In Man with the Movie Camera,[1] Dziga Vertov aims to define a purely cinematic language, as the text that introduces the film didactically informs, or rather warns, us. Doing away with narrative structure and causal cohesion, Vertov captures and distills the mechanisms of the modern city, relying, like Walter Ruttmann, on montage and other distinctively cinematic techniques, including superimposition or double exposure, split screens, and the acceleration, deceleration and reversal of movement. Both Vertov and Ruttmann relay their thematic concerns through an astutely coded aesthetic agenda.[2]
Yet unlike Ruttmann’s Berlin in City Symphony, the city in Man with the Movie Camera is non-specific and unnamed, as Alexander Graf notes.[3] This city is a composite, made up of footage from several cities – Moscow, Kiev and Odessa.[4] It is a distinctly soviet city, but nonetheless unplaceable. As a viewer we are confronted by an ungrounded spatial orientation, which is further complicated by Vertov’s continual reference to metacinematic spaces, spaces associated with the production and exhibition of the cinematic image – the cinema auditorium and the editing studio. These spaces exist outside of, yet simultaneous to, the city.
Just before Vertov cuts to the editing studio in the middle of the film, where as yet unseen segments of Man with the Movie Camera are being edited, he dramatically yanks us out of the fluid rhythm of the city scenes by inserting photographic stills into the montage sequence. In the background of one of these photographs is a sign that reads ‘no movement allowed.’[5] In this instant we become acutely conscious of the film as a metacinematic vehicle, just as we are when we see parts of Man with the Movie Camera being screened in the diegetic cinema, when the film we have been watching becomes, suddenly, a film-within-a-film.
By embedding his city symphony in a film-within-a-film, Vertov disorients his spectator. The diegetic cinema auditorium does not operate as a neat framing device, for we see images of the city before we are introduced to them on the metacinematic screen. What results is the emergence of a complicated and dualistic spatial frame, a network of self-referentiality where the ‘real’ and the cinematic become confused and collapse into one another. It is a phenomenon that Vertov metaphorically echoes later in the film when two sections of a vertical split-screen shot of the streets fold in on one another (an effect that is subtly echoed in Christopher Nolan’s Inception).
What Vertov constructs in this instance of doubled and convergent space is a perfect analogy for the ontology of cinematic space in general. When we sit in a cinema we occupy two distinct, yet simultaneous, spaces: the intangible space depicted on the screen into which we, as spectators, project ourselves, and the concrete space of the auditorium. Conscious of this we can perhaps appreciate Vertov’s manipulation of space – mapping two distinct yet simultaneous and interwoven spaces – as an extension of his pursuit of the ‘purely cinematic’.
There is one figure that is able to negotiate this complicated spatial field, an agent that secures cohesion without the help of narrative. This is the man with the movie camera who vacillates between the city and the metacinematic spaces. It is his camera that opens up this extradiegetic and metacinematic scheme and it is only through this figure that we are introduced to the cinema, for we follow him into it. This diegetic cameraman is a chameleon who adapts to any environment, who can be towering over the city one moment and small enough to fit into a beer glass the next. He is both a figure within the crowd and its recorder, simultaneoulsy Vertov’s muse and accomplice. Man with the Movie Camera unfolds as an interaction, or dialogue, between two cameras – one internal and diegetic, the other external – Vertov’s own.
This fact is explicitly articulated in one particular section of the film, a shot-reverse-shot sequence that moves between the depiction of the cameraman with his back to us, standing in a moving car, and the footage that his camera is recording, a tightly framed shot of the women in the car next to him. One of the women, in the footage taken by our diegetic cameraman, stares directly into his camera and mimics his gesture, turning the crank of an imaginary camera. With this action she bridges the gap between these two shots and the two spaces they occupy, the city seen through the Vertov’s lens and the city seen through the cameraman’s lens – that which constitutes the metacinematic city.
With this in mind we can identify the significance of the collage aesthetic within Man with the Movie Camera not by simply addressing Vertov’s use of montage (which is essentially a collage of discrete shots) but in terms of how the film as a whole reconfigures space. A collage reconfigures the spatial orientation of a particular image by removing it from an original context and situating it in new pictorial arrangement – a new pictorial totality. In a collage, discrete images are layered on top of one another, producing a complex, and composite, spatial field that extends vertically between the layered images as well as horizontally. In Man with the Movie Camera space is layered and ruptured. This occurs between the individual shots of the montage sequence but also within them. With its networked and non-linear spatial field, Man with the Movie Camera operates as a collage.
