy life au naturel was no longer up to date. The 1920s emphasised other aspects in a city: rationality (tselesoobraznost’), efficiency of communication and transportation, the possibility of control over heat and light independent of the sun. The documentary by Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman Moscow (1927) followed this new mythology and represented Moscow as a rational structure, explained to the viewers the functions of the new city’s governing bodies, and watched the adaptation of old buildings to new needs and functions. […] If the topographic map of the city suggested by Cine-Eye could not be used, Moscow was following the real route of the visitor, moving from the square of the three train stations to the centre of the capital (Fig. 17) (Bulgakowa 2010: 114).¹¹

After describing how to get to Red Square, the film becomes a catalogue of factories and institutions that are located in Moscow. The ‘working hours’ sequence of the film exploits the images of the main post office with its pneumatic post, Mostorg shop, Petrovka, Moskvoshvei, telegraph, light and heavy industries (Iava, Mossukno, Trekhgornaia manufacture, Serp i Molot plant, AMO, Elekrolampa, Provodnik) and the first Soviet electromotive which takes the viewer to the outskirts where new workers’ housing is in the process of construction (Fig. 18).

The ‘Moscow at leisure’ section continues the tour and finishes the day with the art museum, zoo, Petrovskii Park, racing track, Sokol’niki, the Moscow River, the stadiums, Neskuchnyi Garden, and Gorki Leninskie. The night-time sequence, mentioned above, is represented by Mossel’prom and the abundance of luxurious food in the cooperative Kommunar intercut with the orphanage and homeless children (repeating the message of the first Cine-Pravda that money could be spent better).¹² It is followed by the representations of ‘old’ ideas about leisure (operetta and restaurant) and ‘new’ ones set in a workers’ club (Fig. 19).

The film finishes with an open statement declaring its abandonment of the travelogue-style representation of Moscow.¹³ The intertitle argues that “It appears to be the same Moscow”, but in fact the Central Executive Committee of the USSR is now in the Kremlin. “The same” Moscow’s symbols – the Tsar Bell and Tsar Cannon – are subverted by filming a boy with a dog from inside the bell and superimposing the cannon over its muzzle (Fig. 20).

The final sequence of the film proudly demonstrates the Shukhov Radio Tower – one of the city’s most important and most visually striking post-Revolutionary landmarks from a number of mobile perspectives: an extreme close-up from outside following the tower from the bottom up; camera rotation shot from outside the tower; camera rotation shot from inside the tower; an extreme bottom-up shot with the tower immobile, but the clouds in the sky passing by (Fig. 21).

Constructed in the period 1919-1922 by engineer Vladimir Shukhov, this 150-meter conical ‘hyperboloid turned steel’ broadcasted the Moscow city and Comintern radio stations and “symbolised the revolutionary future” (Ruble 1990: 126). Thus the choice of this structure to make a powerful closing statement is hardly surprising.

The achievement of the intertitles and the film’s montage should not be underestimated. It is true that it is possible to isolate particular elements in order to argue that the film’s didactic intention is simplistic and leaves little room for doubting the dominant (desired) interpretation, but Kaufman’s subtle cinematography, his first attempts to construct a cine-thing using the elements of his analytical investigation theory (which will be discussed in detail below) as well as offering the first city symphony of the socialist city, make Moscow more than a non-controversial, ‘correct’ newsreel by of Dziga Vertov's brother (Tsivian 2004: 24). It is worth noting that MWMC did not necessarily succeed in inventing a new cinematic language without intertitles, and this film shares many of the qualities which have repeatedly led critics to analyse (and canonise) Vertov’s complex cine-thing. Even though Lev Kuleshov had every right to wonder why this film was made so late (after all, he was the first to incorporate the re-signification device of Moscow ‘before’ and ‘after’ in his film Neobychainye prikliucheniia Mistera Vesta v strane Bol’shevikov/The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), he nevertheless appreciated the urban cinematography of the film:

It is amazing to see this film about Moscow in 1927. It should have been filmed considerably earlier. […] If we had filmed earlier, we would have been able to see Soviet Moscow being gradually constructed, which would be far more interesting than just seeing it in its present state. The cityscape part of the film is the best. […] The film is shot better than it is edited. But its sequences, along with the notable simplicity of its montage construction, are a big step forward for the Soviet newsreel (Kuleshov [1927] 2004: 273-4).

