Person with a Movie Camera, People with a Montage Board
Epistemic Actions in Svilova’s Editing
“the consummate studio professional Svilova – curator of the archive, deeply and creatively involved in all the films and publicly known to have been involved with them – lingers to one side in silence, in a kind of quasi-public reduplication of the ‘private sphere’ behind which women's lives and works have been obscured historically.” (MacKay forthcoming)
Elizaveta Svilova (1900-1975), wife, editor, and lifelong collaborator of the highly-lauded filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), lingers to the side of scholarship on her famous husband’s films, hidden behind the historical neglect both of women and of editors. This article addresses the silence surrounding Svilova by applying research in film history, cognitive philosophy, and creative practice to her montage filmmaking collaboration with Vertov. We aim to recuperate Svilova’s position as creative contributor to what are known as Vertov’s works of genius by showing that their editing processes are the expert work of a distributed cognitive system.
As authors, we are each motivated by problems from within our own disciplines. For the film editor (Pearlman), this cross-disciplinary approach addresses questions about the generation of ideas in editing processes that have been overlooked by film studies. For the Vertov scholar (MacKay), studying the partnership from the perspective of cognitive expertise addresses a problem of a gap in the archives, and knowledge, about the significance of the Svilova-Vertov partnership in the generation of their films. For the cognitive philosopher (Sutton), the onscreen evidence of the work of hands and minds in generating the film offers a practical and specific demonstration of the explanatory utility of the distributed cognition framework.
Our approach to integrating these three research programs is to apply the distributed cognition thesis (outlined in more detail below) to film editing and the collaboration of Svilova and Vertov. We start with analysis of Svilova’s expert editing actions, as seen in the meticulous reconstruction of editing processes documented in Chelovek s kinoapparatom / The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929, USSR). We then identify and describe the cognitive expertise evidenced by her fluent execution of each of these actions. The intended outcome of this approach is a model of creativity1 in film that recognises the work of Svilova’s hands as expert creative cognition.
A few things are at stake here.
At the most immediate level we aim to recuperate Svilova’s creative contributions to what are generally known as ‘Vertov’s’ films. Our claim here is that although Svilova’s thoughts are not documented in written form, applying a distributed cognition framework reveals the creativity at work in her editing. Through this framework, we can see that the edits are thoughts (see also Lambert & Pearlman 2017). They are creative ideas, generated in a distributed cognitive system comprised, at least, of Svilova, Vertov and the filmed material.
A grounded claim for Svilova’s editing as a creative cognitive action also has implications for many women editors of the Soviet Montage Era. Given that this era is known and named for its innovations in editing, there is perhaps a correction required to the assumption that all of the innovations were the sole work of the men who theorised them in writing. The written Soviet Montage theories arise from practice. The actual practice of editing was often done by women, working side by side with these better-known men. If we can demonstrate that editing is thinking in Svilova’s case, perhaps this model can be used by future researchers to reveal some of women editors’ creative contributions to the revolution in montage that characterises this era.
Further, at stake in this case study in distributed collaborative cognition is the utility of studying mind, technology, and culture together across standard disciplinary lines. Some cognitive theorists argue that ‘mind’ is a property of individuals alone and is the province of neuroscience and experimental psychology: from their point of view, distributed cognition unhelpfully tries to focus on processes that cross boundaries between brains, bodies, objects, and culture, identifying only ‘an unscientific motley of capacities’ which cannot be effectively studied (Adams and Aizawa 2001: 62). But we are no enemies of motley, and argue in contrast that by working effectively with independently-motivated materials and problems from film studies, identifying features of the historical and aesthetic processes which might otherwise remain invisible, we can in turn inform, sharpen, and better motivate the distributed cognition framework in philosophy and cognitive theory (see also Sutton 2009).
Finally, collaboration is at stake. While it is beyond the scope of this article to consider all aspects of filmmaking collaboration, the process we are modelling of close analysis of execution of craft as a form of cognitive expertise could be applied in future to other areas of filmmaking where collaborators work expertly with their tools and with each other to generate and realise ideas. Application of this model more broadly could cumulatively give rise to a more nuanced understanding of filmmaking as a collaborative art. It may disrupt the individualistic and generally male-centric notion of ‘director as author’ by proposing that creative ideas in films are actually generated not just in one brain, but by a distributed network of cognising across the brains, bodies, and tools of collaborative teams.
Writing about Svilova and her massive contribution to what we generally think of as ‘Vertov's films’ can be deeply frustrating. With the apparent exception of some of the early Kino-Pravdas, Vertov did not make (to our knowledge) a single significant film during his long maturity - that is, between 1922 and his death in 1954 - in which Svilova was not involved as editor (and often in numerous other ways as well); and yet we cannot identify even one sequence that we can attribute solely to her hand, or any draft notes that clearly reveal the ideas that she brought to the films. Although Vertov and Svilova certainly conversed about their films at home and at work, the scant evidence we have of these discussions reveals little to nothing about who contributed what to the films, even if it does illuminate aspects of their working methods more generally. (MacKay forthcoming)
Thus, the problem arises, as it would in most director/editor collaborations, of how to see the editor’s expert work. In order to unravel this knot of invisibility, a few shifts in understanding are required.
