Man with a Movie Camera (1929) - An experimentation in the cinematic communication of visual phenomena.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme ten, part two - a cinéma vérité* film!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

Dziga Vertov so believed in cinema, he renamed himself for the camera's motion, from the Ukrainian for "spinning top."  His faith in the mechanical eye's ability to capture actualities as they happened, free from any need for characters or narrative, formed the basis for his goals in Man with a Movie Camera.  The three-year project was to serve as a revolutionary cry in support of cinema as the modern art of the people, an artform capable of capturing an entire city in motion without resorting to the techniques of theater or literature, or indeed any medium other than the purely cinematic.  Per the conventional wisdom, he succeeded in his aims while failing to reach the public, crafting an experimental piece of pure filmmaking the likes of which have rarely, if ever, been equaled, just unfortunately timed to release after Battleship Potemkin made a Soviet realist approach the popular mold at home and abroad.  He was, tradition holds, a man fighting the whole weight of narrative film with something completely detached from narrative.  To my eye, however, watching Man with a Movie Camera reveals Vertov failed in even this respect, for his film does adhere to a three-act structure, does communicate in the language of those who came before.  I do not count this failure as a failure he could have avoided, though, nor a failure that speaks to Man with a Movie Camera falling short of its primary goals - rather, I consider it a demonstration of how handily Vertov illustrated the possibility for a moving image to speak the human tongue, and ultimately be a human art.

Let me explain.

The film proper begins with a movie camera atop a movie camera, and the theater's patrons settling into their seats as a projectionist brings the house lights down and the projector to speed, but the first we see of our true subject denies motion entirely.  Our city in the morning is asleep, the rich and poor alike in repose in their quilted bed and bare park benches, the storefronts speak to no one, the great machines all still and quiet.  Trace of activity attract attention ever so slowly: the early risers walking the streets, the pigeons aflutter in the air, the man with the movie camera trotting the landscape and preparing his shots for the day.  With time, the residents rise and busy themselves with freshening and dressing for the day, some already tirelessly working as others blink sleep from their eyes and reluctantly go through the motions.  Even the camera must take time to adjust to the light and focus on the right details and keep its shutter open.  Soon, the traffic begins, workers appearing from nowhere to ready the planes and trains and automobiles, beginning the day's delicate balance of a thousand vehicles narrowly avoiding ten thousand pedestrians.  The pace of life is not entirely even, for the shopworkers have the luxury of sleeping longer than the street cleaners and and transit operators, yet they too must rise and prepare for the day as the machines that truly power the city are brought to life - these, it must be noted, show no hesitance, instantly springing to life and achieving full speed within seconds.  Inside twenty minutes, Vertov and cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman have brought their subject to its full swing, the camera tracing Kaufman as he places himself in out of the way places to get the shot, slipping under barreling locomotives and perching atop moving cars and walking against the crowd and climbing to high perches to find just what he needs.  All is as it always is...

...and then we transition with a stop.  We move from establishment to exploration with a moment's consideration for the editor, Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova, as she holds the celuloid in its raw, unmoving state, and brings it to life with careful cuts.  Initially an invisible hand taken for granted, we will see her numerous times throughout the remainder of the film, keeping us firmly aware that someone must make these images dance as they do, in addition to our existing awareness towards their place in the movie theater and their selection by someone holding the camera.  The kino eye IS perfect in capturing exactly what it is set to capture, exactly as it is before its lens, but it is nothing without those who operate and discern.

Speaking of operation and discerning, we come to our second act, exploring the city's operations.  Vertov contrasts images more here than at any other point in the film, and it is interesting what he chooses to contrast in what order.  The usual choices are right up front, the camera swiveling atop a balcony to capture marriage and divorce at the same instant, a baby's birth and a man's funeral, the celebration of new beginnings and the mourning inherent to passing.  From this lofty comparison of ultimate extremes, he suddenly finds interest in that delicate balance again, positioning the camera between trams and atop trains and at intersections to capture how readily accidents COULD happen, and how narrowly it all speeds on, even tilting mirrored images towards one another to squash Kaufman between passing vehicles with barely an inch to spare - and then we take a minute or two to watch those who ARE unfortunate enough to take a hit, and the rescue and medical services which follow.  Necessity must compliment indulgence, so we next turn our attention to those who partake in leisure and service during working hours, and intercut them with those who package and craft and toil to keep the same functional.  Notably, halfway into this sequence Vertov starts prominently cutting Svilova's editing process in place of the other workers, arguing for the act of movie-making as laborious and necessary a task as wrapping products and tending weaves and minding traffic.  He does not, I think, places these images against one another to imply conflict, for the laborers are shown to enjoy their task just as much as the patrons do their constant repose, and he does them great kindness by then placing them in complimentary positions against the act's grand finale, the thunder of machines.  Mines, forges, power plants, enormous dams, the necessary lifeblood of the modern metropolis, all captured at the height of their operation, tunnels and pools and rushes of water so great they darken all but themselves... and still, the workers and the man with the movie camera are distinctly visible, their actions presented as essential to the continued movement of it all.