Moscow initiated possibilities for imagining the new socialist city with cinema, where utopian impulses intersect with a firm grounding in material reality. In the case of Moscow, Kaufman and Kopalin saw this dynamic intersection in the radical redefinition of the long-established functions of the buildings, the reconstruction of public space with the help of new monuments (Lenin’s plan of monumental propaganda) and new constructivist structures (Shukhov Tower); and in its firm grounding in Moscow’s material provinciality, under-urbanization and its long, difficult to erase (at least, until Stalin’s dynamite-induced 1935 General Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow) religious and imperial history.

Cinematic Sibling Rivalry: Dziga Vertov vs Mikhail Kaufman

The director who would next create his own version of the symphony of a socialist city was Dziga Vertov. The problem was that Mikhail Kaufman was working with him too, but not as a co-director, just as a cameraman and actor.¹⁴ The brothers did not finish the film together. As reluctant as I am to allow their biographical and personal interrelations influence my research, I believe that a brief outline of the circumstances is appropriate here, to offer a ‘film material-based interpretation’.

The first traceable hint of tension between the brothers was recorded after Brik’s review of The Eleventh Year. As stated above, critics commented favourably on Kaufman’s first serious attempt at directing; the absence of the polarised ‘love-it-or-hate-it’ reviews which had accompanied all of Vertov’s previous films was at first interpreted as an inherent quality of “the most simple straightforward” of newsreel cine-thing. At the same time, the idea that Vertov should somehow ‘learn’ from Kaufman was already apparent in Eisenstein’s review. As Tsivian notes, “After 1926 […], critics developed a tendency of pointing to Kaufman as the “good” brother, as it were – more modest, less loud, etc., than that intolerable Vertov” (Tsivian 2004: 24). Brik’s review just aggravated the situation when he wrote:

Of course the absence of a thematic plan also influences the work of the cameraman. For all the brilliant qualities of Kaufman’s footage, it never goes beyond the demonstration of spectacle. It is shot only because of its interest as pure spectacle. It could have been included in any other film [emphasis added]. It completely lacks the element of reportage and polemical journalism. They are excellent location shots, non-fiction sequences for a fiction film. This happens because Kaufman did not know what theme he was producing his footage for, or from whatsemantic position he should be doing his location filming. He shot things in the way that seemed most interesting to him as a cameraman, and from this point of view, the point of view of the taste and mastery of the cameraman, they are superb, but they are shot with an eye to aesthetics and not newsreel (Brik [1928] 2004: 310-1).

After such an attack, Vertov wrote an ultimatum to Kaufman asking him to repudiate all the charges that Brik had made (Vertov [1928] 2004: 311-4). The Council of Three did issue such a letter, stating that:

With the present letter the workers of the Kyiv Kino-Eye group (and in particular the group’s cameraman) decisively condemn the article by Comrade Brik […]. Brik’s wild supposition (served up as fact) that the cameraman on The Eleventh Year, who was not shooting the film beyond the Arctic Circle, but under the direct supervision of the author of the film, did not know what he was filming, and for what purpose. This meaningless ‘assertion’, directed personally against the leader of the Kino-Eye group, alongside the praise poured upon the film’s cameraman, can only be interpreted as an attempt to set the members of the group against each other, with the aim of causing the group to disband (Vertov, Kaufman and Svilova [1928] 2004: 315-6).

But with the benefit of hindsight, Brik was right. The literal realisation of his statement was an anti-religious sequence from In Spring, when a model of a church is cleaned by hand (Fig. 26b). It was fiercely debated between the brothers since Vertov claimed it was shot for MWMC and thus belonged to him, but Mikhail argued that it was in fact he who had shot it autonomously from his brother. Hence it was not included in MWMC, and Mikhail was free to do whatever he wanted with the footage (Fig. 22) (Tsymbal 2002). However, if read in a broader sense, Brik’s critique demonstrates a slight misunderstanding of not only the dynamics at work between Vertov and Kaufman (which, according to Kaufman, was based on very strong collaboration and the division of labour up until MWMC (Kaufman [1967] 1994 and [1976] 1979), but also Vertov’s interval theory, which actually emphasised montage as the basic principle of his work:

Kinochestvo is the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm of each object. Intervals (the transitions from one movement to another) are the material, the elements of the art of movement, and by no means the movements themselves (Vertov 1922: 12).

