On Vertov´s "Man with the movie camera"

As insurrection broke out in Russia in October 1917 in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution, cinema, still a young aesthetic form free from any bourgeois associations and capable of moving illiterate and intellectual audiences alike, was to find a new purpose: propaganda. So when Lenin hailed it as the greatest of the arts, the moving image found itself transformed overnight into the most versatile instrument for the new regime. With the backing of the new state, filmmakers (mostly young, talented and enthusiastic avant-gardists riding on the momentum of Constructivism: Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, to name but a few) would depart from Moscow in the carriages of agitprop trains to remote corners of the country to educate and spread the word of the Party.

However, some of these filmmakers will also transcend the party line and penetrate with their cameras into the immediate reality of Russian life itself, documenting the fast paced and uneasy changes of the first tier of the Twentieth century - a genuine aim to claim the real potentially at odds with later impositions of the apparatchiks. This essay will examine Dziga Vertov’s “The Man with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, USSR 1929)” in those circumstances, providing an account of Vertov’s ensuing journey paving the path for future filmmakers, and weighing up the political intentions of the film as much as evaluating its contributions to the development of the documentary film form. But let us first look into its precedents.

It should be noted that the early films of the Soviets, both factual and fiction, did not differ significantly from those of their predecessors. Ironically, only after a methodical study of the American model, particularly the work of D.W. Griffith , did Soviet cinema start to live up to its revolutionary credentials. Yet, even though we must credit Griffith with the first deliberate editing of pictures, it is the re-evaluation of his techniques and even the iconoclast approach of the Russian experimentalist current brought by the Revolution that would allow for the development and imminent conception of the dynamic cinema of the 20s.

By 1919 Lev Kuleshov had already started to make fundamental experiments to push the use of montage, and formulated what has come to be known as the “K” effect:

“From old films I took shots of the actor Mozhukhin and edited them with various other shots. At first, I had Mozhukhin seeming to sit still in jail and then he was gladdened by the sun, the landscape and the freedom which he found. In another combination I had Mozhukhin sitting in the same position, in the same attitude, and looking at a half-naked woman. In another combination he looked at a child’s coffin – there were many different combinations. And in all those cases, so far as the expression on Mozhukhin’s face was concerned, it had the very same significance which I gave it in my editing.”

Kuleshov’s research leads to the conclusion that cinema, like any other language, is made up of individual fragments, meaningless in isolation, and that it is by assembling these fragments that we can communicate and convey a message. It is therefore not just the content of the images that is important, but also their juxtaposition. A young and extravagant medical student, poet and musician will follow Kuleshov’s footsteps, endorsing (whenever not paraphrasing) these findings: Dziga Vertov. Like Kuleshov, Vertov was also interested in montage and the scientific investigation of the abstract properties of art.

Vertov, born Denis Arkadevich Kaufman in Bialystok in 1896 (he would later on style himself after this Futurist pseudonym that loosely translates as “spinning top”) was the oldest of three brothers that would leave their own mark in the history of cinema: Mikkhail Kaufman would work as Vertov’s very man with a movie camera; Boris Kaufman, separated of his siblings during the Revolution, would be educated in France, where he shot “À propos de Nice” (France, 1930) for Jean Vigo. However, it would be Vertov, a militant and diligent theorist, who would primarily change our current understanding of documentary and factual filmmaking. In retrospective, he explains:

“From 1918 on we studied film writing, or how to write with a camera. We were ignorant, and suffered from the absence of a film-alphabet. Back then we attempted to create that alphabet.”

Vertov’s alphabet was to be written on newsreel celluloid over the harsh years marked by the Russian Civil War (1918 to 1921) and the short-lived period of intellectual freedom brought by Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), a policy Vertov disliked and was critical of as it temporarily abandoned communism, encouraged commercial film production and promoted the import of cheap foreign melodramas, but also a policy that nonetheless approved of experimentation and liberal artistic expression.

