The Man with a Movie Camera

(Dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929) "The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." Oscar Wilde "It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple." Dziga Vertov Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera is a compelling and delightful exploration of the life of a cameraman in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. From the opening superimposed shot of a tiny cameraman climbing atop an oversized camera, Vertov is acquainting his audience with the ability the camera has to manipulate images. Vlada Petric notes, "Whether it is lighting, montage, camera angle, fast or slow motion, freeze-frame, flicker effect, or any other technique, the manifestation of the actual filmmaking forces the viewer to acknowledge the motion picture as reconstructed reality rather than its representational reflection" (Petric, 1987: 9). Erik Barnouw places Vertov's reflexivity in a historical perspective: "Since much of the film shows Mikhail Kaufman in action The Man with a Movie Camera involves staging and contrivance to an extent previously rejected by Vertov. But the artificiality is deliberate: an avantgarde determination to suppress illusion in favor of a heightened awareness" (Barnouw, 1993: 63). Both still photography and cinema were relatively new art forms, and uneducated viewers had a tendency to believe that they showed unaltered reality, sometimes even believing the images were more real than the physical object. Exposing the workings of the camera and the editor revealed a truth about

film; that it can be just as contrived as fiction and must be viewed with a critical and educated eye. As Richard M. Barsam notes, Vertov's film can be seen as an extension of how "[d]evelopments in nineteenth-century French art and photography renewed a new version of the oldest conflict in art: whether art should represent beauty or truth, the ideal or the real" (Barsam, 1973: 13). From the opening sequences, the cameraman (Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov's brother) is portrayed as fearless and brave. He is seen walking on high bridges, hanging off the side of a train, climbing a smokestack and crawling underground with miners. He will do anything in order to get the shot. The shots of Kaufman shooting the train are intercut with sequences of a bourgeoisie woman waking up in the morning. The contrast between the active and busy cameraman and the late-rising woman further inscribes him as a member of the proletariat. As Petric points out, "the Cameraman appears on the screen in a double 'role': he is a worker (who makes a film) as well as a citizen participating in daily life, whether by shooting on location or by posing for another camera" (Petric: 51). Additionally, the numerous shots of the editor undercut Kaufman's role as individual creator of the film and displays the collective nature of film. As Graham Roberts says, "These final moments remind us that this film is as much an editor's tour de force as a record of the cameraman's life" (Roberts, 1999: 89). Socialist values are inherent to the medium as well, as William Guynn notes in A Cinema of Nonfiction, "[Vertov] assertsthat the coherence of any discourse is the work of an agency, here not the bourgeois filmmaker as individual but a collectivity

of filmworkers who create in the progressive stages of production a representation of the visible world" (Guynn, 1990: 24). All film is a joint effort between director, cameraman and editor. It is always a collective form of art. In The Man with a Movie Camera the viewer sees the cameraman on screen and knows that there must be other cameramen filming him as he films. Additionally, the editor is shown with the reels of film the viewer just saw the cameraman shoot. Reflexive images like these make it impossible to forget how the work of many goes into a single film. In "Dziga Vertov and the Film of Money" Jonathan Beller observes that, from a Marxist viewpoint of work/use value, "What we learn from Vertov is that the image is constituted like an object - it is assembled piece by piece like a commodity moving through the intervals of production - and it is a (technological and economic) development of the relations of production" (Beller, 1999: 162). The Man with a Movie Camera is in many ways a film about film. Vertov was attempting to make a universal film, one which relied exclusively on film language to get its message across. As it says in the foreword to the film, "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." Film language in this case means there are no intertitles and no use of theatric conventions in relaying the message. Instead, the shots are organized in a montage style to convey a theme, in this case the daily life of Soviet citizens and the role of the cameraman in that life. Petric interprets the inclusion of the camera itself in

the film both as a way of mechanizing humans and humanizing machines: "by comparing industrial movements with those of athletes, Vertov suggests that machines also possess an expressive visual beauty. Similarly, the motion picture apparatus is equated with the human being as it suddenly begins to 'walk' on its own accord" (Petric: 7). Vsevolod Meyerhold's theory of biomechanics in acting also fits in here. Essentially, biomechanics reduces human movement to machine movement by categorizing and defining it. Just as a person's movements are broken down into parts, the anthropomorphic camera sequence was made using stop-action filming. The movement of the camera was actually hundreds of separate movements recorded individually by the camera. Because of the specific time and place Vertov occupied, communist Russia, all his films had to serve a propagandistic purpose. His inclusion of the elements of filmmaking in The Man with a Movie Camera is his attempt to place his passion and his occupation in a role supportive of the communist regime. The Man with a Movie Camera depicts the daily life of citizens of Russia, contrasting bourgeois luxury with worker industriousness. The cameraman is clearly identified with the workers rather than the bourgeoisie from the way he rises early to begin his work, as do the women sweeping the streets, and also by his constant movement throughout the film, which contrasts with the leisurely haircuts and manicures of the upper class. In some ways Vertov almost seems to prefigure Laura Mulvey's 1975 observations in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" that "[a]lthough the film is really being shown, is there to be seen,

conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world" (Mulvey, 1999: 836). Mulvey's essay centers around a psychoanalytic analysis of how film exemplifies sexual instincts, explaining that Freud "associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze" (Mulvey: 835). While Mulvey's arguments are concerned only with fictional Hollywood cinema, there is a sense of voyeuristic inequality in The Man with a Movie Camera . Vertov equates the camera with an eye, and where that eye is directed is ultimately controlled by Vertov. Chapter three opens with the camera zooming steadily in on a window. It then cuts to a shot of streetlights, establishing the time of day as early morning. Although not enough of the room is shown to determine what is in it, the shot following the streetlight is of a woman in bed, strongly suggesting it was her bedroom that the camera was stealthily creeping up to in order to peep through the lace curtains unbeknownst to the sleeping woman. The voyeurism continues as the woman wakes, washes and dresses in various sequences interspersed in chapter three. The camera cuts from the sleeping woman to the painting on the wall of an old man, positioned as if he too were watching her sleep. This is further emphasized by the subsequent cut to a film poster which the subtitles later identify as "The Awakening [of a woman]," a German film about the sexual awakening of a young woman. The eyes of the poster are also directed to look in the presumed direction of the woman. The shots of various men sleeping are not surrounded with suggestive images.

Vertov believed film was capable of showing what he called "kinopravda" (film-truth). He writes, "the newsreel is organized from bits of life into a theme, and not the reverse. This also means that Kinopravda doesn't order life to proceed according to a writer's scenario, but observes and records life as it is, and only then draws conclusions from these observations" (Vertov, 1984: 45). Significantly, Vertov does not call this theme "truth" in the absolute sense, but film-truth, admitting the creative/manipulative possibilities even in documentary filmmaking. Ultimately, Man with a Movie Camera is a film that champions the artistry of film by intermixing images of both the process and the product of filming a day in the life of a Russian city.
References

Barnouw, Erik (1993) Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Barsam, Richard M (1973) Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Beller, Jonathan L (1999) Dziga Vertov and the Film of Money, Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture. 26 (3). Duke University Press. Guynn, William (1990) A Cinema of Nonfiction. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Mulvey, Laura (1975/1999) "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism. 5th Ed. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press.

Petric, Vlada (1987) Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, A Cinematic Analysis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vertov, Dziga (1984) Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Trans. Kevin O'Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press. A Review by Kara L. Andersen, Northeastern University, USA.