The brothers’ collaboration ended after the shooting for MWMC ended. Mikhail Kaufman explained his view of what happened in an interview with the journal Oktiabr/October in January 1976 (with Naum Kleiman acting as an interpreter). The urtext of MWMC deserves to be cited at length here:

Kaufman: The idea for The Man with a Movie Camera had already arisen in 1924. How did this idea take shape? Strictly speaking, we needed a Kino-theory and a Kino-program in cinematic form. I suggested such an idea to Vertov, but it could not be realised at that time. […] After A Sixth of the World, we set off for Ukraine, where there was a prospect of actually making The Man with a Movie Camera. […] We accumulated an enormous number of devices of all sorts which were supposed to be revealed in The Man with a Movie Camera. Not exactly revealed, but shown as a means to an end. Briefly, the man with a movie camera lands in the middle of life’s turmoil. First we see him as someone in the midst of this whirl, unable to make sense of his situation. He rushes towards one thing, then towards another, and towards a third, and so on. Chaotically. And that explains the accumulation of a tremendous number of phenomena. But gradually, because he is homo sapiens, he starts to find connections between these. And the moment he finds the connections – even one single connection – he’s no longer attracted to just any impression, but to the next associated impression. And that is how we get the thinking man with the movie camera, comprehending the world. Do you see? […] That’s why I shot... why I actually jumped from one side to the other, and to a third. I shot freely. Everything was interesting. Montage as spectacle. But the material allowed it. It’s true that some things weren’t shot because we were so carried away by Odessa. Material was supposed to be shot which would then lead to the search for other material, so as to comprehend all shooting processes, to interpret them. We were filming in a particular environment in our country, where particular sorts of processes take place. Finally we had to hand in the picture, the second half of the picture – perfecting, comprehending this life which we...

October: And frames from the first half were supposed to be used?

Kaufman: Absolutely. New connections. That was my dream. Vertov knew; Dziga knew perfectly well. I knew after all what the result would be. He had an irresistible urge; he wanted to compromise the feature cinema at any cost. I found this childish. It was envy. Actually, it was spite. […] Nevertheless, we had a plan and we went off to Odessa. But then the time came to finish the film. I was summoned: ‘Listen, are you going to be shooting this film indefinitely? We’re already running out of film stock. What are you actually doing here?’ […] Well, it came when we had to break off shooting, and Vertov started editing. I was very disappointed then. Instead of a film which had been thought out, what came out was actually only its first part. And it’s terribly overloaded with events which are, from my point of view, very intrusive. I’m being perfectly open with you. […] Do you remember that interminable number of trams? Those repetitions? Even when reusing the same material, one should never have so many repetitions. Things have to move forward in some direction.¹⁵

Thus the mixture of time constraints and the brothers’ fascination with the material, as well as Vertov’s later choice of the sequences to edit, left Kaufman unhappy and he did not stay to see the finished cine-thing. Meanwhile, VUFKU (Vseukraiinske fotokinoupravlinnia/All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Directorate] had granted Mikhail permission to shoot his own second feature In Spring and he embraced the opportunity straightaway. These autobiographical notes may shed some light on the personal relationship between the brothers. However, I argue that it is more productive to focus on their differing approaches to urban film material, as this allows us to extrapolate their contrasting perspectives on what a socialist city symphony could be in the 1920s. What follows is my reading of Man with a Movie Camera as a film which encompasses as many contradictions as the existence of the Soviet state itself: it defined the city symphony genre despite not striving to be one; it was criticised both for being too propagandistic and not propagandistic enough; and finally, it used urban material to demythologise film production, and film production to re-mythologise urban material.