Shortly after establishing, directing and editing the weekly newsreel Kinonedielia (1918-19), Vertov and his acolytes, whom he named “the kinoks” (namely his brother and cameraman Mikhail and his wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova) would experiment with and promote the concepts of “Kino-Pravda”, or “Film-truth” (materialized in the reportage series by the same name during the 1920s) and “Kino-eye”, the pillars of his own film-making dogma, and indeed those of “The Man with The Movie Camera”. Let’s evaluate these two pillars in detail.

1. Kino-Pravda

Vertov’s convictions develop from a vehement and total rejection of all acted cinema and the theatre (a position that will gain him, in consequence, considerable hostility amongst the fiction filmmakers of his generation, above all Eisenstein). He elaborates:

“To intoxicate and suggest – the essential method of the fiction film approximates it to a religious influence, and makes it possible after a certain time to keep a man in a permanent state of over-excited unconsciousness… Musical shows, theatrical and cine-theatrical performances and so on above all act upon the subconscious of the spectator or listener, distorting his protesting consciousness in very possible way.”

His driving “Kino-Pravda” vision was to capture fragments of raw actuality unawares, though “not filming life unawares for the sake of the unaware, but in order to show people without masks, without makeup, to catch them thru the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting, to read their thoughts, laid bare by the camera.” Nonetheless, this film “truth” remains an elusive concept and, by definition, even a contradiction in terms, inevitably raising that question of what do we appreciate as truth and how can it be achieved when a camera and a point of view (both physical and ideological) are involved. The American theoretician of documentary film Bill Nichols annotates:

“As "film truth," the idea emphasizes that this is the truth of an encounter rather than the absolute or untampered truth. We see how the filmmaker and subject negotiate a relationship, how they act toward one another, what forms of power and control come into play, and what levels of revelation or rapport stem from this specific form of encounter.”

Both John Grierson and the British documentary tradition and Samuel Brody’s Worker’s Film and Photo League in the United States will embrace this principle, an understanding of the real which, isolated of the easy propaganda label, we have also come to expect in the documentary form today: an appreciation of real life captured by the camera, focused on everyday experiences, yet in perspective. In Vertov’s case, this perspective is in tune with the spirit of the Revolution, and understandably shuns bourgeois concerns.

2. The Kino-eye

Unrepentant of his Futurist baggage, Vertov would in addition stress his belief in the supremacy of what he came to describe as the “kino-eye”, or the cult of the camera apparatus, more so when combined with the editing process. In his own words, the “kino-eye” was conceived as “’what the eye does not see’, as the microscope and telescope of time, as telescopic camera lenses, as the X-ray eye”. He annotates the following on his 1923 theoretical manifesto, “The Council of Three”:

“The main and essential thing is:

The sensory exploration of the world thru film.

We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space. The kino-eye lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye. The position of our bodies while observing or our perception of a certain number of features of a visual phenomenon in a given instant are by no means obligatory limitations for the camera which, since it is perfected, perceives more and better.

We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.”

After instructing his cameraman to overcrank his Debrie and shoot him as he jumped from a balcony, Vertov explains the outcome of this experience:

“From the point of view of the ordinary eye it goes like this: the man walked to the edge of the balcony, bowed, smiled, jumped, landed on his feet and that is all. What was it in slow motion? A man walks to the edge of the balcony, vacillating:
To jump or not to jump? Then it is as if his thoughts say that everything points to the need to jump. I am entirely uncomfortable. Everyone is looking at me. Again, doubt. Will I break a leg? I will. No, I won’t. I must jump I cannot just stand here. An indecisive countenance is replaced by a look of firm decision. The man slowly goes off the balcony. He is already situated in mid air. Again, fear in his face. On the man’s face are clearly seen his thoughts.”

As a result, he concludes that from the point of view of the ordinary eye we see only untruth. The swift flicker of his camera, on the other hand, is capable of deciphering “life as it is”, even of reading and documenting its subject’s mind.

Moreover, Vertov’s “kino-eye” is also able to select by directing the attention of the viewer and thru editing; it is capable of condensing time and space by cutting and by fast motion; is able to merge diverse elements into a single visual experience via superimposition and montage if needed. However, Vertov fails to acknowledge an essential point: both the camera and the editing table require a human operator. And this remains to be the case to this day, when digital, high definition video and editing software have become commonplace.