The first shift is to understand that an editor’s creativity is responsive – to directors and to the material. This responsiveness consists of a suite of cognitive activities that cumulatively transform the film from strips of images into significant form. We dissect these cognitive actions in more detail below, to build the argument that responding to images with an editing process is not a distinct or less significant form of creativity than the generation of images – it is part of the generation of ideas.
Secondly, to recognise an editor’s expert work we need a richer understanding of process. We need what Wright (2009: 10) has identified as a “paradigm shift away from authorship and textual analysis and a move toward analysing industry practices and cultures of film and media production”.
One obstruction to analysing industry practices of editing is that editors rarely make notes in advance about their ideas, and rarely even talk about their ideas before doing them or after (see editors’ interviews in Oldham 2012, 1992). “Editors generally refer to their expertise as ‘intuitive’” (Pearlman 2017: 69), which can mistakenly be understood to mean only or merely embodied, not involving thinking. Our approach to shifting the paradigm away from textual analysis and towards process then, must begin with recognition of the cognitive complexity of editor’s actions as unique forms of expertise, involving what Sutton (2007: 778) refers to as: “flexible, real-time engagements with the shifting, tricksy physical and social environment”. Professional editors, of which Svilova was certainly one, ‘think’ in dynamic, fleet, context-sensitive, ways, often so quickly that they can give the misleading impression that they weren’t thinking at the time of the creative working. They generate ideas in response to material, with the material, and through their actions in relation to the material. By shifting away from analysing the film to analysing the process we will develop an understanding of editing as enactive, embodied, and shared cognitive expertise, functioning at a number of levels of complexity. This “paradigm shift” (Wright 2009: 10) allows us to understand that editing is thinking, and that Svilova, Vertov and the filmed material are thinking creatively together.
Finally, the notion of ‘credit’ could shift away from the understanding that ideas arise solely in the mind of a single person, the director, and towards a model of ideas as generated in ‘distributed cognitive systems’ (see Hutchins 1995; Clark 1997; Clark and Chalmers 1998).
The distributed cognition framework postulates that the work of mind is not exclusively taking place inside individual brains. Rather, complex cognitive processes are distributed across “material, symbolic, technological, and cultural artifacts and objects as well as other people” (Sutton 2008: 227). In other words, what we call ‘thinking’ takes place across and by way of reliable and complementary couplings of brains, bodies, and world. One of the framework’s architects, Andy Clark, sees “human cognition as essentially and multiply hybrid: as involving a complex interplay between internal biological resources and external non-biological resources” (Clark 2006: 291). In our case, the biological resources are Svilova and Vertov’s own bodies and brains, engaged together in thinking, feeling, communicating, and creating. The non-biological resources are the images and sounds that have been captured, the ways they are sorted and catalogued, and the editing gear itself, with its affordances for particular actions within particular aesthetic and institutional settings. The emergent outcomes of film editing, we argue, could not be produced by any of the elements – by single individuals or technologies – on their own. Expert editors deploy diverse neural, emotional, material, and cultural resources. The heterogeneous components of such distributed cognitive systems include the brains, the skilful movements, the film, and the machines. These all operate in their unique cultural contexts and at a range of timescales. They combine or complement each other to give rise to novel visual and aesthetic products.
In their 1998 essay on extended mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers deploy the concept of an ‘epistemic action’, developed by Kirsh and Maglio (1994). Epistemic actions are “actions performed to uncover information that is hidden or hard to compute mentally” (Kirsh and Maglio 1994: 513). Clark and Chalmers (1998: 62) write: “Epistemic action, we suggest, demands spread of epistemic credit”. We argue that editing in general is an epistemic action, and that Svilova’s editing is a visible, recorded case of a creative epistemic contribution. This claim is, we argue, supported by Vertov himself. His foregrounding of the work of Svilova in Man with a Movie Camera is an exuberant and at the same time precise proclamation of Svilova’s epistemic actions in the process of editing a film. We turn now to a close analysis of that sequence to demonstrate that film editing is creative, that editing creativity is responsive to the filmed material, and that the ideas for expressive flow of that material arise in a distributed cognitive system.
