Dziga and His Brothers: A Film Family on the Cutting Edge

Director: Yevgeni Tsymbal

The fascinating and tumultuous lives of Mikhail, Boris and Denis Kaufman (better known as Dziga Vertov) are the focus of this powerful documentary. Using rare archival footage from Russian state film archives and private collections, the brothers' lives and art are traced from Bialystok to Moscow, Paris, and Hollywood.

From the Philadephia Weekly: The Coppola clan has nothing on the Kaufmans, a family of geniuses to rival the Tenenbaums, even if their names may not immediately click in your head. Practitioners of impossible shots, editing/camera tricks and improvisation in general, brothers David, Moisey and Boris get highlighted in Yevgeni Tsymbal's succinct Russian doc. David Kaufman became Dziga Vertov, a last name he chose because it was Polish for "spinning top"-which is a perfectly apt description of his 1929 opus Man With the Movie Camera. If Movie Camera's not the best documentary ever made, it's at least the most visually ravishing. (As pointed out frequently enough to diminish its merits, the post-MTV filmmaker generation-and Leni Riefenstahl-would be nowhere without it.) The other two brothers went in different directions, though Moisey worked alongside Dziga on Movie Camera before their estrangement turned him into one of Dziga's doc-making rivals. (From the clips we see, he's just about his equal, too.) Boris, meanwhile, spread the style westward, first to France to work with Jean Vigo (L'Atalante), then to America, garnering him both an Oscar for shooting On the Waterfront and frequent employment by Sidney Lumet.

Evgeny Tsymbal

Born: 1949 (Yeysk, Krasnodar Province, Soviet-Union (now Russia))

Evgeny Tsymbal began work at the Mosfilm Studios in Moscow in the 1970's and worked in production and as an assistant director in films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov, Larisa Shepitko and Eldar Rizanov amongst others. Commencing his own film career with a variety of short films, Tsymbal acheived critical acclaim with the prize-winning short Defence Council Sedov (46 mins) and continued this success with The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon (1990). Subsequent work continued in the sphere of documentary film, with works such as Roads of Commonwealth (1995), Ways of Agricultural Reform (1995), Homeland (1996), In Memory: Alexander Kaidanovskyi (1996), 1001 Stories About Cinema: Vladimir Naumov (1998) and the award-winning Stalker's Dreams (1998), His second film about Kaidanovskyi, who played the leading role in Tarkovsky's film Stalker. Recent work includes the documentary films Ordinary Bolshevism (1999) and Dziga and his Brothers (2002). In addition to directing, Tsymbal has continued his work as a scriptwriter, historian and journalist publishing articles in journals including Iskusstvo kino, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Museum, Russian Literature, Sight and Sound, Premier, Artes, New Statesman and Chaplin

Reviews

VILLAGE VOICE

Tracking Shots

Dziga and His Brothers

by J. Hoberman

DZIGA AND HIS BROTHERS

Dziga and His Brothers profiles the Soviet film genius Dziga Vertov and his talented sibs

David, Moisey, and Boris Kaufman—"perhaps the most talented brothers in the history of cinema" per film historian Yevgeni Tsymbal—were born in Bialystok (the "most Jewish town in Poland") to a used-book dealer and a rabbi's daughter. The town suffered a major pogrom during their childhoods, and their parents would eventually perish in the Holocaust, but the Kaufman brothers attended Russian school and reinvented themselves in the crucible of revolution: David most radically as docu-visionary Dziga. Mikhail (né Moisey) worked with his older brother—he is the title character in The Man With a Movie Camera—until they quarreled and he too became a director. Baby Boris went first to France, collaborating with Jean Vigo, and then to America. Dziga was targeted during Stalin's Cold War anti-cosmopolitan campaign; he suffered a heart attack and died in obscurity months before Boris won an Oscar for shooting On the Waterfront.

THE FORWARD

Traversing the World, in Search of Jewish Stories

If Film Festivals Can Be Said To Have Themes, This One Is About Outsider-dom

By SAUL AUSTERLITZ

This year's New York Jewish Film Festival features a variety of topics, attitudes and historical perspectives, with one film in particular a documentary about Soviet filmmakers stealing the show….

But one film outshines the rest. This past year has been a banner one for documentaries. From "Spellbound" to "My Architect," "Capturing the Friedmans" to "The Fog of War," filmgoers have been treated to a year chock-full of superb documentaries on subjects familiar and mysterious.