And so we stop again, if in a less jarring way than the sudden freeze frame of the first transition.  The factory workers power down their machines, the laborers put down their labor, and the whole city moves to a third act, one of leisure and play.  We engage ourselves at the beach, the track, the amusement park as the people magically fade into their places naturally as you please, and Vertov becomes endlessly fascinated with their activities.  On those who partake in sport, he makes time to freeze on their most dynamic action, capturing both the total motion and the instant of the human body in peak exertion.  The beachside visitors he photographs simply for their own sake as people.  We watch as many become purposefully dirty before washing off at the same instant, see the children enjoy a magic show as the dancers kick and the track stars hurdle and the carnival-goers shoot and the  motorists ride, the millions upon millions doing as they please with the hours they are given.  Through it all there is the man with the movie camera, Kaufman towering over the tallest buildings and rising from unlikely places to get his shot, the great mechanical eye capturing reverse games of chess and excess drinking at the bar from whatever angle is needed.  As the editing grows faster and the images of the day's activities begin to blur into one impression of pure movement, even the camera takes a break, gamboling an awkward dance atop its spindly legs free from the operator's influence.  At this point, we might expect the film to end with another stoppage, watching as weariness sets in and the city goes to sleep, resting for yet another day of weeks of months of years of this endless ballet we call life.

But Vertov does not stop.  The city does not come to rest.  Instead, it splinters, magnifies, kaleidoscopes into many.  Numerous complimentary views fill the screen all at once, reflections of the city as the every-city, the images we have seen before folding on themselves to become the all that is one.  Rather than halt, the city ascends, returning us to the movie theater to watch as it becomes the very nature of the film before Vertov's audience, before, as we might assume, every audience.  The city IS the art, and as we can see by way of Vertov positioning Kaufman as a giant filming his subjects on the screen one last time, so too are those who create such art.  While the kino eye is great, we have already established its limitations, and here we see this expressed in as literal manner as possible: Kaufman's filming as part of the film itself, and the final shuttering montage of Svilova cutting cut itself with the audience, the film, the cameraman, the camera, until we reach our last, enduring image of her eye within the camera's eye.  It must, Vertov argues, all be one.  The city, the people, the subject, the camera, the operator, the director, the very idea of cinema as the modern art - by their total nature as solid, true subjects before the camera's eye, the mechanical and human alike must BE cinema, nothing more, nothing less.

Vertov, I think, fails to make his point in as pure a manner as he hoped because to tell stories in the mode we are conditioned to understand stories is as much part of what he wanted to capture as the city free from story.  Stripped from all but the barest framing device, however, I also think he makes his point as beautifully as he could possibly have done.  Man with a Movie Camera both is and isn't film freed from all that came before; it answers to the master of segmented structure same as any other tale, while performing under this one remaining constraint as only a movie can, through the contrast of living images and nothing else.  Failure here becomes success, proving his point in a more roundabout manner than his own preferred firebrand manner, and in the process becoming a piece of motion picture-making appreciable to any eye.  He truly makes the photoreceptors of glass and viscera one and the same, the idea of a city and its people as they are the natural subjects for both to consider and subsume, and I would even go so far as to say he does so to such great effect as to make the eventual dominance of narrative cinema something in line with his views.  His techniques here became the basis for so much of the cinematic language as we now speak it, whether directly taken from his visual text or recreated by others further on down the line; regardless of the moving picture lacking so clean a cut as he fought towards, the form is distinctly its own entity according to the pattern he illustrated all the same.

(*Which, again, it's not really cinéma vérité, predating the concept as it does by a good 40 years or so, but we chose what we chose from our list, and some of Vertov's views on the camera as the perfect objective eye do fit with the "fly on the wall" idea behind the movement.)