‘Man With A Movie Camera’: A Documentary of Fictions
There was a rather unexpected joy that came with watching Man With a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov. I expected a rather formulaic project while watching the film, with it being a premier example of one of the earlier documentaries in cinema, what I got instead was a symphony to nearly every single aspect of the craft of filmmaking. While Man With a Movie Camera has no actors, it certainly has characters, from the titular cameraman roaming around the streets of Russia with a giant tripod on his back, to the citizens the camera captures in its vision playing it up for the screen or just existing.
And while I expected a love letter to the cities and locations covered by Man With a Movie Camera, I found it to be a love letter to cinema itself. There are simply so many styles and techniques on display by the filmmakers, from the multiple exposures that superimpose a giant cameraman stomping about the city like Godzilla, to the freeze frames employed, to the breaking of the fourth wall by Vertov to show the creation of the film itself, showing the cameraman shoot and the editor edit, Man With a Movie Camera simply has everything going on in it. In a way, the film feels like a visual encyclopedia, showing the fullest extent of what can be achieved by cinema. Anything that can be done on a technical level is achieved by Vertov.
As a documentary, Man With a Movie Camera seeks to achieve the simple goal of collecting a massive collage of what is seen by the human eye every single day. The movement of a train through the countryside, the construction site down the block, the crowds of people downtown, Man With a Movie Camera captures what we believe to be simple, one-note events and circumstances and edits the reality of the situation through the edit. The ordinary becomes the extra ordinary. That train moves backwards by reversing time, that construction site becomes a place of wonder with slow motion, and every single face of that crowd becomes a character with a mass of jump cuts and extreme closeups.
For me, the scene that best encapsulates the tone and style of the film occurs towards the end of the runtime, there is a section that highlights the Lenin clubhouse. What begins as a simple show of people playing chess explodes out of nowhere. Chess switches to someone hitting glass bottles with spoons, which is then superimposed by the feet of a piano player, which are both concurrently jump-cutting the closeups of several faces from a city crowd, going by so fast that some jumps last for barely several frames. What does this scene mean in the grander picture? Nothing at face value. But Vertov’s experimentation with the form wrenches emotion out of you when these images would at best get you to feel curious if you saw them isolated from one another. Meaning is created through the combination of the images.
In that way, Man With a Movie Camera comes off as a plotless collage. There are no intertiles, sets, or actors to put on a show or to guide the viewer towards a preconceived idea or emotion. The only thing set is the rhythm and the pace set by the edit. Instead, the film acts as an exercise for the viewer; to throw away what was thought of as cinema before and to absorb it in its purest, most simplistic form, one image after another.
The one thing that I can tell from Man With a Movie Camera is that if there was one person from 1929 who loved cinema and filmmaking, it was Dziga Vertov. Vertov’s passion and love ripples through the film through the respect he shows from the titular cameraman. He shows that with a camera in hand, a filmmaker is so much more than an artist or entertainer, he or she is a wizard as well. With the camera, time can be sped up, slowed down, ignored or even frozen. The camera can make a regular man look like a giant looking over the country like a god, or small enough to sit atop the very same camera. The camera can communicate without the need for words. The camera can break boundaries and show the creation of the very thing it is shooting. Vertov was amongst the first to recognize the mountain of potential to be found in filmmaking, and this documentary highlights almost every single visual trick in the book.
Man With a Movie Camera is a documentary of fictions. Unrelated stills are forced together to create a scene. Staged acts and unstaged documentation come together as one. The presence of a physical camera reminds us what the film is all about: a man who can shape reality. The meta aspect of the film in showing us its own creation forces us to question if the seemingly staged acts make it a documentary or not. Vertov creates a film about being a film. It does not matter if certain parts of the film are staged or altered. That is not what the director is trying to do. Man With a Movie Camera is simply showing off potential. What we see is real because the camera made it look real, and we as the viewer believed in it. Routine, work, play, and performance are all shown in the same way. The camera is the hidden eye of the audience. By itself, the image does not mean anything except for the meaning given to it by the viewer. Man With a Movie Camera is an ultimate montage of art. It is meant to be viewed in the same way as a blockbuster and even most other documentaries. The viewer comes in, is shown images, and takes away something different from the viewer before or after. That is the beauty of the film.
Cinema makes anything possible. All it takes is a man with a movie camera.
