Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera: Film as Truth

The classic film by Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera, is a compelling and aesthetically marvelous exploration of the life and situation of a cameraman in the Soviet Union during America's roaring twenties.

Vertov's skills are on display from the opening shot. The superimposed image depicts a minuscule cameraman climbing atop an oversized camera; Vertov here acquaints his audience with the ability the omnipresent camera has in our day and age to manipulate any type of image.

To that end, critic Vlada Petric writes: "Whether it is lighting, montage, camera angle, fast or slow motion, freeze-frame, flicker effect, or any other technique, the manifestation of the actual filmmaking forces the viewer to acknowledge the motion picture as reconstructed reality rather than its representational reflection" (Petric, 1987: 9).

Film critic Erik Barnouw goes a step further and locates Vertov's reflexivity in historical perspective: "Since much of the film shows Mikhail Kaufman in action... The Man with a Movie Camera involves staging and contrivance to an extent previously rejected by Vertov. But the artificiality is deliberate: an avant-garde determination to suppress illusion in favor of a heightened awareness" (Barnouw, 1993: 63).

In the 1920s, both still photography and cinema were comparatively nascent art forms, and uneducated viewers tended — sometimes incredulously — to believe that both cinema and photography depicted unaltered reality, occasionally feeling that the images were more real than the physical object itself.

Laying open the workings of the camera and the editor in turn uncovered a truth about film: that film can be every bit as fictionalized as fiction itself and must be viewed with a critical and educated eye. As critic Richard M. Barsam notes, Vertov's film can be seen as an extension of how "[d]evelopments in nineteenth-century French art and photography renewed a new version of the oldest conflict in art: whether art should represent beauty or truth, the ideal or the real" (Barsam, 1973: 13).

Even from the opening sequences, the cameraman — Mikhail Kaufman, who is in fact Vertov's brother — is shown as absolutely fearless. He is depicted traversing high bridges, rappelling from the side of a train, climbing a smokestack, and crawling underground with miners.

Vertov's cameraman will conquer absolutely everything in order to get the shot. The shots of Kaufman filming the train are interwoven with sequences of a bourgeois woman waking up in the morning. The dichotomy between the active, industrious cameraman and the late-rising woman further identifies him as a member of the proletariat. As Petric observes, "the Cameraman appears on the screen in a double 'role': he is a worker (who makes a film) as well as a citizen participating in daily life, whether by shooting on location or by posing for another camera" (Petric: 51).

Additionally, the numerous scenes featuring the editor deliberately undermine Kaufman's role as sole author of Vertov's film and instead demonstrate cinema's collective nature. As critic Graham Roberts writes, "These final moments remind us that this film is as much an editor's tour de force as a record of the cameraman's life" (Roberts, 1999: 89).

Socialist values are equally inseparable from the medium. As critic William Guynn notes in A Cinema of Nonfiction, "[Vertov] asserts... that the coherence of any discourse is the work of an agency, here not the bourgeois filmmaker as individual but a collectivity of filmworkers who create in the progressive stages of production a representation of the visible world" (Guynn, 1990: 24).

All film, after all, represents a hugely collaborative effort between director, cameraman, and editor — a form of art that is inherently collective, or socialist, in nature.

In The Man with a Movie Camera, the viewer watches the cameraman on screen and understands that there must be other cameramen filming him as he films. The editor, too, is shown with the very reels of film we just watched the cameraman shoot. Reflexive images like these make it impossible for the viewer to forget how the work of many goes into a single film.

In "Dziga Vertov and the Film of Money," Jonathan Beller observes that, from a Marxist standpoint of work and use value, "What we learn from Vertov is that the image is constituted like an object — it is assembled piece by piece like a commodity moving through the intervals of production — and it is a (technological and economic) development of the relations of production" (Beller, 1999: 162).

The Man with a Movie Camera is the quintessential film about film. Vertov attempted to make a universal film — the everyfilm, if you will — one which leaned exclusively on cinematic language to convey its message. As the film's foreword states: "This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature" (Vertov).

Film language in Vertov's case means there are no intertitles and no theatrical conventions. Instead, shots are structured in a classic montage style to put forth a concrete theme: the daily life of Soviet citizens and the role of the cameraman in that life.

In motion picture terminology, a montage (literally "putting together") is a form of cinematic collage consisting of a series of short shots edited into a coherent sequence. Viewers infer meaning based on context. Lev Kuleshov, through his famous Kuleshov Experiment, established that montage is one powerful way of guiding the viewer toward certain conclusions about the action in a film. D. W. Griffith was among the early proponents of montage, introducing cross-cutting to show parallel action in different locations and codifying film grammar in numerous other ways.

In his earlier works, Sergei Eisenstein regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating ideas. By contrasting unrelated shots, he sought to provoke associations in the viewer through shock. In effect, the film aimed to transcend mere presentation of reality and to explain the conflict inherent in that reality — a technique known as intellectual montage.

Critic Petric interprets Vertov's inclusion of the camera itself in the film both as a way of mechanizing humans and humanizing machines: "By comparing industrial movements with those of athletes, Vertov suggests that machines also possess an expressive visual beauty. Similarly, the motion picture apparatus is equated with the human being as it suddenly begins to 'walk' on its own accord..." (Petric: 7).

Interestingly, Vsevolod Meyerhold's biomechanics theory in acting also applies to Vertov's work. Biomechanics reduces all human movement to machine-like categories by defining and systematizing that movement. Just as a person's movements can be broken down into their constituent parts, the anthropomorphic camera sequence in the film was created using stop-action filming — the camera's apparent movement was in reality hundreds of separate individual recorded positions.

Solely because of the specific era and place in which Vertov lived — communist Russia — all of his films were required to serve a propagandistic purpose. His inclusion of the elements of filmmaking in The Man with a Movie Camera is his attempt to place his passion and his occupation in service of the communist regime.

The film paints the everyday life of Soviet citizens, contrasting bourgeois luxury with worker industriousness, giving viewers an everyfilm within an everyman portrait. Vertov ensures, as noted above, that the cameraman is clearly identified with the workers: he rises early alongside the women sweeping the streets, and his constant movement throughout the film contrasts sharply with the leisurely haircuts and manicures of the upper class.

In significant ways, Vertov almost appears to prefigure Laura Mulvey's 1975 observations in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" that "[a]lthough the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world" (Mulvey, 1999: 836). Mulvey's essay centers on a psychoanalytic analysis of how film exemplifies sexual instincts, explaining that Freud "associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze" (Mulvey: 835).

However, where Mulvey's observations are linked only to fictional Hollywood cinema, a feeling of voyeuristic inequality is equally present in The Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov equates the camera with an eye — but that eye is directed and ultimately controlled by Vertov himself.