Dziga Vertov's Man With a
Movie Camera (1929) is a stunning avant-garde, documentary meta-narrative which celebrates Soviet workers and filmmaking. The
film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to
portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn't
just recording reality, he transforms it through the power of the
camera's "kino-glaz" (cinema eye). Vertov's rich imagery transcends
the earth-bound limitations of our everyday ways of seeing.
Vertov was a working-class artist who desired to link workers
with machines. His film opens with a manifesto, a series of
intertitles telling us that this film is an "experiment," a search
for an "absolute language of cinema" that is "based on its total
separation from the language of literature and theater." This
manifesto echoes an earlier one that Vertov wrote in 1922, in which
he disavowed the films of D. W. Griffith and others as psychological
dramas--cliches, copies of copies, films overly indebted to novels
and theatrical conventions. Vertov desired to create cinema that had
its own "rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the
movements of things." For Vertov an emphasis on the psychological
interfered with the worker's "desire for kinship with the machine."
And as a peoples' artist, Vertov felt that the peoples' cinema must
"introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor" and "foster new
people."
And foster he does. The Man With a Movie Camera is divided
into nine orchestral-type movements, and several of them use
rapid-fire editing, wild juxtapositions (e.g. blinking eyes with
shutter blinds) and multiple exposures to mesh workers with machines
in a simultaneity of reverence and celebration. Levers and wheels
turn and workers synchronously turn with them. Later, Vertov reveals
more mechanical reality as he juxtaposes a woman getting her hair
washed with another washing clothes, and then shows a barber shaving
a man, and sharpening a razor's edge. The sequence ends with
newspapers rifling along a printing press, and a young woman packing
cigarettes, watching the machine's quick slap pressing, while
smiling at her labor.
As Vertov revealed the joys of work, the rhythm of workers and
machines, he also felt that filmmaking (as a largely technological
medium) was also a component of that mechanical reality. In the
aforementioned sequence of a cigarette worker and her machine,
Vertov also splices into the mise-en-scene his wife and editor,
Yelizavela Svilova. As shoes are shined and a woman gets her hair
cut and fingernails polished, an edit reveals Svilova rubbing
emulsion off the film strip, suggesting that polishing the beauty of
cinema is synchronous with the peoples' visit to the beauty salon.
More importantly, Svilova's appearance stitched into another montage
(a woman sews, fabric linked with thread, while Svilova edits, film
threaded through a splicer) strongly suggests that filmmaking is
workmanlike, the perfect analog to the worker's life.
Besides celebrating workers, machines, and filmmaking as
constituting Soviet reality, Vertov uses kino-eye to transcend the
very reality he celebrates. In a 1923 manifesto, Vertov wrote "I am
kino-eye, I am mechanical eye, I, a machine, show you the world as
only I can see it." And he boldly asserted: "My path leads to the
creation of a fresh perception of the world I decipher in a new way
a world unknown to you." Again this ground-breaking film brings to
fruition Vertov's earlier vision of what cinema should be. His
camera, in the hands of brother Mikhail Kaufman, is never static; it
travels where we can't--up smokestacks, under train tracks--and
through continuous explosions of cinematic trickery--variable camera
speeds, dissolves, split-screen effects, the use of prismatic
lenses, and tightly structured montage--Vertov transforms not only
reality, but traditional narrative cinema. He moves outside of
Hollywood storytelling (three-act structures, goal-oriented
characters), and closer to an absolute language of cinema that he
seeks.
The film's middle section captures some of the absolute language
of the kino-eye. The sequence begins with a low-angle canted shot of
a traffic light turning. Then from on high, the camera visible frame
right, kino-eye overlooks a busy Moscow street. Cut to a joyous
couple walking into a municipality, where they sign a wedding
registration. Kino-eye then returns to the previous establishing
shot, as the camera pans the street, and then cuts to the traffic
signal reversing. This switch cues a shift in mood which is
reinforced as next cut shows the camera, frame right, spinning
around and portraying a darker side to life's dialectics. Kino-eye
now shows a disconsolate couple entering the municipality to fill
out a divorce registration. Their pending separation is foregrounded
in kino-eye's shot selection: an occasional two-shot mixed with six
separate shots of the woman, chin in her hands, and four separate
shots of the man, looking weary and angry. Kino-eye follows this
with a prismatic image of streetcars crossing in V-shaped diagonals
and then offers more dialectics: a crosscut sequence of automobiles
heading to a funeral and an agonized woman, awaiting the birth of
her child. The sequence concludes with the cameraman superimposed
over a prismatic street, buildings leaning at weirdly oblique
angles, and in a graphic punctuation, a baby born from kino-eye's
doctorly point-of-view. In three minutes, Vertov's kino-eye has
ordered material reality in fresh, original ways, revealing a range
of motion (high/low compositions and stunning taboo images of the
baby's birth) and emotion (marriage/divorce; death/life).
The film's conclusion is aesthetically beautiful and
ideologically committed. Oddly, in the 1930s the Stalinists didn't
think so. Vertov fell into disfavor with their regime and this film
and others were accused of formalist error, of placing aesthetics
ahead of ideological commitment. It's unfortunate that a man who
wanted to link the cinematic machine with the people could be so
mistrusted, because Man With a Movie Camera has a wonderfully
rousing coda that links spectators within the theatrical diegesis to
their onscreen counterparts (the film within the film). And as they
watch their images everything coalesces: machines (typewriter keys,
spinning wheels, mechanical spinners, streetcars) and people
(walking the streets, driving cars, resting at the beach) in rhythm,
and in kinship. But perhaps the cameraman riding above the sea of
prismatically coalesced imagery bothered the Stalinists. Perhaps
they saw in that cameraman not formalist error but a brilliant
representation of the powerful kino-eye to not only see and know all
then (1929), but to possibly further see and expose a darkening
future threatened by totalitarianism.
From www.imagesjournal.com
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