Symphony of an Utopian Universal Socialist City: Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

The first attempts to inscribe MWMC into the city symphony genre appeared immediately after the film’s release abroad, especially in Germany and the USA. Since Vertov’s film appeared two years after Berlin, it was forgivable for the German public, who were not familiar with Vertov’s earlier works and had only seen Blum’s compilations, to assume that Vertov, like indeed so many others across Europe from the end of the 1920s to the beginning of 1930s, was captivated by Ruttmann’s film and tried to imitate it.¹⁶ In fact, Vertov’s reply to this was the following:

One should stress particularly that the majority of Kino-Eye films were constructed either as a symphony of labour, or as a symphony of the whole Soviet country, or as a symphony of a particular town, and so forth. Moreover, in these films the action often unfurled from early morning to evening. This is the way the town wakes up and begins to live in the first reel of Kino-Eye (which won a prize at the international exhibition in Paris). This is the way day gradually moves into evening and ends at midnight in the film Stride, Soviet! The action in the Kino-Eye films Nursery and Moscow unfurls in the same way, from morning to the depth of night. […] The recent experiment by Ruttmann, along with the most recent experiments of certain members of the avant-garde, should therefore be interpreted as the result of the prolonged pressure of the works and statements of Kino-Eye on the workers of abstract film (and absolutely not the reverse, which is chronologically absurd, and absurd in essence) (Vertov [1929] 2004: 379).

Thus it is clear that Vertov is not ascribing any special status to his film as a city symphony. In fact, the chronology of the day is followed very roughly in the film’s division into three parts: the waking up of the city; work; and leisure. Moreover, this basic structure is constantly interrupted by the film’s self-reflexivity towards its construction, whereby the play with the time on screen becomes one of its main themes. This non-adherence to strict chronological order has become a starting point for many a reading of the film. Mayne’s analysis of movement in the film proceeds from the film’s disjointed temporality.¹⁷ Hicks points out that Vertov had abandoned chronology as early as Cine-Pravda in order to experiment with other more productive cine-thing constructive principles; and Roberts, in his introduction to the film, emphasises the broken temporal continuity as one of the crucial principles for the imaginary first-time viewer to keep in mind.¹⁸ Whilst these evaluations of chronology and temporality have proved productive for many critics, it is once again important to state here that it is no less effective to conceptualise the cinematic medium in spatial terms; particularly given this analysis’s interest in Vertov’s construction of urban space. Unlike Manhatta, Nothing but Time, About Nice, Moscow and Berlin, MWMC does not represent a specific city. It aims at constructing a universal socialist urban space, and even though the majority of the interpretations of this film do mention that the city in MWMC is a synthesised image, they do not put this fact at the primary focus of their analysis.

The success of Vertov’s strategy to construct a universal socialist urban space is manifested by the fact that even leading scholars of urban and cinema studies were confused as to what city(ies) is/are actually shown in MWMC. Their iterations include, but are not limited to: “unseen, even visionary New Moscow” (Weihsmann 2011: 26); “five different Russian cities: Moscow, Kiev, Donbas, Yalta and Odessa” (Alifragkis and Penz 2009: 2-3); “Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and even the industrial sites of Donbass and Dneproges” (Clark 2006: 185); “the combination of footage of Moscow and of a number of locations in the Ukraine” (Donald 1999: 79).¹⁹ The discussion was resolved by John MacKay who, after consulting Vertov’s files in RGALI’s archive, identified the specific cities filmed as: Moscow, Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv (MacKay 2013).²⁰ I argue that MWMC works with urban cinematic material along two axes: firstly, to undermine and re-signify the sites and landmarks of the pre-Revolutionary city; and secondly, to abstract, detach and dissociate the urban space of different cities intentionally as a gesture of radical egalitarianism, in order to use it as material for the cinematic construction of a universal socialist city.

By extrapolating my analysis of Moscow above, it could be suggested that such major urban centres as Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv (which was the capital of the Ukrainian SSR until 1934) also had their touristic images constructed in actualities, travelogues, guidebooks and postcards at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, when Vertov was faced with the problem of re-signifying the exteriors and interiors of a bourgeois city, he, unlike Kaufman’s and Kopalin’s

heavy reliance on intertitles, chose to proceed with strictly cinematic devices.²¹ With the help of Kaufman’s constructivist cinematography MWMC re-signified a major Kyiv landmark built in the Art Nouveau style: Ginzburg’s house (aka Ginzburg’s skyscraper (1910-2) (Fig. 23).²²

