Movie Loner

It’s been a while since I’ve gone back in the day so I figured I’d go way back to 1929. I first saw Man with the Movie Camera in film school at Ithaca College. I remember being transfixed by the striking images and inventive shooting techniques. To this day I am still impressed. The man responsible for this seminal masterpiece is the great Russian documentarian Dziga Vertov. Vertov believed in what he called “film truth”, a methodology that strove to capture reality in a way that the human eye could not.

Man with the Movie Camera is not a documentary in the traditional sense. There is no specific subject like you’d see from Ken Burns or Michael Moore. Vertov’s subject is life itself, in point of fact the life of a city and its inhabitants. He begins with a woman rising in the morning. Then the city awakens; empty streets fill with people, cars, buses, wagons. The hustle and bustle of urban existence is filmed in its purest form, without artifice. To be fair some of the setups are clearly staged, but Vertov deftly maneuvers his lens across the city in such an innovative fashion that you can hardly quibble over his creative indulgences. Split-screens, double-exposures, slow motion, and skew angles gloriously pepper the screen throughout.

Tricks and treats aside, Vertov succinctly contrasts the influx of technology on society with the routine occurrences of human life. Wheels turn, gears grind, pistons pump while people work, marry, play and die. The camera travels everywhere, from dark, dank coalmines to sun-soaked beaches. Vertov provides an all-encompassing portrait of a city’s populace: the joy of marriage and childbirth parallels the pain of injury and loss. His camera rarely stops to rest, electing to remain in motion seizing the rhythm and energy of man and machine. The similarities between the two is impossible to ignore.

Vertov believed the camera possessed a unique power greater than that of the pen or instrument. He eschewed romanticized images in favor of precise ones free of manipulation. He regarded fictional drama as an “opiate of the masses”, one that reinforced man’s inherent weakness and fallibility. It was his great desire to witness man evolve from an imperfect being into a more exact machine. His experimental endeavors behind the lens attempted to bring truth to the people. Man with the Movie Camera is one such truth, not a universal truth, but rather a subjective truth from the brilliant eye of Dziga Vertov.

A scene from Man with the Movie Camera: