whether it should be bought or sold (just that it sells) or

its value as anything other than a marketable item.

and

it is strange in this health ‘revolution’

that the same concern is not extended to

that which will not lend itself to a brain

that is disgusting and lazy.

-Nick

1. Consider that reviews exist in a world outside of affection. But people rarely take the time to consider their own tastes or interests as trivial to a world outside of their own. What I mean to say is that sometimes people just like movies, or music, or certain foods, and they really can’t explain why and really shouldn’t be expected to. But it is the job of a reviewer to present the quality of something in a language outside of preference. (which they often do not). How could they achieve this?

A reviewer can achieve this by explaining how a movie works (needing a background in directing, lighting, editing, screenwriting). Like a good mechanic the reviewer should be able to spot the parts of a film’s engine that are of top quality, or the pieces that perhaps need replacing. A bad mechanic would only be able to tell you ‘Your car is shiny’ or ‘Your car is blue, I like the color blue’.  Now, when you begin ‘looking under the hood’ of most (American?) films, you will realize that they are all of the same make and model.

2. Therefore, if I turn on a movie and I begin to notice the importance the director has placed on the story, by delicately setting up a character who will inevitabley be faced with a new decision or chance within the half an hour (1st Act). And does not give a shit about using moving pictures edited in any way other than tricking my mind into believing that everything going on infront of me is real, than I do not see the harm in turning the movie off, right at the beginning.

The director is like the writer. The first sequence of his movie, is like the first paragraph of a novel. Of course, most directors waste their first sequence on credits. So lets pretend the second sequence is the first sequence. If this sequence is bullshit, than the whole thing is bullshit. Let me take the preference out of that statement: If this sequence is a lot of shot reverse shot, meaningless in itself without the dialogue and pretty faces of the actors, than I should soon realize the director is relying on the actors, and the story, (and not the camera/editing) as the mainstay of his film.

Modern movie makers care about film like hunters. They wish only to capture moments of reality.  It is a vacant use of moving images. Blindly, they ignore a hundred years of film history that has determined this pursuit benign: reality cannot be caught.

Remember: hunters kill the game they seek and display only its corpse. Narrative film makers obliterate the film medium by using everything they can to hide it.

The Man with a Movie Camera is a 67 minute poem. It is poetic in its desire to attune its viewer to a specific ideology without formally telling. When making the film and throughout his career, Vertov drew heavily on influence from both Walt Whitman and Russian Futurist poet Vladimiar Mayakovsky (Singer 247).  If we are to estimate that a minute on screen equals one page of a script on paper, then The Man with a Movie Camera is a poem that is 67 pages long. The task of understanding and explaining the entire contextual, intellectual and kino (cine) logical (to use a Vertovian term) significance of this film is quite hypnotizing. To begin to do this, it is important to highlight the structure of The Man with a Movie Camera.

Different Researchers have broken the film into different segments. I have discerned nine distinct pieces with integral components. Vlada Petric, the author of several academic articles on Vertov as well as the book “Constructivism in Film”, breaks it into only four. Petric notes that other researchers, Croft and Rose, divide the film into seven ‘thematic’ pieces (Petric 73).  My own nine pieces of The Man with a Movie Camera are:

1. Theatre Opening / Band Beginning to Play

2. Silent City / Woman Awakening

3. City Awakening / Camera and Workers

4. Editing Woman / Frozen Women and Children

5. Life-As-It-Is

6. Introducing the Kino-Eye

7. Dance of the Workers

8. Defend Security of Soviet State

9. Proletarian Film Theatre.

I would consider these names as “chapters” in a hope that Vertov’s rigid discipline of all parts serving the whole be recognized (Vertov 120).  A cursory glance at the content of each of these ‘chapters’ may help reveal the thematic elements of Man with a Movie Camera:

1. Man opens theatre to public; Band begins to play just as film is projected on screen. Beginning film with film beginning. (wanting audience to realize they are watching a film and take part in understanding it)

2. City is silent, silent store fronts, silent buildings, manikins in store front frozen, single shot of manikin (?) hand, silent machinery without anyone operating them, giant bottle, rows of building windows, rows of baby’s cribs. Cameraman is seen traveling to rail station intercut with a woman sleeping in bed. Train runs over camera man, woman awakens.

3. Woman awakens, people awaken to cameraman’s lens standing over them, machinery is equipped with hands, cameraman is seen among workers, climbing a tall tower as man works in black coal. Cameraman moves through space with people, stores open. Cameraman after shooting handfuls of workers is seen shooting woman in carriage at leisure.

Film freezes.

4. Woman who had woken up (The woman who is editing is not the woman who was sleeping, however their strikingly similar features is something I will discuss) is seen editing film as it happens:  Changes frozen faces of women with older faces of women, younger faces of women and then children. Film is edited as film is playing.