Another iconic pre-Revolutionary building, the imploding of which is one of the most memorable episodes in the film, is Bolshoi Theatre (Fig. 24). The collapsing sequence was Vertov’s answer to contemporaneous debates about the fate of the theatre and academic heritage in general. Shklovskii’s words could be paraphrased here: the revolution was forced to nurse the Bolshoi Theatre, with which it did not know what to do, and only Vertov turned its destruction into a manifesto.²³

Other re-signification examples include:

● a pre-Revolutionary cinema which demonstrates the proletarian film MWMC. The ‘film within a film’ sequence at the beginning and at the end of MWMC was shot in 1-e Goskino – the main cinema of Kyiv (Fig. 25) – and it is later juxtaposed to the Proletarian cinema (most probably in Odesa) which screens the feature entertainment film Green Manuela (Fig. 26).

● the emphasis on architectural objects that showcase the construction’s engineering principle (Fig. 27).

● the juxtaposition of a genuine constructivist building (the multi-storeyed building constructed by Georgii Barkhin in 1925-27 to house the Izvestiia newspaper) with the Strastnoi Monastery (demolished in 1938) in Moscow (Fig. 28).

Apart from the re-signification of touristic and bourgeois architectural heritage, MWMC aims to construct a universal socialist city by means of abstracting urban everyday life, recontextualizing its material according to a particular idea of a ‘cine-thing’. The method Vertov used in his film has been defined as creative geography, which relies on a seamless flow of narrative for the construction of perceptibly complete film spaces. The protagonist who ensures such an uninterrupted continuity is Mikhail Kaufman, the Man with a Movie Camera himself, whose filmic diary we are supposedly watching. As early as 1923, the Council of Three issued a manifesto stating that the Cine-Eye is: “[…] free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them” (Vertov 1984: 18). This montage principle, of course, concerned all phenomena, not just space per se, but it is imaginary urban construction which is the focus of our interest in this article. Kuleshov’s early experiments in montage are usually recalled as the origins of creative geography, but anyone familiar with Vertov’s and the kinoks’ theoretical and film works could only value Kuleshov’s experiments as being parallel to Cine-Eye’s achievements, and not pioneering them. The continuity which Kuleshov heavily relies on is the cinematic illusion of narrative in an artistic feature film and, consequently, the dispositif it produces. The creative geography as a result of montage and filming in different locations is a minor byproduct of filmmaking. It does not really matter where the sequence was filmed as long as it is just the background which punctuates the protagonist’s story.

Yet in MWMC the process is reversed; the urban material which was supposed to be the foil for the cameraman’s work (after all, the film was originally conceived as a programmatic statement as well as a practical demonstration of different filming methods) comes to the forefront and becomes the leading actor. The continuity illusion of the film is constantly destroyed by the sequences demonstrating the film’s editing process, but the continuity of the utopian universal socialist city is sustained throughout.

What is remarkable about MWMC and its socialist city is that, unlike the typical gaze of the modernist architect, its construction does not rely on the usual disembodied gaze from above. In contrast to the prototypical modernist architect, Vertov’s film can be viewed as constructing the socialist city from within, a position which conflicts with Strathausen’s argument that the disembodied gaze from above is repudiated by the cinema through the medium’s ‘uncanny’ capacity to embody the ‘anxious view of the immersed city-dweller down below’. Vertov’s position orientates the human architect ‘down below’, but in a manner which is largely free of any such ‘anxiety’, and which grounds its constructive praxis in its material contrasting with ‘Baudelaire’s flâneur who aimlessly wanders the streets of Paris enjoying the bombardments of visual impressions he encounters in the labyrinth of the modern city’ (Strathausen 2003: 22-3).²⁴ Despite Mikhail Kaufman's passion for filming from above, MWMC does not have any aerial shots; in the cities, the highest vantage points are used which are usually situated on rooftops, still within the city, as opposed to on an aeroplane.²⁵

While Kaufman is filming from within the city, Vertov, as an architect on screen, models a modernity which does not yet exist.²⁶ He pioneered the utopian mode of the representation of non-existing cities, so widely used in the Soviet cinema of the 1930s. However, unlike the feature films of the 1930s, which either never show a city (e.g. Aerograd (Oleksandr Dovzhenko, 1935), or just demonstrate its construction (e.g. Komsomolsk by Sergei Gerasimov, 1938, scale models and studio set designs (e.g. Novaia Moskva/New Moscow by Aleksandr Medvedkin, 1938), Vertov constructs his city from documentary material, life caught off-guard, estranged, abstracted and egalitarian. The material is abstracted to such a degree that it becomes merely cinematic construction material, with no date and time of the people or places filmed. Vertov, in a radical futuristic manner, is not interested in and does not speak about history; he is fascinated with the socialist future constructed out of elements of contemporary urban material.