The technical aspect of this kind of montage is best illustrated in Man with the Movie Camera, showing the recurrent images of Svilova (Vertov’s wife and editor of the film) splicing together thousands of shots on her editing table. She does exactly what Vertov described-from miles of film strips, she culls the good pieces, those which will allow her “to organize a good film.” After classifying “the good film material” (arranged on the shelves above her editing table), she measures each shot and matches it with the others in various ways, building up the film’s structure as a mason does by laying stones and bricks to make a house or oven. Throughout the film, Vertov continuously points to the thematic classification of shots into groups and sub-groups (which Svilova separates in many boxes, each related to a topic). By showing this repeatedly, he gives the viewer an insight into the very process of making a film. (Petrić 1978: 34)
When Petrić identifies Svilova’s actions as being “exactly what Vertov described” he reinforces the understanding that Svilova’s actions are necessarily creative, since they are the actions of making significant form from “miles of film strips”. However, although acknowledging her creativity, Petrić also risks creating a misconception about Svilova’s actions by labelling them as “technical”. In editing theory and practice, the word “technical” often implies an action that is physical, but not creative, as in not the yielding of meaning2. For example:
The technical aspect of editing is the physical joining of two disparate pieces of film…The craft of film editing is the joining of two pieces of film to yield a meaning that is not apparent from one or the other shot…The art of editing occurs when a combination of two or more shots takes meaning to the next level – excitement, insight, shock, or the epiphany of discovery. (Dancyger 1997: xiv, see also Reisz 1953)
Dancyger’s (and Reisz’s) account of the physical actions of editing as technical and therefore distinct from the craft and the art is common – as common as saying that the decision making of editing is ‘intuitive’ or ‘instinctive’, and similarly obscuring of the cognitive complexities. Our argument here is that the “technical” operation of the editing gear is functionally integrated with the “craft” of yielding meaning and the “art” of “taking meaning to the next level” (Dancyger 1997: xiv). Not only do these actions require complex procedural memory of precise and fluent execution, but they are themselves integral to the act of creative decision making. The argument is that editors don’t think first and then act, they think through acting (see Pearlman 2018). The editor’s “technical” (Petrić 1978: 34) juxtaposition of two shots will yield a meaning and replacing one of the shots or changing its duration will yield a different meaning. These meanings are not internally conceptualised first at a conscious level and then externally realised, they come into being through the physical processes. In order to substantiate this claim we look, as Petrić did, to Man with a Movie Camera for visible evidence, and identify each of Svilova’s visible, physical actions as creative cognitive operations contributing to the meaning making process.
Before undertaking a close analysis of the visible evidence, it is important to establish that the view of Svilova as a creative decision maker which we will argue is congruent with Vertov’s own view of her work in their process. He wrote, for example: [...] “the ‘scaffolding’ is removed only at the last minute (when) Svilova and I have so familiarized ourselves with the footage, with all its nuances and possibilities, that we make all the essential improvements and changes literally in a few hours” (Vertov, 1984: 211).
By acknowledging the work of familiarising themselves as work they did together, Vertov acknowledges the reciprocal and iterative flow of information. Here we do not mean ‘information’ in a dry sense, but also include the aesthetic feel of the information that is manipulated across the different elements of the system. The familiarity with “nuances and possibilities” (Vertov 1984: 211) that they share – typically without needing explicit discussion – is an agreement on what the material is and what kinds of responses to it, and with it, they would collectively create. It’s impossible analytically to separate out what Svilova does over here, what Vertov does over here, and what's happening on the table, as the material itself takes on significant form. Rather, one can only understand that complex causal process as an interconnected whole. The compiling of the film, which they do, together, based on their shared memories and expertise “literally in a few hours” (Vertov 1984: 211), occurs only after weeks, months, and years of close collaborative cognising. It is this collaborative cognising that has brought into being their shared understanding of what a film can be and of how this particular film should take shape.
An objection could be raised to the claim that Svilova is doing work that is beyond technical by pointing to the evidence that Vertov may have planned the montage sequences. Some plans for various sequences, like musical scores, exist and the written information in them is generally in his handwriting. However, it is unknown whether these scores were made as part of the planning process before shooting; or as part of notating ideas that he and Svilova may have discussed, before making the actual cuts; or as instructions to the ‘splicers’; or for other purposes. When they were made is important to understanding how they function in the ideas generation process. Without knowledge of their function they cannot be interpreted as evidence concerning Svilova’s cognitive engagement with the editing process, and so must be left aside for the time being in favour of evidence in the film Man with a Movie Camera, and documents whose provenance and purpose are more certain.
In one such document, Svilova’s memoirs of Vertov, Svilova writes about their films being put together to a considerable extent on the basis of intuition and the trying-out of “1000s of variants,” testing the “meaning, visual quality and rhythm” of the sequences “by ear,” with both of them “bent excitedly over the montage table” all through the night and into the morning (Svilova 1976: 68-69).
So, what exactly were they doing, bent excitedly over the montage table, and how can we understand these actions as creative cognitive processes? The iterative, complex, causal process of turning shots into a film includes, at least, watching, sorting, remembering, selecting, and composing (Pearlman 2018). These editing actions, which are intimately and inextricably connected with the filmed material, are epistemic actions, in that they are making creative connections and producing creative outcomes that can not easily occur any other way. Svilova and Vertov bend over the montage table, together, and handle the filmed material in order to uncover how the pieces might come together as a complete composition. They cannot, or cannot fully, uncover the film’s potentiality without physically “trying out 1000s of variants” (Svilova 1976: 68-69).