On that utopian note, Vertov’s illuminated rhetoric flows in his manifesto, where he provides us with an early outline of “The Man with the Movie Camera”:

“I am the kino-eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world only as I can see it.

Now and forever I free myself from human immobility. I am in constant motion.

I draw near, then away from objects. I crawl under. I crawl on top. I move apace with a galloping horse. I plunge full speed into the crowd (…) manoeuvring in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations.

Freed from the rule of sixteen to seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time and space. I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I have recorded them.

My path leads to the creation of fresh perception of the world. I decipher in new ways a world unknown to you.”

Six years on, Vertov and Svilova would epically assemble the film from the countless “kino-eye” rushes captured during the “kino-pravda” years, a calculated juxtaposition of materials aiming to produce a more meaningful structural whole:

“In fact the film is only the sum of the facts recorded on film, or if you prefer, not merely the sum but the product, a ‘higher mathematics’ of facts. Each term or each factor is a separate little document. The documents have been joined with one another so that, on the one hand, the film would consist only of those linkages between signifying pieces that coincide with the visual linkages and so that, on the other hand, these linkages would not require inter-titles, the final sum of all these linkages represents an organic whole.”

This “higher mathematics” of facts was to take the shape of a kaleidoscopic day in the life of any given Soviet town (the editing allows a creative geography where Moscow and Odessa are just a splice apart), preceded by a declaration of principles and nearly 3 seconds of intentional blank screen building up tension and raising our expectations:

ATTENTION
VIEWERS:
THIS FILM
Represents in itself
AN EXPERIMENT
IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of Visible events

WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES
(A Film Without Intertitles)

WITHOUT THE AID OF
A SCENARIO
(A Film Without a Script)

WITHOUT THE AID OF
THEATRE
(A Film Without Sets,
Actors, etc.)

THIS EXPERIMENTAL
WORK WAS MADE WITH THE INTENTION OF
CREATING A TRULY
INTERNATIONAL
ULTIMATE LANGUAGE OF
CINEMA ON THE BASIS OF ITS
TOTAL SEPARATION
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THEATRE
AND LITERATURE


After being introduced to the main characters of the film (Mikhail Kaufman, the cameraman, with his camera; the film reel and its audience in the cinema) we follow Kaufman as he ventures into documenting the realities of his time from dusk until dawn. The camera depicts an early morning urban setting, a woman awakes, and so does the city. People marry and divorce; a funeral and a birth take place. The pace of the day speeds up and we are shown labour and machines in operation, a self conscious thematisation of urban landscapes, industry and technology; we see sport events, musical performances, workers engaging in leisure activities, all in the presence of Kaufman as “life caught unaware” unfolds for his Debrie. A giant camera, with a human eye superimposed on its lens, dominates the city. We see Svilova, the editor, cutting together this material and we are transported back to the cinema, where the audience watches the camera and the film take on a life of their own before the camera closes its eye.

The film complex structure and many levels of thematic meaning grows from a love of Modernism and Constructivism and is dominated by the formalist concept of “obnazhenie priema”, understood as an aim to bare the filmmaking devices and make the viewer conscious of the mechanisms at work within the film. Vertov exposes us to a constant deconstruction of moviemaking and dramatic forms where we see shots of the cameraman’s footage, shots of the cameraman in the process of obtaining that footage and the editor putting together these shots. Aesthetically, Vertov attempts anything and everything, delivering a catalogue of innovative techniques and every possible film strategy available (a catalogue that will later influence Alberto Cavalcanti’s work for Grierson’s GPO documentary group and many others, e.g. “Coalface”, 1935): diagonal and boldly direct compositions aiming to incite the spectator to action, superimposition, split screens, varied speed, telescopic and microscopic lens shots, animation, subliminal shots, deliberate breaking of geographical and temporal continuity, use of hand held cameras, cameras on planes, trains and motorbikes. Film historian Jay Leyda comments on:

“In ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’ all the stunts that can be performed by a cameraman armed with a Debrie or hand-camera (sic) and by a film-cutter armed with the boldness of Vertov and Svilova can be found in this full to bursting film.”