What also differentiates the Vertovian city symphony from those previously analysed is its inability to “calmly and adventurously go travelling” (to use Benjamin’s metaphor).²⁷ In other city symphonies, the chaos of the new modern city is to be deciphered first and foremost by the individualistic gaze through flâneuring, which in cinematic terms was as much realised in actualities and travelogues as in the city symphonies. This individualised epistemology focused on the visual perception structured by the subject-centred camera, which established the continuity of the gaze via shot-reverse-shot (I see what the camera sees) and in some cases, supplemented by the introduction of fictional characters (as in Rien que les heures). The position of the camera is never revealed and the work of filming and editing is always taken for granted. Whereas Vertov constructs the socialist city by not fully submitting to the point of individualised

epistemology; the cameraman is not flâneuring (as in Ruttmann), he works and records the facts which make up the film. The opening sequence openly warns the viewer – do not identify with the view of the protagonist; he will show you his perspective, but the film will also contain sequences which belong to other subjects (other cameramen whose footage was included in the film were Boris Tseitlin, Konstantin Kuliaev and Heorhii Khymchenko). Alignment with the subject-constructing camera of the cameraman is a consciously limiting perspective. To understand the new universal socialist city, the montage must include not just one day in one city, but an interrupted chronology (not just from dawn to dusk), interrupted geography (a montage of four cities), and an interrupted human subject (the electrical Adam from the We manifesto). Thus MWMC aims at constructing not only a cinematic collective experience, but a collective socialist subject, that is, a collective space in the eye of the subject. However, this idea failed to be realised in the eye of one specific person – Mikhail Kaufman.

Organic, Haptic, and Reflective: Mikhail Kaufman’s In Spring (1930)

Having analysed two interpretations of the socialist city symphony genre, it could be suggested that Kaufman took the “chaos” (in his own words)²⁸ of the material personally, and could not agree with the montage method behind the film. As discussed above, he had previously offered his own version grounded in one specific city (Moscow), in monuments and architecture so strongly defined by their location that they were impossible to be abstracted from their context into an idealised utopic space of everyday life. At this point Kaufman decided to make an antithesis to MWMC – In Spring – also without intertitles, but with a solid structure using his film analysis method.

Although the film was shot in and around Kyiv, this time Kaufman did not inscribe the city into history as much as he had done when filming in Moscow. Using the so-called freedom of the periphery, the less known and yet to be industrialised urban landscape of Kyiv, Kaufman shifted a-day-in-a-city method to a more universal metaphor which was still steeped in natural cycles (see the abundance of wildlife sequences) and symbolised the youth of the mostly agrarian Soviet state: spring. Yet, such a perspective in the times of the forced tempo of collectivisation and the industrialisation of the 1930s, in addition to the film’s formal qualities and the absence of the Party was highly problematic.

Kaufman’s use of haptic aesthetics and longer shots, as opposed to constructivism and the rapid montage sequences of MWMC, created an almost direct counterbalance to Vertov’s film, particularly in the episodes which emphasise the strong dependence of people on nature as opposed to conquering it. The anti-modernization opening sequence was thought to last too long. If the morning city to be cleaned is shown in 2-3 shots which last under a minute (both in Moscow and MWMC), the frozen Kyiv streets and the destructiveness of the thaw that followed allowed too broad a scope for anti-Soviet interpretations. Kaufman tried too hard to adhere to the Soviet modernization rhetoric on the level of content, but his cinematography revealed quite a different side of the new state’s anti-modern society. The softer, almost ‘Dovzhenkian’ style of cinematography (or rather the cameraman’s Danylo Demutskyi’s style) is sometimes interpreted as a ‘Ukrainian’ factor, a reductive interpretation adhering to the colonial logic of the industrialised metropolis vs rural colonies that are ‘steeped in nature’ (see Cavendish’s chapter on Dovzhenko and Demuts’kyi [2013: 241]). Yet it has been demonstrated (Stites 1989) that in the 1920s the Soviet Union lacked an industrialised metropolis per se, thus requiring cinema to construct and demonstrate – either in the ‘before’ and ‘after’ sequences of Moscow or in the abstracted urban spaces of MWMC – the possibility of such a metropolis.²⁹ The film In Spring, however, despite its structural adherence to a logic of progress, does not succeed in this task.