The epistemic actions of Svilova are what Petrić refers to when he writes that “she measures each shot and matches it with the others in various ways” (Petrić 1978: 34). This measuring and matching is the epistemic action of altering the lengths and orders of shots to create structures and rhythms of ideas and experiences. The process, the actual measuring and matching, in other words the physical editing, is clearly the work of hands moving pieces around into different durations, sequences, and associations, and is also the collaborative work of minds making connections, structures, rhythms, ideas.
This work is clearly seen in a sequence beginning at about 22 minutes and 50 seconds in to Man with a Movie Camera. The sequence starts with an image of shelves on to which many pieces of film have been sorted, individually labelled, and grouped under category names such as “traffic”, “factory”, “machines” and “magician”. (see Fig.1)
Fig. 1: The shelves onto which Svilova sorts the film. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
The source for all of the following sequence of images is Lobster Film’s digitally scanned and time code stamped file of Man with a Movie Camera, www.lobsterfilms.com/fr/
Svilova, we learn later in the film, is the keeper of these shelves which are organised as part of her sorting process. Their introduction here is an introduction to the process of editing. In the next shot, we see an empty ‘take up reel’ – the reel onto which film will be wound, to be separated and labelled before shelving.
Fig. 2: Empty take up reel Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
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By showing us the editing process beginning with the shelves rather than beginning with watching the material to be sorted, Vertov and Svilova reveal the circular, continuous and overlapping aspects of editing. Watching, sorting, remembering, selecting and composing do not happen one at a time and in that order, they happen iteratively, in orders that may vary in response to discoveries that can be made in any part of the processes.
The third shot of the sequence is of a film strip laid horizontally across the frame, a shot of a young woman in a headscarf.
Fig. 3: The horizontal film strip with which Svilova is working. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
The film strip is not moving, but the next shot shows us the take up reel starting to spin and take up film.
Fig. 4: The film reel beings to spin and take up film. In a particularly Vertovian construction, this shot is in reverse motion, so that the film seems almost to express its cognitive agency in the process by appearing to magically jump on to the reel of its own volition. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
Cut to Svilova bent over the montage table, her head tilted so that she can see the horizontal images whirring by on the strip of film as she turns the crank that winds them on to the take up reel.
Fig. 5: Svilova bent over the film strip as it whirs by. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
The tilt of her head is important: it reveals that she is watching the images as they whir by, and in the next shots we immediately get some appreciation for her watching as differently skilled to our own. We see what she sees: the film strip whirring by, but unlike her we cannot differentiate the images on the film, they are a blur to us. In his discussion of editing technologies in film history Fairservice writes that “holding the film with one hand in front of a light box” (Fairservice 2001: 330), as we see Svilova doing here, was an editor’s preferred way of viewing material, rather than watching it being projected. Fairservice (ibid.) adds: “Astonishingly, editors become so adept at this practice that many continued to use it even after mechanical animating devices became available”.
Fig. 6: Film strip whirrs by. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
One renowned editor of the silent era and beyond, Margaret Booth, discusses this method of watching a film in a 1973 newspaper article. She says “Before we had Moviolas for editing, we would run the pieces of film through our fingers. I would count, as if I were counting music, to give the scene the right tempo” (quoted in Hatch 2013: 4). Svilova may or may not be counting – there are other ways she may be bodily clocking the rhythm of the movement she is seeing (e.g. humming, pulsing, nodding – see Pearlman 2016: 101-102). However, one way or another, she is absorbing what she sees and developing a memory of it as a rhythmic entity in motion which she will use as she “measures each shot and matches it with the others in various ways, building up the film's structure” (Petrić 1978: 34).
Svilova’s watching, as a cognitive action, is informing and shaping all of the other distributed and iterative cognitive actions including sorting, remembering, selecting, and composing.
During watching, felt responses and key images, or sounds of shots are mentally linked and embedded in the editor’s consciousness … These coupled images and sensations become triggers for imagining the as-yet un-invented sequences into which they may be eventually composed. Watching, for the expert editor, is perceiving and responding affectively, noticing the perception and the feelings, and filing - mentally or physically or both - the combination of image and response to be accessed when building a film (Pearlman 2018: 310).
This first editing sequence in Man with a Movie Camera returns twice more in the next 20 seconds to images of Svilova watching as she winds film across her light table. This underscores the importance of watching in the process that will, as Petrić reports Vertov describing, “allow her ‘to organize a good film’” (Petrić 1978: 34). Although the sequence only shows Svilova watching, there is no question that Vertov would have also watched, probably repeatedly, probably together with Svilova, all of the film material. Watching is one of the forms of cognitive expertise they shared, and through which they would “familiarise” (Vertov 1984: 211) themselves with the material together.
