The jittery, crazed, experimental brilliance of Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film, subtitled The Symphony of the Donbas, still pulses after almost a century, although it should be said right away that the “enthusiasm” of the title is mainly for two things: first, Soviet Russia’s control of Ukraine and, second, coal. Neither of these commands quite the same excitement in 2022.
This was Vertov’s first sound film, celebrating the role played by the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and its mineral and agricultural riches in Joseph Stalin’s five-year plan, and nothing could have been less conventionally “symphonic”: a piercing, clanging, screeching sound-collage, mixing crowds, shouts, boots and industrial machinery as well as ordinary music and speech. Religion is swept away by Communist party orthodoxy. The pious, icon-kissing elderly people of Donetsk are shown with trenchant, irreverent irony and Brechtian alienation: they are surrounded by tramps, drunks and crowds of younger people they don’t understand; their streetscapes are tipped into weird Dutch angles and confusion. The churches of Donetsk have their steeples torn down and the buildings turned into social clubs for the workers.
