Directed by Dziga Vertov
Soviet Union, 1929
This film presents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visual events
Without the aid of intertitles
Without the aid of a scenario
Without the aid of theatre
This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature
With an opening manifesto like that it may come as no surprise that this week’s film is a work of Soviet cinema. But what actually is it? Documentary? Experimental art film? Or as the director of Man with a Movie Camera described it: Kino-Pravda – a work of ‘film-truth’?
In a world now dominated by the universality of fast-cut, fragmented images on the small screen: TikTok, Instagram, and videogames, there may come a time when the idea of sitting down to watch a film in a theatre is a distant memory. If ever the concept of cinema needs to be reintroduced you could do a lot worse than making a start with this silent film from 1929, Man with a Movie Camera. The irony is that it’s sixty eight minutes of pure cinema, full of fast-cut, fragmented images.
In 1929 the average length of shot in a film (ASL) was around 11.2 seconds. Man with the Movie Camera has an ASL of 2.3 seconds, four times faster than most films of that time and the speed of an average action film made today.
Supposedly showing us the life of a Russian city over the course of a single day Man with a Movie Camera is very much a film of the modernist era. It followed the publication of Ulysses, by James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, two modernist novels that both follow a single day in the life of a man and a woman as they wander across a city.
I’m not sure, however, that the director, Dziga Vertov, would be happy for his film to be included in this company. For a start his name was a construction meaning ‘spinning top’. His original name was David Kaufman and he was part of a collective of Soviet filmmakers known as the Kinoks. They rejected the idea of staged cinema: eschewing sets, actors, and scripts.
Somehow by stripping away all these elements you will be left with a film that has a universal truth. A truth that would have application regardless of class or creed. Yes, what Vertov was aiming for here was propaganda. It was a magnificent failure, not the film itself but as an exercise in propaganda. The Communist Party dismissed it as ‘devoid of context’, and Dziga’s brother Mikhail - the actual man with the movie camera - refused to work with him again. Because this manifesto for the hope and efficiency of the Soviet Union inadvertently, or not, becomes a joyful celebration of humanity, but also of the medium of cinema itself.
The man with the movie camera is set loose all over the city: high up on the towering chimney stacks, suspended from an apartment block rooftop, laying down with his camera on a rail track as a steam train approaches, and then deep down into the subterranean setting of the city’s mines. The result is an impressionistic kaleidoscope of a cityscape. I say one cityscape but there’s the rub.
The film was shot over three years in five different cities. So much for realism? Well, this is what the Kinoks would describe as ‘constructive’ realism. Amidst fleeting scenes of birth and death Vertov sets up a contrast: one woman tunnelling in a mine, then a switch to another being pampered in a hair salon. Power hammers versus the mascara brush.
Then a third woman appears, she is Vertov’s wife, Elizaveta Svilova, the film’s editor. She is shown cutting and weaving film strips together, so although Vertov may consider that he is showing us ‘life caught unawares’ what is actually revealed is the importance of 1) frame, 2) focus, and 3) editing. That is the truth that turns a series of images into cinema, and here the editor reveals all the tricks in their toolbox. We have dissolves, slow-motion, Dutch angles, and stop-motion animation. Bear in mind that this was back in 1929. It now plays as a film school masterclass, and then there is that use of double exposure – exposing the film’s frame to light twice – arguably cinemas’ first great special effect. This trick allows Vertov to place the cameraman inside a pint of beer. The man with a movie camera ends up everywhere, all at once.
I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only the machine can see it - Dziga Vertov
One approach to editing in cinema is to try and make the process invisible, avoid those cuts drawing attention to themselves. Vertov shows no such fear here, the workings are shown there on the screen for all to see. Like Richard Roger’s Centre Pompidou in Paris, Vertov’s film is an inside-out construction that has its structure and services clearly visible on the exterior. So, Man with a Movie Camera. To return to our starting question, what actually is it? Well, it’s a film about a city, it’s a film about cinema, and finally it’s a film about life.
What is so impressive about this film, is that something so avant-garde, deconstructed, and revelatory, can arrive at such an early stage of the art form - N
Like Ulysses being published right after Pride and Prejudice - S
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 75
T - 81
N - 80
S - 79
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Coming next… Triangle of Sadness(2022)