Collaged Space in Dziga Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera

Prefix: This is (was) my presentation

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.

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[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

 

Toccata for Toy Trains

As we are introduced to the toy trains – the stars of Ray and Charles Eames’ short film Toccata for Toy Trains – a voice over explains that:

In a good toy there has to be nothing self-conscious about the use of materials… what is wood is wood, what is tin is tin.

This statement intrigued me and conditioned the way I saw the rest of the film. The city in Toccata is constructed out of old toys and painted backdrops and is populated by a strange array of dolls and figurines. And yet that voice over gives this city a kind of authority. These toys aren’t real, but they are authentic.

While this seemed to be a somewhat counter-intuitive proposition, it struck me as central to any understanding of the film.

Charles and Ray Eames, Toccata for Toy Trains, 1957

In class we discussed the possibility of treating Toccata for Toy Trains as a city symphony film. Indeed, ‘Toccata’ is the name of a type of musical composition and this fact colours how we read the rhythm and pace of the film. The movement of the trains and the people, as well as the edits of the montage sequences, takes on a rhythmic significance similar to that found within other city symphony films. There is even a section of Toccata that quite explicitly recalls Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. As one of the toy trains pulls into a station the film’s pace slows and we see repeated close-ups of the train’s wheels, recalling Ruttmann’s train as it approaches Berlin at the beginning of the film.

The camera, positioned at the eye level of the city’s miniature inhabitants, determines the relative scale of this world. As I watched the film I forgot how small this city really was. Composed of a motley bunch of rusty old toys and badly painted backdrops, this city seemed no more ‘constructed’ than the cities we find in Vertov or Ruttmann’s films – cities that speak to the modern urban landscape allegorically through their spatial fragmentation and rhythmic distortion.

The Eames city is a hybrid and composite space, just like Vertov and Ruttmann’s. Porcelain dolls, wooden figurines and tin monkeys occupy the same space and wooden trains share tracks with rusty tin trains.

Charles and Ray Eames, Toccata for Toy Trains, 1957

Thinking about this analogy between Toccata and the other city symphony films, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Toccata resembles and mimics these films, or whether they anticipate Toccata. What I mean by this is that perhaps Toccata achieves something that Vertov and Ruttmann were working towards.

What Toccata achieves is this notion of authenticity – these toys aren’t dressed up or disguised, they are simply toys. Vertov (and Ruttmann too, but Vertov more explicitly) is also concerned with authenticity. What is authentic within Man with The Movie Camera is not so much the ‘reality’ of the city he reveals, but its ontological status as a cinematic construct. He signposts this through his constant use of metacinematic references – the cinema auditorium and the editing studio. Vertov does not contradict himself when he declares he is ‘heading to the streets’ and abandoning the studio and its fake worlds.[1] He is interested in authenticity but this does not mean he is interested in gritty realism. What is authentic in this film is the ontological status of the cinematic image.

What Vertov takes great pains to ensure – namely this notion of the ‘authentic’ – Toccata achieves almost effortlessly. It is a humble, yet surprisingly complex, film that I found a rather apt note to finish the course on.

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[1] Vertov, Dziga (edited Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien). 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, London; Sydney: Pluto Press pp. 5-9

Tokyo Story

The experience of watching Tokyo Story for the first time was almost hypnotic. Pulled into the rhythm of this film – a rhythm that is stretched and teased out – I found myself acutely conscious of the form and movement of almost every small detail that presented itself to the camera. This hyper-awareness was shrouded in languor. I was both spectator of, and participant within, an intricate and meditative aesthetic.

My interaction with film was shaped by its pace. Ozu moves slowly, with delicate and measured steps that tread quietly along the boundary between action and stillness. Having recently sat through Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition, which is almost ten hours long and progresses through a similarly languid rhythm, I was quite prepared for the pace of this film and did not find it tedious. In The Human Condition the camera holds still on a shot even after the action or event has passed. Ozu’s camera operates in the same way, holding on a scene long after it has served its narrative purpose.

This lingering camera makes its presence known most explicitly in the interior domestic scenes. Even after a room has been emptied of its inhabitants, the camera remains attentive. These moments – the vacant room moments – are pauses between narrative events. Here the distinction between movement and stillness is almost imperceptible as time is stretched apart and opened up. These rooms are not inert domestic spaces, but expansive and generative spaces. What they generate is a ritual of waiting – waiting for the cut, the next scene, the return of a figure, anything.