Aware of this we can appreciate Annette Michelson’s identification of Vertov as a constructivist in her introduction to a collection of Vertov’s own writings.[6] The Russian constructivists appropriated abstraction and other techniques, the most significant of these being collage and photomontage (seen in the work of Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis), to express Marxist ideology and iterate the revolutionary fervor and utopian ideals of the young socialist state. The constructivists used formalist aesthetic principles to document their social reality.[7] For them, collage was not simply an aesthetic choice but an ideological imperative.[8] Vertov’s distinctly cinematic appropriation of the collage aesthetic, cinematic insofar as his collages are composed of temporal fragments as well as spatial ones (and he describes his cinema as the conquest of both space and time[9]), works towards a similar objective. Vertov’s intention was to document the reality of the world around him, offering a short description of his film as follows: “a little man, armed with a movie camera, leaves the fake world of the film-factory and heads for life. Life tosses him to and fro like a straw.”[10] Vertov’s film, a cinematic collage, does the same thing to its viewer.
A city is a composite and collaged space. When we walk through an industrialized city we move through very different spaces; crowded streets and hidden alleyways, parks, factories, offices, residential areas. The defining architectural feature of the modern city is the skyscraper, a vertical structure whose floors are layered on top of one another. The city itself operates through montage, it is proto-cinematic, as Alexander Graf acknowledges.[11] Man with the Movie Camera is a portrait of a city composed of individual ‘snapshots’. Vertov’s liberal use of skewed and canted camera angles and the dramatic shifts in intensity within his montage intensifies our experience of this city as a fractured landscape, as does the fact that the images depicted in these individual snapshots are often themselves fragments – sections and corners of machines, segments of a reclining woman’s body, the heads of mannequins, and what for me stood out as the most arresting and visceral shots, a severed hand resting on a pillow.
In Vertov’s city the body is no longer a discrete, organic totality but a hybrid and fractured form. Through the film, as Vertov announces in a manifesto, “our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the perfect electronic man.”[12] These are mechanical, moving with the same rhythms and pulsations as the machine. This is especially true of the exercising bodies near the end of the film, or the woman we see getting out of bed whose blinks are synchronized with the rapid movements of the blinds.
Here the inorganic cinematic eye and the organic human eye converge, a phenomenon that Vertov alerts us to by repeatedly superimposing the two on top of one another. The camera and the cameraman are a symbiotic and co-dependent organism. They frequently occupy the same frame – the same spatial field – simultaneously: it is through the lens of the camera that we see the reflection of the cameraman’s eye staring back at us, or arm as it turns the crank, or even both together. Together they function as a perfect symbol of the relationship between the city and the meta-cinematic spaces. These two spaces are also bound to one another, operating simultaneoulsy, constituting “an organic whole.”[13] This is the phrase Vertov uses to describe his film – ‘an organic whole’: not merely a collection of disparate fragments but rhythmically and metaphorically associative fragments. They are layered fragments, sections of a self-contained cinematic collage where all images are stuck together to create a single totality. Who better than the meta-cinematic figure – the man with the movie camera – to negotiate this cinematic collage: a figure who is himself a hybrid and collaged form, part man, part machine.
[1] Vertov, Dziga. 1929. Man with the Movie Camera
[2] Alexander Graf unpacks their shared aesthetic in great detail, discussing the City Symphony films as a genre.
Graf, Alexander. Paris – Berlin – Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s
[3] Ibid p. 79
[4] Michelson, Annette. 1984. Introduction. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien) xv-lxi. London: Pluto Press p. xxxvii
[5] This translation is courtesy of Elena Alexander
[6] Michelson, A. Op.cit pp. xxviii-xl
[7] Lodder, Christina. 1983. Russian Constructivism. New Haven: Yale University Press p. 186
[8] O’Reilly, Sally. 2008. Collage: Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies. In Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art, ed. Blanche Craig, 8-19. London: Black Dog Publishing pp. 11-12
[9] Vertov, Dziga (edited Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien). 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, London; Sydney: Pluto Press pp. 87-88
[10] Ibid p. 286
[11] Graf, A. Op.cit pp. 85-90
[12] Vertov, D. Op.cit p. 8
[13] Ibid p. 84