Yet another gem will have its New York premiere at the Jewish Film Festival: Yevgeni Tsymbal's "Dziga and his Brothers," which sheds new light on the world of early Soviet filmmakers.

From the perspective of 2004, the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s seem impossibly distant. With their gee-whiz enthusiasms for, among other things, the nascent revolution, the hum and throb of heavy machinery and the rise of the new worker, the idealism of major Soviet figures such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko feel like relics from some earlier, dramatically more innocent world. Tsymbal's new documentary, showing January 20 and 22, takes another iconic figure of Soviet filmmaking, Dziga Vertov (along with his gifted brothers Mikhail and Boris), and rescues him in all his gritty specificity. Vertov emerges as a pungent mixture of high-minded Communism and dashed hopes, paying obeisance to a Soviet regime that ultimately denied him the privilege of the one task he lived for making movies.

Vertov was born David Kaufman in Bialystok, a Polish-speaking city with a major Jewish presence. Leaving his roots behind, he adopted the name Dziga Polish for "spinning top" and began working on the cinema-trains, a new creation that simultaneously filmed the Soviet people at work and play, and showed them the results. Vertov was a born documentarian, but he professed little interest in the mechanical duplication of the world. His motto was "Shoot the world as it happens!" but Vertov saw himself as the world's master of ceremonies, introducing the spectacle of daily life, from the pounding of machinery to the whir of his own cameras, from the miracle of childbirth to the mysteries of death. Vertov's masterpiece,

"The Man With a Movie Camera" (1929), is a film of the world in the largest sense, encompassing a multitude of perspectives and personalities. In true modernist fashion, the film's canvas is so wide as to include the making of the film itself; in fact, one of its most stirring scenes involves the cutting and pasting of strips of film to create that unmistakable Vertovian montage.

Fundamental to the process of filmmaking was the input of Vertov's cinematographer brother, Mikhail Kaufman. Willing to put his life on the line in the name of a better shot, Mikhail pulled off complex imagery (like a cameraman emerging from a worker's beer stein) that today's studio lensmen, with all the computer wizardry at their disposal, would have difficulty matching. Mikhail's skill helped make Vertov's early work a success, but he grew increasingly frustrated at his lack of control over the finished product, and at his brother's messianic zeal for the Soviet Union. A lighter soul than his brother, Mikhail was more interested in cavorting with his latest girlfriend than promoting the latest Five-Year Plan. At the same time, the youngest Kaufman brother, Boris, moved to Paris, where he met a blazing wunderkind of the French cinema named Jean Vigo. Before Vigo's untimely death in 1934, the pair collaborated on three magnificent films: "A Propos de Nice," "Zero de Conduite" and "L'Atalante."

The intensification of Stalin's terror and the impending arrival of World War II brought much heartbreak to the Kaufman family. Mikhail was living with an Italian woman named Gabrielle, with whom he had a daughter. Living with, or even knowing, a foreigner, was an extremely dangerous state of affairs in the Soviet 1930s, and the NKVD eventually came around, collecting Gabrielle, who was never seen again, and murdering their daughter. Dziga's films were increasingly criticized for their formalism, with two of his later works, "Three Songs of Lenin and Lullaby," unceremoniously shelved by the authorities. Vertov's star had dimmed so significantly that he was banished to the Kazakh city of Alma-Ata for the duration of World War II, denied permission to film. He spent the last 10 years of his life editing newsreel footage, a legend forgotten in his own lifetime. He responded to inquiries about his state of mind by saying, "Please don't worry Dziga Vertov is dead." Boris was the most successful, although his life in later years was also fraught with difficulty. Fleeing France just ahead of the Nazis' arrival, he spent 10 years in the United States struggling to make a living before getting his break, shooting Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront." Boris won an Academy Award, but in a bitterly ironic turn of events, in order to get the job, he was required to deny his life in the Soviet Union, and his brothers, taking an oath that he had no relatives in Russia and knew no communists.

Tsymbal's documentary cleverly appropriates the language and imagery of early Soviet montage to tell the story of the Kaufman brothers a film about Vertov as directed by Vertov. The film, less than an hour in length, manages to quickly and expertly sketch the artistic and political realities of a wide swath of 20th-century life, from the Soviet Union under Stalin to Columbia Pictures under Harry Cohn. "Dziga and His Brothers" is a celebration of the tremendous energy and intellectual excitement of the first generation of Soviet filmmakers and a tragedy about their destruction by a Soviet regime more in love with the rifle than the movie camera.

Saul Austerlitz is a writer living in New York.