These spaces are about immanence and the in-between. For me, they are inscribed with as much, if not more, significance as the narrative. Where they are laden with metaphoric substance – that immanence – the film’s narrative progresses through what seems like a sequence of non-events. The elderly woman’s death, the film’s most crucial narrative development, passes by so quietly that I almost missed it.

The event of the woman’s death seems almost inconsequential. The unoccupied spaces speak of, and to, death in a way that the woman’s funeral and the reaction of her children do not. Immediately after the funeral her children make demands over which of her belongings they want and then quickly leave to return to the city. Where they do not give her death space, the unoccupied spaces do. The spaces forecast her death: if they are waiting for anything they must be waiting for death. Her death is the ‘immanence’ that those in-between spaces announce.

There are two characters that grieve the woman’s death, her husband and her daughter-in-law. As they grieve they become absorbed into these ‘immanent’ spaces. The daughter-in-law weeps silently in a train carriage, which is an interior space that epitomizes the condition of the in-between, and the husband sits cross-legged in a room in his house, facing away from the screen. In this instance it is as if he has dissolved into the space around him and become submerged in that ritual of waiting. This was, for me, the most heartbreaking moment in the film.

Movement in 'Manhatta'

The portrait of New York Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s construct in their 1921 film Manhatta does not share its stylistic agenda with Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City or Dziga Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera.[i] The individual scenes of city life we witness here are not abstract fragments, studies of form and rhythm, but carefully composed vignettes. They are like individual stanzas in a poem, each moving with the same pace, rhythm and tone.[ii] 

The composition of each shot is considered with the camera positioned apart from, not within, the action documented. This camera is not like Vertov’s. It is not a part of the crowd but remains detached and unacknowledged. It is a camera that steals glances through balcony railings at the city streets below, privileging the monumental and the panoramic over the immediate and microscopic. 

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Manhatta, 1921

Ruttmann and Vertov both uncover a palimpsestic city and show us its interior spaces, its mines and sewers. Where their city is pried open with its anatomy exposed, Strand and Sheeler’s city is fully clothed. Manhatta is a study of the city as edifice, as façade. We see the thousands of tiny windows that adorn the buildings, but never once look into them. We do not see a single face, only a sea of tiny figures in uniform black overcoats and hats dwarfed by this urban colossus.

Yet, however reserved this image of the city may seem – inhabited by somber and faceless figures – it embraces certain subtle and veiled contradictions. Both the movement within each city scene and the transition from one scene to the next has a homogenized and measured pace. And yet, it is also possible to detect aberrant rhythms buried within the solemn architecture of some shots.

The Smoke. Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Manhatta, 1921

 These micro-rhythms work against the pace of the rest of the film. They are a moment of respite from the rigid geometry of the cityscape. I was first made aware of these micro-rhythms when I paid attention to the smoke spilling out of chimneys, roofs, boats and/or trains in almost every shot. This smoke moves at a dramatically faster pace than any other element within the film, including the camera.

For me, this smoke was the most animated aspect of the city, and the pace of city life – even the hurried walk of the pedestrians – appeared somber in comparison. After I noticed it I could hardly look at anything else. That smoke is spectral, like some strange ghostly presence seeping into the hard geometry of the city.

With its intense energy, this smoke appears as an isolated pocket of movement in an otherwise still image, confusing the distinction between film footage and photograph. I thought this particularly interesting given Strand’s background as a photographer and the fact that particular shots in Manhatta are obvious references to his past photographic work. For me, this conflation of movement and stasis provoked a gentle, yet noticeable, rhythmic disorientation. 

Left: Paul Strand Wall Street 1915            Right: Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, Manhatta, 1921

In relation to Vertov and Ruttmann’s city films, David Campany acknowledges how “the speed of modernity was experienced as a series of switches in tempo and shocks to perceptual habits.”[iii] In a subtle way this is also true of Manhatta. A stylistic anomaly among the city films, it too distills the experience of the modernity through cinematic expression. Watching this film we become acutely aware of the city as a space that overwhelms its anonymous inhabitants but also as a space of overlapping and divergent tempos.

