Taken together, the brothers Kaufman represent one of the great filmmaking families. First, there’s David Kaufman (also known as Dziga Vertov), the premier theorist of documentary film in the early days of the Soviet Union whose film Man With a Movie Camera (1929) remains one of silent cinema’s greatest achievements. Second, Boris Kaufman, the youngest of the three, whose career as a cameraman outside the Soviet Union led him to work with Jean Vigo (1933’s Zero for Conduct, 1934’s L’Atalante), Marc Allégret (Zouzou, 1934), Alexander Hammid (Hymn of the Nations, 1944), Elia Kazan (1954’s On the Waterfront, 1961’s Splendor in the Grass), Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, 1957), and Otto Preminger (Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, 1970). Finally, Mikhail Kaufman, the middle child, who performed in his elder brother’s film as the titular “man with a movie camera” and is the least known of the three as far as his own career goes. Simultaneously one of the first great directors of the Stalin era and one of the last experimenters of 1920’s avant-garde, Mikhail Kaufman’s small filmography constitutes one of cinema’s great minor oeuvres. In large part, it rests on the reputation of two feature films: An Unprecedented Campaign (1931), a tribute to the commencement of the Five-Year Plan, and In Spring (1929), a city symphony about seasonal change that unifies urban and natural cycles in a transformative rhythm.
The first section of In Spring is dedicated to spring thaw and the reappearance of life after long, stultifying winters. The texture of water is of acute interest for Kaufman; the expressivity of churning white foam, the thin, silken sheen of water over cobblestones. He embraces water’s preternatural connotations of regeneration and replenishment, but also imbues it with new possibilities: still planes of water become screens for new images, and new ways of representing the world. In Spring is permeated with a sense of abundance, in which everything overflows with new life. There is something quaintly pastoral about the images of children and animals—a charmingly quasi-archaism that does not undercut the sense of urban modernity, but demonstrates the interconnectedness of both, past and present, nature and machine. In Kaufman’s world, through a montage technique more readily associated with his brother Vertov, we witness a dialectical unification of the forces of production and the forces of nature; natural and (re)productive cycles fold effortlessly in extended visual lyricism. Freshly melted snow gives way to spinning wheels, factory gears, even the cranking of the camera, all of which moves and melds together at an ever rapid pace.
In addition to the progressive time of urban, industrializing modernity, and the cyclical time of nature and rural peasantry, another temporality emerges toward the end of In Spring: liturgical time. There is a surprising tenderness to how Kaufman represents Orthodoxy, even if, in one shot, what appears to be a full-sized church is comically revealed to be nothing more than a small-scale model dwarfed by a hand wiping over the domes with a cleaning rag. This is the only segment of the film to include intertitles, with the formula of Христос Воскресе (Christ is Risen) broken down into its syllabic components, rendering its power that of poetry rather than doctrine. Kaufman references Easter, and in particular the Orthodox east Slavic tradition of Radonitsa, where believers paint eggs, and families gather to dine around the graves of loved ones in deference to the promised restoration of all things. Kaufman is sensitive enough to know that these traditions, even if they belong to the past, share something essential with the Pioneer marches we see at the end; the ushering in of a new world.
In Spring screens on 35mm at BAMPFA, on Friday, March 28, with live piano accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg.
See Also
