Published On Apr 1, 2024
Man with a Movie Camera. Silent film with a live score.
Live score by Roksana Smirnova & Misha Kalinin. Performed in Bern, Switzerland 2024.
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David Abelevich Kaufman is documentaryâs Jumpinâ Jack Flash. Indeed, there is a photograph of him caught in mid-air, jumping. His pseudonym âDziga Vertovâ, which translates as âspinning topâ, could not be more apposite. And his masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera is a flash spinning-top of a movie. It has taken more than 80 years, though, for this to be fully recognised. (...)
Man with a Movie Camera is a âcity symphonyâ film of a kind not uncommon in the 1920s. These films celebrated the vibrancy of the modern cityscape with pastiches of urban images, for the most part neither set up nor reconstructed. Vertov, though, plays fast and loose with the conventions of such films, to profound effect. He superimposes, splits the screen, deploys fast- and slow-motion and extreme close-ups, and animates using stop- motion. Most surprisingly, he shows us the processes whereby a documentary is made. The eponymous man with the movie camera is his brother Mikhail, and his wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, is his editor. Both appear at work on screen...
Almost from the start of his career in newsreels immediately after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and in total contrast to the fixed-camera procedures of the time, he was already experimenting with special effects to reveal, through the kino-glaz, the cameraâs eye, film truth â kino-pravda. âFilm is not merely⌠facts recorded on film⌠but the product, a âhigher mathematicsâ of facts.â Crucially, he disdained everyday observationalism: âOur eyes,â he wrote, âsee very poorly and very little⌠the movie camera was invented to penetrate more deeply into the visible world.â
And the world as he saw it in Man with a Movie Camera was not revolutionary enough. The film is not really about filming the filming. That might be its most startling element, but he thought it a subordinate theme. Rather, it is a critique of Leninâs temporising with the middle class with his New Economic Policy, introduced in the wake of the post-revolution civil war. Vertov shows us beggars and porters and the bourgeoisie parading themselves in horse-drawn carriages. In his view, none of this should have still been around. The Bolshoi Theatre, for Vertov an unacceptable relic of the old regime, is made optically to collapse on itself. Such a criticism, though, was to Party-eyes âleft-infantilismâ, as bad as â or worse than â his formalist un-âprogressiveâ experimentations.
Nevertheless, the controversy over the film did not finish his career. Unrepentant as the decade turned, he embraced synchronous sound with his flamboyance undiminished. But as stifling Stalinism took hold, he became an ever-more marginal figure. Reduced to editing newsreels, he was to die of undiagnosed cancer in 1954, aged 58. The filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya remembers him sitting in the courtyard of the apartment block in Moscow where she grew up, always looking âvery sadâ.
And then the French translated the LEF debates, and in 1960 the anthropologist Jean Rouch decided, like Vertov, to include footage of himself and his co-director Edgar Morin when making Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique dâun ĂŠtĂŠ), a film-ethnography on the âstrange tribe that lived in Parisâ. Rouch made his debt to Vertov explicit: he was after, he announced on screen at the outset of his film, âun espèce dâun cinĂŠma vĂŠritĂŠâ, a type of cinema truth â kino-pravda. The reappraisal of Vertovâs work was underway.
Rouch, like Vertov, was concerned with exploiting the camera eye to reveal deeper truths and, as with Vertov, filming the filmmakers was only part of the attempt to go beyond surface realities. In his films, Rouch not only talked to the people he filmed but also had them re-enact events â whether actual or fantasy â as a way of getting further inside their heads. The line from, say, current controversies over re-enactments and fantasies in Joshua Oppenheimerâs The Act of Killing, clearly runs back via Rouch to Vertovâs kino-glaz.
Today, all such possibilities matter more and more. A âkino-eyeâ seeing beneath surface realities offers a crucial lifeline as modern technology undercuts and wounds mainstream realist documentaryâs essential observationalist assumptions, perhaps fatally. Vertovâs agenda in Man with a Movie Camera signposts nothing less than how documentary can survive the digital destruction of photographic image integrity and yet still, as Vertov wanted, âshow us lifeâ.
Brian Winston, Sight & Sound, September 2014
âAuthor/Supervisor of the Experimentâ: Dziga Vertov
Production Company: VUFKU
Chief Cameraman: Mikhail Kaufman
Assistant Editor: Elizaveta Svivlova