Vertov, of course, was also an editor, although it is unknown whether he picked up scissors and worked on Man with a Movie Camera manually. What is known is that he relied heavily on Svilova, and never, as noted above, made a major work without her active participation. However, he may also have himself done many of the embodied expert actions we are describing. We treat them as Svilova’s because she is the person seen on screen performing them, and, importantly, because describing them as hers does not take anything away from Vertov. Writing about documentary editing and cognition, Pearlman (2018: 312) describes collaboration as a “process of distributing cognition between director and editor. The director’s mind is now extended through and with the editor, as hers is extended through and with the material that she has sorted to optimize her cognitive interaction with its possibilities.” In other words, describing Svilova as part of the distributed cognitive system that made the work adds to the strength of that system, which includes Vertov sometimes as editor and always as director.
Returning to the sequence, the whirring film stops, and Svilova’s scissors enter the frame, snipping deftly, without hesitation, the white frame (‘flash frame’) that separates shots.
Fig. 7: Snipping without hesitation. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
The scissors confidently cutting the film strip is the first action of sorting, and also of selecting. By cutting the shot Svilova individuates it for naming and creates the opportunity to select it for inclusion.
The next three shots reveal:
Svilova pulling the shot off the take up reel;
The shot as she would now see it, holding it still, and vertically;
Svilova placing the shot on the ‘montage board’ in front of her.
These three shots are showing us many complex cognitive activities. One of these is Svilova’s expert (fluent, confident, matter-of-fact) use of the gear, which is the visible aspect of the cognitively complex work of editing. The visibility of gear operation might lead to the mistaken impression, when observing an editor at work, that the physical skills with the gear are the substance of the job. Without undermining the operational expertise required, it is important to note that it does not solely constitute the editor’s actual expertise. At the same time, it is crucial to recognise that the expert work of hands is always already the expert work of minds. As McIlwain and Sutton note, drawing on studies in physical expertise and embodied cognition: “Expert thinking is not an inner realm behind practical skill, but an intrinsic and entirely worldly aspect of certain forms of real time, on-the-fly engagement in complex, culturally embedded physical activities” (McIlwain and Sutton 2014: 656).
Thus, from a cognitive standpoint it is important to include gear operation as one aspect of embodied cognition at work, but not to suggest that the editor functions as a pair of hands rather than as a thinker in the editing process. Instead we must consider the complex cultural engagements that a cognitive analysis of the physical activities of editing reveals. Pulling film off the take up reel, holding it up to see the shot clearly, labelling it and placing it on the montage board are all actions that Svilova would consider to be fairly simple manual tasks, and they are also her “real time, on-the fly engagement in complex and culturally embedded” (McIlwain and Sutton 2014: 656) creative collaborative filmmaking processes.
For example: Svilova pulling the shot off the take up reel is an action of ‘sorting’ the film pieces.
Fig. 8: Svilova sorts shots by removing the shot she has selected from the take up reel. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
Sorting is not ‘just’ administration of the material, it is shifting crucial aspects of the cognitive processes of collaboration into the editor’s realm of responsibility. When sorting, Svilova names the material, giving it an associative tag by which it can be remembered and retrieved. Svilova’s processes of labelling and placing the material in a position in the room, which are revealed in later scenes of Man with a Movie Camera, determine how material will be found and accessed.
Fig. 9: In a different sequence (36 mins in to Man with a Movie Camera), Svilova is seen sorting shots into specific positions on the labelled shelves. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
Through these actions, she scaffolds some of the decision-making processes into her own body and memory where she holds the associative links and spatial memories her sorting has created.
Svilova is in fact known for her sorting and remembering. These are some of her “legendary organizational skills, so important for all the films made under Vertov's sometimes shaky helmsmanship” (MacKay forthcoming). This is not to cast aspersions on Vertov. Directing was and still is an exceedingly difficult process, often described as a ‘battle’. Vertov is far from unique in struggling to lead. Directors may be, by the time they have finished shooting a film, so worn down from negotiating the challenges of capturing the material that they can barely remember what their original vision was. In a practice that is still common today, Vertov shifts some of the cognitive load of watching, sorting, remembering, selecting, and composing to his most expert and reliable collaborator, Svilova, on purpose.
This is not to say that collaboration in cognitive and creative work is a magic bullet, for collaboration does not automatically improve performance. But under certain circumstances working together does bring benefits, leading to emergent outcomes in which the group is indeed more than the sum of its parts. In particular, collaboration is more likely to be successful when participants are working in their domain of expertise and have established effective micro-processes of communication (see Meade, Nokes, and Morrow 2009) as Svilova and Vertov did. As research on collaborative remembering shows, these circumstances may hold for some long-term couples3 (see Harris, Barnier, Sutton, and Keil 2014) like Svilova and Vertov. Again, there is no guarantee: but in some cases, deep familiarity with each other, with the equipment in question, and with the shared goals of a project, all of which Svilova and Vertov had, may bring collaborative facilitation in which working together does give rise to emergent outcomes.