But “The Man with the Movie camera” is much more than a box of tricks, and the aesthetical approach is soon overlapped by its moral and political intents: the superimposed image of the cameraman emerges from a beer mug and, as if intoxicated by the alcohol, we see shellfish performing a dance (a visual joke achieved through stop frame animation); the classical façade of the Bolshoi Theatre is shown through a split screen, with the old building seemingly breaking apart and imploding, representing the kinoks’ break from bourgeois tradition.

Aiming to equate art to labour and draw parallels between the filmmakers and the proletariat (additionally highlighting the social differences between the activities of the bourgeoisie and those of the working class), we are exposed to shots of a manicure parlour followed by Svilova’s hands splicing film and by other cutaways of women at work; the shot of a smiling bourgeois woman applying make up is juxtaposed to a that of working woman’s face, blackened up by coal; two well-off ladies in a carriage, uncomfortable with the cameraman going about his business, respond to Kaufman’s presence by mimicking his cranking of the camera. This is followed by a shot of the ladies’ maid, a barefoot woman absorbed by her duty of carrying their luggage. Vector connects the discomfort of these ladies with the exploitation of their servant, aligning himself with the underclass.

None of these shots can be understood outside the politico-historical frame that defines them: Russia’s shift to stricter communist practices following Lenin’s death and Stalin’s abolition of the NEP.
Vertov elaborates:

“All these have their meaning – all are victories, great and small, in the struggle of the new and the old, the struggle of revolution and counter-revolution, the struggle of the cooperative against private capital, of the club against the public house, of athletics against debauchery, dispensary against disease. All this is a position won in the struggle for the Soviet land, the struggle against a lack of faith in socialist construction.”

Lamentably, though, this political swift would also bring the troubled period of forced collectivisation of Stalin’s first five-year plan that would destroy Russia’s agriculture, a period of shameless party purges, expansion of the gulag system (corrective labour camps), and penetration of the secret police into all areas of life. This would translate into an increasingly hostile intrusion of Stalin’s bureaucratic regime, where blatant political propaganda (Socialist Realism) would be promoted and detailed scripts would be required for thorough examination prior to any shooting.

Vertov will find himself in a paradoxical situation: endorsing socialist construction, but at the same time unwilling to sacrifice his artistic freedom to political dictates. Vertov’s artistic integrity will prevail, holding up to “film-truth” and defending uncompromisingly freedom of expression he will stray from the dutiful path, adding uncomfortable fragments of “life as it is” actuality to “The Man with The Movie Camera” clearly opposed to the party line: vagrants are depicted as the city awakes; the deprived underclass populates bars and beer halls; a homeless young woman sleeps in a park bench. A subtle, even shy gesture later redeemed by his filming of the great Ukraine famines in the 1930s, the final nail on his kinoki coffin.

Much at odds with Stalin’s agenda, the Soviet avant-garde would be eventually demised, with Vertov’s filming paradigm denounced as “ideologically unsuitable”. Vertov, refusing to compromise and falling under ideological suspicion, would be denied full participation in the artistic community, and finally, forgotten.

However, Vertov’s theories would inexorably survive him, influencing the entire spectrum of cinema and paving the way for contemporary filmmakers, directing their attention towards a more realistic treatment of film aesthetics. Understanding Film History as a continuous struggle between the establishment agenda and the initiatives of the anti-establishment, an alternation between illusion and truth, “The Man with The Movie Camera” would be eventually unburied from the film archives and recognised as a fundamental cornerstone in the history of cinema, the “kino-eye” revived with Vertov becoming “emblematic of changing tides in cinema history and practice” . Hints of his film dogma can be appreciated as early as the late 1940s, early 1950s as Neo-realism breaks through in Italy (e.g. Vittorio de Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves”, 1948), although it won’t be until the rise of the politically committed documentary movement in Europe in the 60s and the advent of Cinema Vérité , a direct translation of “Kino-Pravda”, that Vertov’s teachings will be fully vindicated. The precedent being set, and influenced by Vertov’s formalism, Jean-Luc Godard will later name his ‘counter cinema’ group after Vertov himself. Before long, Nouvelle Vague filmmakers will follow, and more recently the Dogma 95 movement, forever keen to take their handheld cameras into the streets in an attempt to explore and experiment with the medium, find their stories in the lives of ordinary people and, above all, portrait “life as it is”. As we continue to do today.