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[i] As Alexander Graf makes remarkably clear by not considering Manhatta within the genre of the city symphony film on the grounds that it, unlike Ruttmann or Vertov’s films, lacks rhythmic or associative connections between individual shots

Graf, Alexander. 2007. Paris – Berlin – Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s. In Avant-Garde Film (ed. A. Graf and D. Scheunemann) 77-91. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi p. 78

[ii] Fitting, then, that the film’s inter-titles are taken from a poem by Walt Whitman.

[iii] Campany, David. 2007. ‘Introduction: When to be Fast, When to be Slow?’. In The Cinematic (ed. D. Campany) 10-17. London: Whitechapel Ventures Ltd. P. 10

Another Eclipse

Just while we are on the topic of spectral figures and the eclipse, I thought it fitting to mention one of the very few photographs taken of Cornell (he was a bit camera shy) that inserts him into this web of association. The photograph is by Duane Michals and shows Cornell in profile standing in front of a mirror. He does not look real, but like a shadow on the verge of disappearing, its form being eaten up by the light encroaching from the left. It is almost as if Cornell himself is being eclipsed.

Where Rose is the sun, in this photograph Cornell is the moon (for he is merely a dark silhouette). Both are intangible and transcendent figures, yet each is the inverse mirror image of the other.

Duane Michals, Joseph Cornell, 1970

Figure as Force in Joseph Cornell's 'Rose Hobart'

The objects enclosed within Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages – the glass jars, marbles, pieces of driftwood and other ‘trinkets’ – are metaphoric souvenirs from the depths of his unconscious. They are transcendent forms, not simply inanimate objects. The same can be said of the silent protagonist in Cornell’s filmic collage Rose Hobart. This woman is no longer the actress Rose Hobart or even Linda Randolf, the character Hobart plays in George Melford’s East of Borneo (the original source of the footage used in Rose Hobart). She is something else entirely, an ungrounded and transient figure.

Cornell’s Rose does not belong to the jungle but to a sort of liminal space. Where the jungle is submerged in darkness she is luminous, a point of light against the murky depths of her surroundings. She floats through the jungle, existing outside of, and apart from, it. Her presence immaterial and intangible – almost ghost-like – and yet she possesses a profound energy and intensity. She is a figure who pulsates as she emits light, a phosphorescent entity.

Thought of in such terms she begins to mirror the image of the sun that Cornell continuously returns to throughout the film. This sun does not have a defined form because it is obscured by clouds. It is indistinct yet luminous and, just like Cornell’s Rose, almost throbs with a palpable vitality as it gives off light. 

This analogy between the woman and the sun, a figure/phantom and a celestial body, reminded me of one of Cornell’s most enigmatic series, his ‘Soap Bubble Sets’. In the first work within the series, called simply Soap Bubble Set, Cornell placed flat glass discs, a white clay pipe, a porcelain doll’s head and an egg in a wineglass in front of an image of the moon. All of these objects are fragile. While the egg hovers precariously in the wine glass, the doll’s head balances on a plinth. A crack is already visible on its small face.

In the presence of these fragile objects the moon’s own fragility becomes apparent. It has become the ‘soap bubble’ of the work’s title, a floating orb that will eventually burst.

The sun in Rose Hobart is characterized in a similar way. It is transient. At the end of the film we witness a solar eclipse that is paired with a shot of a ball falling into water as if the sun were falling out of the sky. In this instant the analogy between Cornell’s Rose, the floating, transient and ghost-like figure, and the sun is complete. The fall of the sun foreshadows Rose’s own fall, the moment when her light is extinguished once the projector is turned off.

Cornell’s Rose is, for me, a dream figure, a flickering light that emerges amid the darkness of sleep. Catherine Corman, among others, talks of the “oneiric logic”[i] that shapes Cornell’s film but somewhat overlooks the significance of his transcendent protagonist, referring to her simply as a “blank slate.”[ii] Cornell’s Rose is not, as I see her, a blank slate but a planet – a soap bubble planet – whose gravitational pull is the force that holds the film together. That is, until the bubble pops and she is once again enveloped in darkness.

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[i] Corman, Catherine. 2010. Surrealist Astronomy in the South Pacific: Joseph Cornell and the Collaged Eclipse. East of Borneo. Viewed 16^th March 2011 http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/13

[ii] Ibid