As if starting off where Vertov left the viewer, In Spring begins with a rapid montage sequence. A brief winter opening is set outside the city, emphasizing, perhaps, that rapid montage can be used not only to recreate the rhythmic and fragmented perception of the modern city dweller, but also a more natural phenomenon like a blizzard (Fig. 29).

Yet the next sequence takes the viewer back to the city, presenting an aerial view of Kyiv (St Sophia’s Cathedral) from a biplane which also closes the film (Fig. 30).

What would usually be a morning sequence in a city symphony film with static objects and deserted streets (with the exception of a few street sweepers) is turned into an early spring section. The frozen wheel of a car stands for technology paralyzed by nature; icicles and horse carts loaded with snow, the frozen Dnieper and drainpipes, a snowman and a skating rink all present powerful imagery of the yet unawakened city (Fig. 31).

An Art Nouveau building is shown here not as a symbol of modernity or an object for constructivist re-signification but as a mundane health hazard from the rooftop of which blocks of ice and snow fall down (Fig. 32).

Perhaps not surprisingly, Ginzburg’s skyscraper also appears in the film. Yet, the constructivist imagery gives way to a medium long shot, a static view that emphasises the building as a whole (Fig. 33a), as opposed to close-ups of architectural details and unusual angles (only in one shot the building is slightly diagonal Fig. 33b).

Haptic visuality dominates this section of the film with an abundance of fluid and reflective footage (reflections in water/puddles - Fig. 34).³⁰

The ‘solid’ Kyiv arcade building (on 18 Velyka-Vasyl’kivs’ka Street) loses its monumentality if reflected in the water.

The rail tracks of the revolution subside in mud (Fig. 35). Also, instead of the mechanical traffic controller, Kaufman prefers the weather station with the wind spinner submitting to the forces of nature (Fig. 36). This opening sequence, counter-arguing Vertov’s film in almost every shot, testifies that In Spring was conceived as a direct and no less programmatic reply to MWMC. There is no utopianism or idolisation in this sequence, just everyday life with its problems. For our argument, it is irrelevant that after the sequence the film starts to adhere to the glorifying logic of Soviet films: the rail track gets fixed and the roads are mended. Although this ‘progress’ could also be interpreted as ironic – the fact that the snow melts away and everything returns to life is not due to the Party’s efforts or socialist modernization. Kaufman aimed to show that spring can be destructive, not just lyrical and romantic as it was commonly represented in the poetic tradition; ironically, he was labelled precisely as ‘the more lyrical brother’. I would also argue that in his own way Kaufman tried too hard to achieve the ‘correct’ Marxist method for his filming. As is evident from the fact that he did not leave much theoretical writing, from his restless fascination with the technical aspects of his filming and the pride he rightly took in his technical innovations, Kaufman seemed uninterested in theoretical justifications for his work. Thus, it could be summed up that, whatever personal reasons for the conflict between the brothers, the socialist city symphony sub-genre actually benefited from it. If, according to Daria Khitrova (2013), Dziga Vertov’s self-portrait is one shot from Kino-Glaz/Cine- Eye (1924) (Fig. 37), then, Mikhail Kaufman’s signature could be, in my opinion, the shot from In Spring: the upside down cameraman filming the unstable. This reflective puddle in spring creates tactile imagery far removed from the constructivist cinematography of Man with a Movie Camera (Fig. 38). Assuming, he is indeed an inversion of Vertov, then the logic of the dialectical relation between the brothers gives us a hint that one is defined by the other, and either is impossible without each other; as are their symphonies of socialist cities.