© Jose M Barea Velazquez, March 2007

Agitation and propaganda.
Lenin himself approached Griffith and asked him, unsuccessfully, to head the new state film industry after viewing a stray print of “Intolerance”, Griffith’s 1916 film illustrating the problem of people's intolerance against other people's views. It is worth noting that “Intolerance” was unexpectedly progressive, shot by Griffith in response to critics who protested against his previous film, “The Birth of a Nation” (USA, 1915), for its blatant racist content.
David Curtis,”Experimental Cinema, a fifty-year revolution”. Studio Vista, 1971. p. 31.
Annette Michelson (Editor), “Kino-eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov”, University of California Press, 1984, p. 145 (Dziga Vertov, “In defence of Newsreel”, 1939)
Luda and Jean Schnitzer & Marcel Martin (Editors), “Cinema in Revolution”, Da Capo Press, 1973, p. 82 (Dziga Vertov, “Kino-eye discussion”, 1924)
Annette Michelson (Editor), “Kino-eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov”, University of California Press, 1984, p. 41 (Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye”, 1924)
Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001. p. 116)
Luda and Jean Schnitzer & Marcel Martin (Editors), “Cinema in Revolution”, Da Capo Press, 1973, p. 79 (Dziga Vertov, “Kino-eye, the embattled documentarists: How did it begin”, 1944)
Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 53 (Dziga Vertov, “The Council of Three”, 1923)
Debrie: popular hand cranked, compact film camera in the 20s.
Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary”, Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 45 (Dziga Vertov, “Kino-eye”)
Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 55 (Dziga Vertov, “The Council of Three”, 1923)
Annette Michelson (Editor), “Kino-eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov”, University of California Press, 1984, p. 84 (Dziga Vertov, “On The Man with a Movie Camera”, 1928)
Graham Roberts, “The Man with The Movie Camera”, I.B.Tauris, 2000, p. 36.
• Graham Roberts, “The Man with The Movie Camera”, I.B.Tauris, 2000, p. 88.

Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary”, Wayne State University Press, 1998, p.53 (Seth Feldman, “Peace between Man and Machine”)
In “Chronicle of a Summer” (“Chronique d'un été”, France, 1961) anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin set up a kinopravda experiment to discuss whether or not it is possible to act sincerely in front of a camera, filming a cast of real life individuals and finally showing their subjects the compiled footage, discussing the level of reality that they thought the movie obtained.
Godard's "Breathless" (“A bout de Souffle”, France, 1960), will continue to shock contemporary audiences with its bold editing, use of jolting jump cuts and hand-held camera.
Jose Luis Marques’ “Fuckland” (Argentina, 2000) features seven professional actors improvising their scenes with local residents, unaware that they are taking part in the production of a feature film.


Bibliography

• Vlada Petric, “Constructivism in Film” (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
• Graham Roberts, “The Man with The Movie Camera” (I.B.Tauris, 2000)
• Annette Michelson (Editor), “Kino-eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov” (University of California Press, 1984)
• Luda and Jean Schnitzer & Marcel Martin (Editors), “Cinema in Revolution”, Da Capo Press, 1973
• Vincent Pinel, “Le Montage: l’espace et le temps du film” (Cahiers du Cinema, 2001)
• Marcel Martin, “Le langage cinematographique” (Editions du CERF, 1955)
• Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001)
• Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary” (Wayne State University Press, 1998)
• Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary” (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998)



Filmography

• D.W.Griffith, “Intolerance” (USA, 1916)
• Dziga Vertov, “The Man With The Movie Camera” (USSR, 1929)
• Jean Vigo, “À propos de Nice” (France, 1930)
• Alberto Cavalcanti, “Coalface” (Great Britain, 1935)
• Vittorio de Sica, “Ladri di biciclette” (Italy, 1948)
• Jean-Luc Goddard, “A bout de souffle” (France, 1960)
• Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch, “Chronique d'un été” (France, 1961)
• Jose Luis Marques, “Fuckland” (Argentina, 2000)