When we understand that sorting material shifts some of the decision-making process into the editor’s body, we can see the collaboration itself as a process of distributing cognition between Vertov and Svilova. Their minds are extended through and with each other’s and also through and with the material that she has sorted to optimize their cognitive interaction with its possibilities. Svilova’s “legendary organisational skills”4 are not just administration of Vertov’s genius, they are part of the genius.
After Svilova pulls the roll of film from the take up reel we see the film strip she is holding, with the image of the girl in the headscarf as Svilova now sees it, vertically.
Fig. 10: The film strip as Svilova sees it, revealing valence she will remember. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
Showing us the shot as Svilova sees it reminds us of the importance of watching, as described above, but it is also showing us how the operation of ‘remembering’ functions in editing processes. Showing the shot to us vertically reminds us (as Svilova is reminding herself) of its content. It asks us to remember this content, and signals that it is the editor’s job to remember this content. Remembering as a cognitive action is thus seen as more than memory of how to use the gear5, it is also “memory of shot content and valence” (Pearlman 2018). Svilova and Vertov will share and call on these content and valence memories to inform their process of imagining juxtapositions and flow. Svilova shows us how this works in the next shot when she places the film strip in a particular place on the montage board.
Fig. 11: The shot being slotted in to a particular place in the sequence Svilova is building. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
The “montage board” is a light backed shelf that sits above Svilova’s editing bench. When she places a film strip on it we see the cognitive activities of selecting and composing.
Svilova does not put the shot in the last position on the board, she deliberately places it in a gap in the sequence of film strips. Its position is number 4 in this sequence. What can be surmised from this action is that Svilova is using the montage board as an externalised part of the cognitive process of building a sequence. She places each film strip she intends to use in the sequence vertically, in a particular order. She has been building the sequence for a while, as we can see from all of the other strips on the montage board.
The sequence is being built on the montage board because Svilova can see a few frames of each shot there. She uses those frames as triggers for the memory of the content and valence of the shot. She has perhaps counted, mirrored, or internally sung a rhythm of each shot as she watched, sorted, and selected it, and she now can elide those rhythmic fragments into a phrase of movement in her imagination/memory by looking at the shots in sequence.
This practice of using still images to support imagining by triggering embodied memory persists in editing today. Most editors use thumbnail views that are built in to digital editing systems (see Pape 2016). Some editors print out stills of screenshots. Walter Murch describes his process of surrounding himself with still images in the edit suite as “pickling myself in the juice of all these pictures” (Murch 2013: 0:36:00). Murch’s metaphor neatly elides the external with the embodied and reveals the whole of the edit suite, the filmed material, and the editor ‘pickled’ within them, as a distributed cognitive system.
Murch uses this image system as “another way of letting your mind comb through the material” (Murch 2013: 0:36:00) rather than looking at it on the computer. Svilova, being pre-digital, has other reasons to use it, too. She and Vertov use a montage board as part of the process of trying out variants. On the montage board, pieces are easily moved around into different orders and imagined as different lengths and rhythms before they are cut.
When we see Svilova position a shot in the sequence as a deliberate, not random, choice we have visible evidence of her composing a sequence or an order for the shots to go in. We can see that her sequencing is in a malleable form. She may return to watching, sorting, remembering, selecting, and composing in response to the knowledge her epistemic actions thus far have revealed about what the film may become. Most crucially, the last few frames of this shot reveal Svilova looking at the board, thinking about the composition, imagining its flow, and considering her next move in response to the pattern the pieces are making now.
Fig. 12: Svilova looking at the shot in position and imagining how it will move. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
Immediately after Svilova looks up to where she has placed the smiling girl in the headscarf into sequence on the montage board, there is a cut to the smiling girl in motion.
Fig. 13: The girl in the headscarf, laughing, as Svilova imagines she will in the final film. Man with a Movie Camera (frame capture).
Svilova gazes at the girl, imagining how she will move in the sequence, and the girl smiles back, obligingly, moving, as she will, toward the next shot.
It may seem like an interpretative leap to say, of Svilova’s gaze, that she is imagining how the film strip will move when it is spliced into the sequence and projected, but Vertov and Svilova’s next six shots underscore the validity of this interpretation. These six shots are:
Svilova watching,
The films strip she sees,
That strip in motion as she imagines it will be in the film
Fig. 14 a, b, c: The cognitive actions of a) watching, b) selecting and c) composing are revealed.
Svilova watching,
The films strip she sees,
That strip in motion as she imagines it will be in the film
Fig. 15 a, b, c: The cognitive actions of a) watching, b) selecting and c) composing are repeated.
