Dziga Vertov | Человек с киноаппаратом (Man with a Movie Camera) / 1929

the mad cameraman

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dziga Vertov (screenwriter and director) Человек с киноаппаратом (Man with a Movie Camera) / 1929 [documentary]

 

Vertov's film begins with a written prologue:

 

                    The film Man with a Movie Camera represents

                    AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION

                    of visual phenomena

                    WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES

                    WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO

                    WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE

                    (a film without actors, without sets, etc.)

                    This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards 

                    the creation - ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY - on the basis of its 

                    complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.

     Vertov had randomly shot over 1,775 scenes, employing his wife Elizaveta Svilova to cut and piece them together as a representation of a day in the life of a city (in this case, Odessa) in 1929.

      Certainly, Man with a Movie Camera is intentionally experimental, using numerous techniques from double exposures, slow motion, freeze frames, split screens, close-ups, and long tracking shots to what is described as Dutch angles, a tilt of the camera to the side creating vertical lines at an angle to the frame.

     Yet one certainly cannot describe this documentary as being without narrative. It begins, in fact, with the above manifesto as a kind prologue before showing, from within, a movie house, as the crowd enters, the seats seeming to automatically fall from upright position to the horizontal in long rows. The crowd is seated, a curtain rises, and an orchestra is poised to begin as a short stasis creates tension before the conductor brings down his baton on the Alloy Orchestra, a group which creates not only a driving rhythmic music but incorporates sounds such as sirens, crowd noise, the cries of babies, and much else.

     The narrative is made immediately apparent, as a woman is seen sleeping upon a bed, an alarm clock blares, and another woman sits up to wash her face and change into her dress. Although Vertov's work begins rather slowly, it quickly picks up a speed that drives the numerous daily routines, from traveling to work by bus, train, streetcar and other modes of transportation to the masses' arrival into the heart of the city where they begin their numerous daily routines that take us into the late afternoon when the host of figures engage in multiple entertainments, including theater, sunbathing, and various engagements in sport events.

    At the center of this narrative is the central character, an almost manic cameraman (Mikhail Kaufman) who with camera in hand hops upon various forms of transportation, climbs bridges, and mounts machines, tracking scenes from below and on high as he risks his life to capture the life and energy of city living.

     But, of course, we know that despite the cameraman's busy demeanor that there is yet another camera trained on him, and that, in fact, the film is not just a movie about a "man with a movie camera," but is a more self-referential film, a movie about a movie maker. The stars of this narrative are the cinematographer, Vertov himself, and the tool he uses to accomplish the task. At one point the camera seems to actually come alive, taking itself apart and reassembling its own being. At another moment we witness the mad camera man atop his own camera. And again and again, while the masses go about their daily chores, the cameraman and his camera race across the screen to track the actions of the Soviet folk it—again mostly in a pretense—"secretly" shoots. This is not exactly candid camera, however, for although Vertov is said to have distracted several of crowds from the fact that they were being filmed, the very outsized version of his machine surely encouraged some of his figures to pose for the camera, or, to put it another way, to "act."

     Except for the statement of no intertitles, accordingly, Vertov's manifesto seems to ignore what it claims to have accomplished, creating instead a kind of theatrical narrative whose actors are the cameraman and his camera among a cast of thousands of extras. No matter, the film is still today one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made, long ahead of its time using techniques that influenced 20th and 21st-century filmmaking.

     If at times Man with a Movie Camera, particularly near the end, seems—as Vertov's critics had argued—gimmicky and even manipulative, over all the work is a remarkable achievement, representing as it does a vast landscape of pulsing city life.

 

Los Angeles, March 21, 2012 | Reprinted from International Cinema Review (March 2012).