5. A divorce, wedding registration, people just after being married and divorced, old woman crying on grave, woman giving birth to child and funeral are all intercut. Within this sequence is a superimposed image of cameraman shooting two buildings at distinct angle: the structural capabilities of film, to show time as one moment.

6. Vertov first use of Phi-Effect, Eye is cut rapidly among a moving shot. Iconic use of shot: woman uses telephone, ambulance leaves station. Ambulance is cut parallel with fire truck leaving station, direction of movement is distorted. Eye is seen inside camera lens looking at hurt man (Kino-Eye).

7. Various people are manicured by hands in a salon as others, (women) covered in dirt or mud, work. Hands of hairdressers, seamstress, editor, ax sharpener, traffic director, abacus counter, camera man’s cranking, packing cigarettes, connecting phone lines, return to machines only, climaxes in Phi-Effect of cameraman among all machines. People stop working.

8. Boat cruises by with “Defend Security of Soviet State” banner on it. People go to beach. Cameraman lies in the water, washes himself. Naked girls with mud cut with woman applying make-up and giggling. Return to images of children editor used in chapter 4, now cut over a magic show. Sequence of erotic exercises. Soviet paper with slow motion sports. Ball game with numerous players and objects. Because of the sequence’s introduction, another dimension of Vertov’s ideology is touched upon: that recreation, fun, and sex is vital to a community.

9. Camera points out ‘Proletariat Film Theatre’. Dancing Lobster, Cameraman visits bar, leaves as woman ‘shoots’ away bottles. Cameraman goes to ‘Lenin’ club. Camera dances for audience in theatre; screen goes nuts and begins to play ‘actuality’. Giant Building is visually broken in half. Cameraman points his camera at camera shooting him, in turn at the audience of theatre.  Film ends on shot of ‘Kino-Eye’.

Obviously The Man with a Movie Camera is trying to unite all the worker’s of Vertov’s socialist society and proclaim the film maker as an integral part among them. He, as well, continually gives examples of film’s power – showing the editor’s ability to change and rearrange images and resulting context and ability to communicate. He gives two specific example of his own ‘Kino-Eye’ theory, involving catching life ‘unawares’ and with the heightened perceptibility of a camera (Vertov 1-253). (It should not be forgotten that the entire film is an example of Vertov’s Kino-Eye or Film Truth theories). Here, I am referring to chapter 6, “Introducing the Kino-Eye”, where an eye inside of a lens is seen documenting an accident involving an injured boy and in chapter 8 ‘defend security of soviet state’ where people watch sports players perform in slow motion. Obviously it would take the power of a camera to so precisely catch the rhythmic movements of sports players.  Also, in chapter 6, after the hectic sequence of the eye looking around the city there is shot of a woman on the phone, followed by a bell ringing and men running to an ambulance – here Vertov employs the visual understanding of a situation without the help of an ‘intertitle’.

Another example of a visual understanding of a situation can be read in the chapter, 2. Silent City/ Woman Awakening. A woman is seen tossing and turning in bed as the cameraman shoots underneath an oncoming train. Just as the train gets to the cameraman, there is a quick shot of an ankle and foot bent across one beam of the railroad. WHOOSH, the train is seen moving from right to left and the woman jumps up out of bed. In this way, the train sequence may be construed as a dream (or nightmare), because of its inter-portrayal with a woman sleeping. This means also means that the other shots within this sequence may be parts of this ‘dream’: the giant bottle, the hands, the silent machinery, the buildings and the babies. All of these objects reappear later in the film, as well as a prominent woman figure: the editor. The editor, who may be mistaken for the sleeping woman, is seen creating the film, and thus the ‘dream’ in the film’s beginning may be the film in its preconception.  Also it is hard not to try and enter the psyche of the editing woman as she is introduced splicing together images of older and younger women and children. Similarly, the film may ask to enter the psyche of the sleeping woman.

You may also note the attention I’ve paid to working women and women not working. (Those on the carriage, those clean in the salon shown before a completely filthy worker, those applying makeup unable to bath in the mud with other women). I feel it accurate to do so because of specific shooting instructions Vertov gave to his cameraman: “1. Observation of the place (e.g. the reading room, the cooperative); 2. Observation of moving characters or objects (e.g., your father, a pioneer, the mail truck, a streetcar); 3. Observation of the theme, independent of the thematic character or location (e.g. water and bread, father and son, cities and villages, tears and laughter).”  (Vertov, Petric 33) Because of the time Vertov seems to take visualizing the soviet state, it would seem appropriate that he would characterize those who stand against it. In this way, the women on the beach applying lip-stick seem to stand out against the women covering each other in mud. This idea is also epitomized in the end of The Man with the Movie Camera when first approaching the “Proletarian Theatre”, first before the screen goes all screwy, we see on it only dancing lobsters, and bar maids. Often, Vertov condemned fiction film or drama “as an opiate” for the people (Singer 250).

