man w/ a movie camera (1929) & the seventh art, fresh & fully formed

 

Originality in the arts certainly deserves praise, but should it always earn merit? Far too often do we revere the new, over the innovative. It is one thing to conceive a novel idea, but it is another, more challenging thing, to execute that idea with such sheer precision to essentially influence everything to come after it. This is what Dziga Vertov did with his pioneering and propulsive 1929 documentary ‘Man with a Movie Camera.’ 

From double exposures, to freeze frames, to fast and slow motion, cross-cutting, montage and beautiful split frames, Vertov utilizes a vast compendium of special effects and camera tricks that don’t allow the viewer to ever be stagnant, with a rich visual feast always appearing and disappearing before your eyes. It would be one thing for Vertov to simply employ these techniques in a random fashion, but instead, he deploys them as if it was effortless and yet so deliberately. Every process not only conveys a certain feeling in the viewer but so perfectly harmonizes with the images on screen and the greater allegorical brushstrokes Vertov is designing. 

For instance, take the iconic double exposure shot of the camera perched on the roof of an Odessan building, surveying the quotidian people below. Not only is it an elaborate and visually rich shot, but it firmly places the camera and Vertov as the central characters of the picture; that of omnipotent gods. No more is this more clearly shown than another double exposure shot of an eye firmly wedged between the lens of Vertov’s dummy camera. The camera watches all, and only for the camera is the truth ever captured. This ‘Kino Pravda’ or film truth, reverberates around throughout the picture, and Vertov, is not comfortable with only making a groundbreaking film showing the mirror back at a whole country, but then directing that mirror inward back on itself. 

It is intangible to me how Vertov could be this self-reflective in a moment of innovation. Following the ever-predictable sinusoidal fashion of fads, it's inevitable that after something new breaches, there will always be others who begin to deconstruct the movement and push back from it. If superhero films become over-saturated with whimsical motifs, then a pioneer will create a realistic, grounded approach and be praised, only for that to eventually dominate the market. Usually, this phenomenon is observed over a long period of time and with numerous artists building off one another; what ‘The Spinning Top’ has done here, is revealed that he is indeed a matryoshka top. As the film opens to us, an on-screen film opens to a group of contemporary patrons of a cinema, ushered in and they only leave towards the very end of our film, thus evoking that they were watching what we had just seen. This framing device serves as an indication of how self-reflective Vertov was. Constantly examining what he was doing, how he was shooting a particular shot and how that was affecting the subjects he was shooting. Miraculously, these are motifs that artists will be tackling and ‘discovering’ 40 years later in the cinema verité movement.

Another great example of Vertov’s control of how to present information is in the second act when he opens on a lady editing 35mm prints. We are shown blowups of young children with apparent images of disgust, or unpleasantness, or a lady who looks disgruntled. Like a reverse Kuleshov effect, we infer these emotions onto these people. Vertov then has the on-screen editor scratch the prints up and then only later shows us the footage from which he derived the photos. The kids were not anguished, in fact, they were concerned for a rabbit in a magic show they very much enjoyed; the woman not disgruntled, but instead bargaining, perhaps putting on a facade to get a better deal. Vertov rolls up his sleeves and shows his hand here, saying ‘Look, I’m the one arranging these images, and yes it’s the truth, but context matters.’ 

With the cross-cutting between machines and people, of a woman getting her eyebrows painted and then of another woman lathering herself with a similarly coloured mud to avoid being burned in the warm Ukrainian summer sun, Vertov not only created a stupendous snapshot of a mindset, but melded that so beautifully with innovative techniques to evoke in the viewer exactly what he was trying to say, while simultaneously examining the philosophy of documentary filmmaking himself. For that, ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is an ouroboros of perfection, and will never be forgotten