The repetition, the patterning of shots of seeing, what is seen and how it is imagined in motion, could be said to be a common trope of Vertov and Svilova’s films, but is particularly central to Man with a Movie Camera. In some remarkable and intricate notes laid down during the production of that film, Vertov developed the theme of “transition from one set of eyes to another,” and described a sequence in which, following an initial transition from the eyes of the cameraman to that of the editor, the editor (explicitly identified as Svilova) would become a kind of perceptual hub capable of observing and organizing the perceptions of the cameraman and of personages within the film, as well as her own. The act of editing is compared with playing a game of chess, where each of the pieces of the film, and their visual contents, have a kind of autonomy that the editor must take into account while fashioning the film out of the “game” of montage. These notes, dating to some time in the late summer or fall of 1928, clearly provide the conceptual kernel of the famous sequence reconstructing the editing process that we have been analysing. Equally clearly, they show that Vertov worked on the sequence together with Svilova, as evidenced by the questions he poses on paper to her about which “bits” (of motion, of stillness, of images of the cameraman) the sequence should contain (Vertov 1928: 6-7, 13-17).
Having analysed the visual evidence for the case that the films Vertov worked on with Svilova were created in a distributed cognitive process that relied on the cognitive entanglement of the filmed material and both of the filmmakers, the question arises: could another equally skilled editor have done what Svilova did? Watching, sorting, remembering, selecting, and composing are the expert cognitive skills of editors (see Pearlman 2018). So, is it reasonable to assert that Svilova in particular is part of the genius and not just any editor? Comments made by Svilova’s contemporaries and by Vertov support the notion that she was indeed singular, but perhaps not in the way one might expect.
Svilova was unquestionably the member of the team with the most professional experience in the operations of editing gear and execution of filmmaking protocols (see Svilova 1976: 65-69). Vertov and Svilova’s colleague, filmmaker Aleksandr Lemberg implies that if it hadn’t been for Svilova's seniority among and authority over other editors, Vertov's strange films might not have been made – although she must have gone along with the strangeness, and perhaps added some of her own (see Lemberg 1968: 39-50, 1976: 84).
However, it is not just her professional ability, but her willingness to engage with Vertov’s unprecedented ideas that sets her apart from other editors. The significance of Svilova’s willingness, and the insight that is implied by this willingness when others were resistant, is seen in one of the legendary stories of Russian cinema: Vertov came into the studio’s editing room with a basket full of one frame shots, and presented it to the editors. They immediately threw it in the trash, thinking that it was garbage, that it was just leavings. He was totally crestfallen and moped around until (the story goes) Svilova took pity on him and put the film together (see Svilova 1976: 66). Clearly in this anecdote Svilova’s willingness is a point of difference between her and any other editor. She was able and willing to see something there that the other editors couldn’t. She was willing to risk her own standing to contribute.
We cannot say there is evidence of her solo hand in any decisions, nor can we say that another, equally willing and competent editor might not have been equally or distinctively creative and influential. But we can say, it does not look as though any other editors were equally willing. Can we say then that the willingness is part of her genius? Svilova instantiates what Bacharach and Tollefsen call ‘we’ intention. They write:
If we conceive of artistic groups as plural subjects, then at the heart of co-authorship are joint commitments, and these joint commitments are going to be of many different kinds depending on the type of group. But the most basic joint commitment will be a joint commitment to create a work of art as a body. To be a co-author, then, one must be part of a plural subject of authorship. A and B (and C, D, and so on) constitute a plural subject of authorship if and only if they are party to a joint commitment to create a work of art as a body. (Bacharach and Tollefsen 2010: 29)
One might ask if Vertov already had all of the good ideas and Svilova ‘just’ came on board as a pair of hands to execute them. However, Vertov is clear, in his writing on some of their earliest collaborations, the Kinopravda series, that Svilova is an active participant in the evolution of the ideas. Vertov describes the process and is unwavering in his use of the word “we”:
Each successive Kinopravda differed from the preceding one [...] Slowly and persistently within this distinctive laboratory, an alphabet of the cinematic language began to take shape [...] As Kinopravda developed its crew grew. Svilova mastered the new alphabet. […] Everyday something new had to be invented. There was no one to teach us, we were on an untrodden path, inventing and experimenting we wrote – in film shots – editorials, feuilletons, film-essays and film-poems (Vertov 1984: 152).
If each issue was different and every day something new had to be invented, and Svilova came on board in the middle of those days and “mastered” the alphabet, she would have been involved in the incremental problem solving and invention process. She had the insight, that other editors lacked, to recognize the possibilities of these new ideas and to risk her considerable professional standing and skills on them.
Finally, after addressing questions about Svilova’s unique contributions as distinct from the contributions of some other hypothetical editor, we can close with some scrutiny of the questions themselves. One point of treating editing as a distributed cognitive process is to spread what Clark and Chalmers (1998: 62) might call “epistemic credit” around between the editor, the director, and the filmed material. The cognitions each participant brings to the creative process are unique, and it is their confluence that determines the outcome. Given that the distributed cognition model also includes the participation of the filmed material itself, it is instructive to ask the same question of the filmed material that has been asked about Svilova: could different filmed material have done work of the same quality and significance? Could it have contributed the same ideas? The absurdity of the question instantly reveals itself. Different filmed material might well have been composed into something interesting by Vertov and Svilova or even by Vertov and another editor, but it could not be the same. What was created by Vertov, Svilova and the filmed material in the editing process of Man with a Movie Camera is a unique creative product of the particular confluence of its particular players, and the confluence is the source and location of the genius.