Perhaps comparing Man with a Movie Camera to another experimental work of its time may reveal the film’s significance.  The 1924 film, ‘Ballet Mecanique’ or Mechanical Dance, begins with the assertion: “C’est le premier film sans scenario”, translated means “It is the first film without a script”. This film by the cubist painter Fernand Leger, shot by Man Ray, is a visual study of movement, both of what is shown on screen and the movement between what is shown, as in editing to create movement. The use of a triangular glass piece creates strikingly distinct visual studies of objects in motion. Vertov also begins his film with the assertion that it is a film ‘without the help of intertitles, without the help of a script and without the help of theater’. Vertov also edited his film around a study of movement, what he theorized as ‘The Theory of Intervals’. However, Vertov’s study of movement coincides with his use of actuality footage and his social conscience. These elements in no way subtract from his study of visual phenomena, whereas Leger’s film exists only as visual device and does not extend itself in anyway outside the realm of film. Although Vertov did have a sincere relationship with the 1920 avante garde cinema art movement, in this way he surpasses it.

Vertov’s “Theory of Intervals” relied on a system of ‘kinetic impact’.  The theory of intervals means cutting a film together to the temporal action of all that is involved in each shot. It is the use of shot composition and the arrangement of each composition as a basis to build ‘kinetic tension’ (Petric 139). The shots are used to interact with one another in a number of ways explicitly written about by Vertov. “ (1) the correlation of planes (close-up, medium-shot, etc.), (2) the correlation of foreshortenings  (3) the correlation of movements within the frame, (4) the correlation of light and shadow  (5) the correlation of recording speeds.” (Vertov 90)This is employed in the entirety of Man with a Movie Camera.

Vertov was also part of the Constructivist artists of Russia. It was an art movement that wanted art to be created analogous to architecture and math equations (Petric 5). In the way that buildings house a society and math equations are employed to solve problems, likewise was the desire of constructivist artists. This Constructivist nature of Vertov’s, to me, is the explanation for his seemingly contradictory nature regarding “Film Truth”. “However, it is not enough just to film bits of truth. These bits must be organized in order to produce truth of the whole.” (Vertov 120) Vertov wanted his films to be the servant of socialism. His Kino-glaz (1924) series, features only people doing and performing actions as they would in real life. This, however, does not prevent Vertov from taking these ‘real’ moments and using them as the basis of information of a more expansive truth about their lives. An example of is how Vertov shows bakers’ baking bread in reverse, from the oven to the dough to the flour to the fields of wheat that are painstakingly labored over by farmers. Here, Leninists or “Young Pioneers” help the farmers in recognition of their importance to their society, as Vertov has just shown. This approach, the use of actuality as a basis to ideology, is the entirety of Man with a Movie Camera.

Man with a Movie Camera is a film that accurately predicted the future: that the moving image would become dominate to the written word in the modern society. It was made at a time before there was a television set in every home. Vertov not only knew the quickening importance of moving images but hoped to point future users of moving images in a direction away from passive creation. Thus is Man with a Movie Camera. It is common knowledge that watching television is a passive activity. Dziga Vertov did not help create a future of passive television watching. Hollywood movies, television programs, news, are all made with little regard to the ideologies that they disseminate and in no way try and use the medium of film as a device that requires thought.

Works Citied

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: a history of the non-fiction film. 2^nd Revised Edition. New York. Oxford University press1993.

Singer, Ben. Connoissers of Chaos: Whitman, Vertov and the “Poetic Survey”. Communication and Mass Media Complete.

Petric, Vlada. Dziga Vertov as Theorist. Cinema Journal, Vol. 18 No. 1 (Autumn 1978) pp. 29-44. University of Texas Press on Behalf of Society for Cinema & Media Studies. Accessed 24/02/2009. 11:35.

Petric, Vlada. Constructivism in Film: The man with the movie camera, a cinematic Analysis. Cambridge University Press. London. 1987.

Leger, Fernand. Ballet Mecanique. 1924.

Dziga Vertov. Man With A Movie Camera. 1929

Dziga Vertov. Kino Glaz. 1924

Vertov, Dziga. Dizga Vertov: Projects, Proposals. (Article from Class, excerpts from Kino Eye)

Dziga Vertov. Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. University of California Press. 1985

it is used in a lot of films.

it is used many times in a lot of films.

shot reverse shot:

Shot 1: character A’s face framed on left side of the screen,  back of character B’s head on the right side of the screen.

Shot 2: character B’s face framed on the left side of the screen, back of character A’s head on the right side of the screen

and again.

This technique has been employed by various directors to convey the relationship of the two characters interacting. Citizen Kane (1941) uses shot reverse shot in a way that has the viewer looking up to a dominant character and down at a weaker character. The Wrestler (2008?) imitates this with the use of a ladder and a super market boss.

This of course is relying on story to find meaning in shot choice/editing, but we’ll ignore that

because we can’t get over the blatant laziness of film directors.

and she ment it,

like that.

in the minds of other people:

When you die,

and when you’re living.