Upon viewing ‘Man with a Movie Camera,’ it was quite clear that Vertov’s creation is much more unreserved than Ruttman’s ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’. It never fails to amaze me that even with censorship and the public expectation of modesty and inhibition, films were still able to somehow present the taboo, with nudity, child birthing and even an instance of divorce, which still carries a stigma in certain societies, making an appearance in Vertov’s film. Although Vertov uses ‘kinography’ to explain the lack of intertitles, scripting and theatrical components such as actors and sets, the film still manages an intriguing account of city life through the implementation of several filming techniques which are visually stimulating, and certainly would have been an object of fascination at the time. Vertov, aware of the poor sound quality of available equipment, recognised the impossibility of organising the many sounds people were confronted with daily. Instead, he sought comfort through the possibility of capturing the physical world with a movie camera: “Record the visible...Organise not the audible, but the visible world. Perhaps that’s the way out?”[1] In organising the visible world, Vertov, like Ruttman, is able to create the idea of noise generated by constant movement and a quick succession of images: sound is implied rather than heard. Speaking of his 1928 newsreel ‘The Eleventh Year’, Vertov remarked that “we already see montage connected with sounds. Recall how the machines thump, how absolute silence is conveyed.”[2] This musing can easily be applied to ‘Man with a Movie Camera’. Vertov adequately records the energy of motion, as slow and fast, industrial and mechanical, without employing the use of sound. Viewers today, who have been desensitised by the constant array of CGI enhanced images and sequences, are either unimpressed by the technical simplicity or captivated by something which was so technologically advanced for its time. It is interesting how what was once considered ‘avant-garde’ quickly descends into the realm of the conventional. Vertov, it seemed, was simply interested in the filmic capture of images and the mechanical portrayal and manipulation of our surroundings, writing that: “I am kino-eye. I am builder...I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it”.[3] His superimposition of his ‘man with a movie camera’ on top of a large building, overlooking the city captures both his advanced film making methods and also a metaphor, for the film-maker towering above everything and everyone, an all-seeing figure. The reality is that Vertov, as the man with a movie camera behind the man with a movie camera, is indeed a powerful figure, able to manipulate images in order to depict this sentiment. Cinema itself promises power as it allows time to be cut, edited, reversed and replayed.[4] One of the most interesting things about ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is its self-reflexivity: it begins with an image of a camera, and as the film unfolds, we are made aware of the camera and the film-maker’s constant self reference and awareness.
[1] Vertov, as quoted in Douglas Kahn, Noise, water, meat: a history of sound in the arts, (The MIT Press: Cambridge, 1999), p. 140
[2] Ibid, p. 141.
[3] Dziga Vertov, ‘Kinoks: A Revolution’, in Technology and culture, the film reader, ed. Andrew Utterson, (Routledge: London, 2005), p. 102
[4] Peggy Phelan, Mourning sex: performing public memories, (Routledge: London, 1997), p. 160
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