Through close analysis of a scene depicting editing process in Man with a Movie Camera we have, first, shifted the paradigm “away from authorship” and “toward analysing industry practices” (Wright 2009: 10). This shift uncovers the cognitive complexities at work in physical editing processes, and reveals that in film editing the physical work is creative collaboration in a distributed cognitive system. This onscreen evidence of the work of hands and minds has allowed each author of this paper to achieve their individual aims: to recuperate editing from its ‘invisible’ position in ideas generation; to deepen understanding of the significance of Svilova’s contributions to her creative partnership with Vertov; and to demonstrate the explanatory utility of the distributed cognition framework in film studies. This is, we suggest, a mutually beneficial engagement: the case study in film history can both test and in turn refine the cognitive theory.
The model is perhaps particularly applicable to feminist film studies because it could be used, as we have done, to recuperate hidden contributions of particular women in the Soviet Montage Era, and reveal their significance in the practices that generated its ideas.
Using the distributed cognition thesis, we have also begun to reframe the understanding of creative collaboration in film. We have grounded this fresh model of filmmaking collaboration in empirical evidence as seen in the works and documents of the ground-breaking Svilova-Vertov collaboration.
In short, we have argued that Svilova and Vertov and the filmed material worked together. The working is thinking. They thought together. Their thoughts, as manifested in the film, with the film, are an instance of what we might call ‘genius’ in extended mind.
In the Vertov/Svilova partnership can we separate who helps and who creates? We know that “instead of selecting shots according to an a priori elaborated plan, Vertov's system was to observe and record life ‘just as it is’, and only then to draw conclusions from his observations” (Enzensberger 1972: 99). We know that Svilova was there with him making those observations, literally watching, sorting, remembering, selecting, and composing from the material. If we accept that editing is an instance of distributed creative cognition and that Svilova and Vertov are, like many editors and directors, a functionally distributed collaborative cognitive system, then we can see that the expert cognitive actions of watching, sorting, remembering, selecting and composing are not just helping, they are the creativity.
Perhaps asking who should get credit for one or another part of this integrated creative activity is asking the wrong question. What we need to be asking is: what is creative thought in a distributed cognitive system? Can we move away from the idea of a sole auteur to understand that this editing thinking is the shared thinking of Vertov and Svilova’s extended mind? This discussion has demonstrated that editing and directing are not solo tasks. At the very least they are thought processes that rely on the biological resources of the filmmaker and the non-biological resources of the film itself. More often, and certainly in the case of Vertov and Svilova, they rely on the biological resources of more than one filmmaker. The editor and director are both, in this sense filmmakers. The editor’s epistemic actions are creative, and their edits are their thoughts.
Karen Pearlman | karen.pearlman@mq.edu.au | Macquarie University
John MacKay | Yale University
John Sutton | Macquarie University
Dr Karen Pearlman is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University (Sydney) and the author of Cutting Rhythms, Intuitive Film Editing (Focal Press 2016). Her creative practice research film Woman with an Editing Bench (2016) won the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) Award for Best Short Fiction and the Australian Screen Editors Guild (ASE) Award for Best Editing in a Short Film along with 6 other film festival prizes. Other publications from Karen’s ongoing research into editing, cognition and feminist film histories include “Editing and Cognition Beyond Continuity” in Projections, The Journal of Movies and Mind (2017), “Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition” in A Cognitive Approach to Documentary (Palgrave MacMillan 2018) and the essay film After the Facts (The Physical TV Company, 2018).
Professor John MacKay completed his PhD dissertation on Romantic and post-Romantic lyric inscriptions at Yale University in 1998. He began as an assistant professor in Yale’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures the same year, and has over the years taught courses on film and media theory, Soviet cinema, Chinese cinema, Russian culture, slavery and serfdom in US and Russian literature, Marxist theory, Chekhov, and other topics. John has published articles on aspects of Dziga Vertov’s work in KinoKultura, Film History, Senses of Cinema, and October, among other journals, and is the author of the forthcoming Dziga Vertov: Life and Work (Academic Studies Press).
John Sutton is a Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, researching and teaching in the philosophy of mind, cognition, and action, in cognitive psychology, and in the interdisciplinary cognitive humanities. His main research topics are autobiographical and collaborative memory, embodied memory and skilled movement, distributed cognition, and cognitive history. John is widely published in journals and edited books, and his work has been supported by the Australian Research Council through numerous grants. He is co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series Memory Studies, and was elected to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2015.
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