Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov's 1927 film Man with a Movie Camera is widely recognised as “the grand summa of the Soviet futurist-communist-constructivist avant-garde”[1]. Unlike Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City, Vertov does not reference a specific city. His city symphony amalgamates footage from Odessa, Kiev and Moscow into a Soviet meta-metropolis, where peace has been made between man and machine. In his 1922 manifesto Vertov states that through cinema the kinoks aim to “reveal the soul of the machine, causing the worker to love his workplace, the peasant his tractor, the engineer his engine”[2]. Having read the rather angry manifesto before watching the film I anticipated a very slow and painful death of cinematography. When it was first released screened in New York critic Jay Leyda found himself "reeling" from a New York theatre, "too stunned to sit through it again"[3]. I however, found it far more engaging than Berlin.

Vertov’s film is an extended montage of shots capturing the people of Soviet Russia as they go about their daily life. A “man with a movie camera” unites these scenes. His role is simultaneously character in and creator of the film. In the duality of his role, the man with the movie camera is a constant reminder that what we are seeing is a selective view of the world filtered through a mediating ideology. In this reflexive mode, the viewer’s attention is ‘drawn to the device as well as the effect’[4], allowing us to ruminate not only the subject matter of the film, but the way in which we are shown this subject matter. Along with showing the cameraman moving about the world, Vertov’s extravagant use of filmic techniques such as double exposures, split screens, stop motion animation and fast and slow motion all draw attention to the fact that what we are watching is a film, not reality. Vertov thereby engages in a metacommentary, speaking to us ‘less about the historical world …than about the process of representation itself.[5]’ The intention is to break down the presuppositions that shackle visual perception by refusing to allow us to forget that we are watching a film that has been created by a subjective being. By denying us the ability to see the screen as some kind of portal to reality, the film destroys its own illusions in the hope that a new reality.

Many students were critical of Vertov's adherence to his own ideology for making the cameraman the “star” of the film. I think it could be argued that instead Vertov makes the camera the hero of the film. Rather than following the cameraman’s actions we are following, or at least trying to keep up with the action of the camera. Yuri Tsivian suggests that Vertov's film cannot be read. A viewer will invariably translate their perceptions “of the spectacle into verbal images”[6]. Due to the absence of intertitles, scripting and because the film “retains only those semantic couplings between individual sections which fully coincide with the visual couplings” the viewer is unable to read and translate the film. In this way Vertov can be said to be successful in creating a genuine, international purely cinematic language, entirely distinct from the language of theatre and literature[7].