Conclusions

City symphonies have been treated for too long as the isolated ‘masterpieces’ of individual auteurs without attempts to introduce comparative, evolutionary or even attributional dimensions. Contextualising them within the Zeitgeist of the decade, as well as highlighting the political dimensions of the utopic urban spaces some of them attempted to produce, revealed the new insights they offer and confirmed that there is more to them than meets the cine-eye.

Despite difficulties in definitions and the need to reinvent the genre almost every time, I have demonstrated that the cinematic tropes they have in common (the city as a main protagonist, rather than a backdrop, polyphonic qualities, rhythmic or associative montage as well as the programmatic desire to develop a new film language and adhere to musical rather than artistic functioning principles) are indeed enough for a successful attribution of the films in question. Choosing urban and spatial aspects as my prisms, I considered a spectrum of films which, in my opinion, are best suited to trace the evolution of the genre (from Alberto Cavalcanti Nothing but Time (1926) and Jean Vigo’s About Nice (1930) to Mikhail Kaufman’s and Il’ia Kopalin’s Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye (1927), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Mikhail Kaufman’s In Spring (1930). The article has focused on the the Kaufman Brothers’ attempts to construct a utopian socialist city symphony on screen. Through shot-by-shot analysis of film sequences, I highlighted the elements of the visual ‘instrumentarium’ that the brothers shared. Thereafter I proceeded to the differentiation crucial for understanding the main city symphony which defines the genre itself: Man with a Movie Camera. The film that separated the brothers as co-authors is seen in a new light if compared to In Spring. The contrast between the constructivist, utopian, universalist and dazzling urban logic of Man with a Movie Camera and the organic, haptic, reflective and lyrical reasoning of In Spring is too conspicuous to be incidental.

These symphonies of socialist cities have long been considered key to understanding the genre as a whole as well as the visual logic of the cinematic urban portrait developed by Cine-Eye. Through close shot-by-shot analysis, I have shown how filmmakers such as Vertov, Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman constructed not only a new cinematic language, but also powerful urban imaginaries — utopian, dynamic, and ideologically charged. The contrast between the dazzling, universalist logic of Man with a Movie Camera and the haptic, lyrical composition of Kaufman’s In Spring reveals the full range of the genre.

Yet today, as Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odesa face destruction, forced evacuations, and erasure, these cinematic city symphonies take on a new, tragic resonance. What once appeared as future-oriented visual manifestos might now read, in part, as elegies. The urban spaces they so vividly staged persist on screen and in the memory of viewers, but are being dismantled in the real world.

Rather than remaining artifacts of a bygone avant-garde, these films now invite contemplation of parallel histories — cinematic, ideological, spatial — while raising urgent questions about cultural memory, political violence, and the role of the urbanist archive in times of loss. In this light, the city symphony is not only a celebration of modernity, but also a document of fragility.

Note: Apart from Figures 17 and 23a, all other figures are screenshots of the analysed films personally taken by the author of the paper.

Anna Hurina
Independent scholar

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6909-1604

Bio

Anna Hurina is an independent scholar who received her BA and MA degrees in Cultural Studies from the National University of ‘Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’ (Ukraine) and her PhD in Russian, film and urban studies from the University of Durham (UK) with a dissertation entitled: “Representations of Urban Space and its Transformations in Soviet Cinema of the 1920s and 1960s”. She is interested in exploring the tropes of urban modernity on the Soviet screen.

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Filmography

Cavalcanti, Alberto. 1926. Rien que les heures / Nothing but time. Néo-Films.

Hackenschmied, Alexandr. 1930. Bezúčelná procházka / Aimless Walk. Independent Film.

Kaufman, Mikhail. 1930. Navesni / In Spring. VUFKU.

Kaufman, Mikhail and Kopalin, Il’ia. 1927. Moskva: Probeg Kino-Glaza / Moscow: A Race of the Cine-Eye. Sovkino.

Ruttmann, Walter. 1927. Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis / Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. Fox Europa.

Vertov, Dziga. 1929. Liudyna z kinoaparatom / Man with a Movie Camera. VUFKU.

Vigo, Jean. 1930. À propos de Nice / About Nice. Pathé-Natan.

Suggested Citation

Hurina, Anna. 2025. “The Cinematic Urbanism of the Kaufman Brothers: Global Context and Personal Visions”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 20. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00020.315.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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