Pros: Visual innovation, beauty, gimmicks, a talent for making us see the world's connectedness.
Cons: Intentionally lacks plot, dialogue, and characters.
The Bottom Line: A movie that demands to be treated as a puzzle -- but it demands with a goofy smile, and the solutions, when found, make the whole world look cooler.
Man with a Movie Camera’s first image is a trick. We stare into the lens of a camera, taking up much of the screen. Suddenly, a tiny man seems to step onto the top of the camera, and sets up his own tripod, which he aims at us. In fact both cameras are of normal size; making clever use of the best of 1929 technology, the director has merely shot the two cameras with different, extreme camera angles, and laid the two shots together. The director did this with a third camera, of course, one we can’t see. Our director, Dziga Vertov, is a liar: good thing he’s honest about it.
The movie starts before the first image, though. In plainspoken Russian titles (translated impressionistically into English), we are told that Man with a Movie Character is an experiment in film: a “diary” of a photographer’s day, it will contain no plot and no “scenarios”. The movie is also silent, or was before a Michael Nyman score was appended for the DVD. Verta would certainly have told us that, but silence was the expectation in 1929 Soviet cinema. Our director is a teller of truth.
As a man who tells his truths and lies without the crutch of words or story, he’s very conscious of his audience. We begin watching an audience shuffling into a theatre; the chairs, in eager unison, open up to await them. The shots are rhythmic and intercutting, and stutter backwards and forwards in time: anyone who tells you music video invented such techniques is as ignorant as I still was last month. We will return to the audience at the hour mark, seeing their movie screen inside our own TV screen. Even more proto-MTV effects appear: the hour of film prior is re-angled, played at impossible time-lapse speeds, split-screened, and layered with translucent scenes obscuring each other. We see the audience delighted, chatting and gasping among each other, especially when their film ends and a movie camera assembles itself at a podium (it looks a little like #5, the friendly robot from Short Circuit). We can’t blame Dziga Vertov for hoping; but to understand his hopes better, it’s worth examining what, exactly, that hour consisted of.
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First of all, it is indeed structured as a day. Since scenes interact and are cut between quickly, associations are always being made. A waking woman brushes her teeth; an early-rising streetcleaner vigourously cleans outside, with heavy-spray nozzle in hand. We see a camera's focus knob manipulated, and the picture of it fades in and out of focus; the woman inside rubs her eyes blearily and blinks a lot. Meanwhile, the factories warm up. Happy gears crank into action, trains and horses sidle to their gates to await the starting gun. We will witness the morning rush hour, people dodging in assertive groups amidst the trolleys and the horses and motorcars: a somehow jovial anarchy, evoking Buster Keaton’s reliable narrow escapes rather than the real risk of collision.
Worktime shows film editors, haggling shoppers, and a cart horse all exerting themselves with similar motions and gestures. At lunchtime, we see the top of a building’s revolving doors, spinning and spinning and spinning; as we pan down some, we see the humans on break scuttling through them, a random discharge spewed by the door’s actitivity.
Afternoon has more work, certainly: for one thing, the city clerk goes through nearly identical motions to certify one couple’s marriage and another’s divorce (the couples themselves act quite differently, though the giddiness of happiness and the giddiness of shame do overlap in expression and gesture). But afternoon also, for example, lets us watch some barbers in action: a haircut for the woman whose eye-rubs and teeth-cleaning we’d seen, a haircut for the divorcing man.
We see the awesome power of nature in close-ups of a roaring, crushing river – which turns out, as the camera pulls back, to be a dam. As the afternoon progresses, and the cogs of unrelated machines do similar dances, we watch the workers get increasingly chatty, anticipating the final bell. As the women wash up after, they are laughing, even as the machines sputter neatly into simple rest. Evening-time is devoted to sport, drink, and of course a trip to the cinema.
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Perhaps the clearest theme here, and certainly the most beautiful, is that humans can be graceful machines. As workers talk on the assembly line, their hands engage in dazzling repeated actions that interact to make things spring from nothings, again and again and again – just as we also watch the machine parts twirl and spin, ricochet and deflect, move away, then meet with a nudge and kiss. The shot-put and the pole-vault are human activities, but the best of the athletes are edited together in quick sequence, the same turns and twists from different bodies.
The hurdle race is close enough that the leaps seem synchronized. The swimmers’ group exercises really are synchronized, and as their arms and legs flip among positions like in a pinball game, they look perfect enough to be assembling radios or yogurt cartons. Even the rhythms of genuine trades (cameraman, repairman, draft horse) have their little constancies, the motions of perfect practice; we watch those up close. En masse, even the randomest shuffle starts to look as patterned as a kaleidoscope.
Another theme is how easily our eyes can be made to lie to us. In a way, that’s a subtext of every movie: a flat or smoothly curved monochrome screen is made to look cluttered and three-dimensional, and what trick could be plainer than that? But Man with a Movie Camera delights in the fakery. We’re frequently reminded of the camera. All its parts get demonstrated at some point or other, and we see the photographer assemble his tripod as a 50-foot giant atop a three-story house, or while standing in a stein of beer at a bar. In the traffic chaos, our cameraman leans across his car (cars didn’t have roofs then), and as a car passes it on the right, one of its passengers smiles at him and imitates his camera-hand’s cranking motion.
Meanwhile, we cut between a closeup of a flickering eye, and the randomly jerking views of the city that the eye “sees”. We see discarded cigarettes assemble themselves into a cute little abstract sculpture, and we see a man throwing a javelin that has turned into a soccer ball by the time the goalie blocks it. A weightlifter’s legs, butt, and back, each shown with shots from different lenses, seem to float rapidly apart into a vaguely human-shaped geometrical mobile.
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We also learn about the pace of 1929 life, and it’s not always clear where social commentary leaves off and simple weird objectivity begins. We come to know a store whose products are listed in order of importance: “Vodka, Beer, Wine, Eatery”. Fact, or issue? We see a homeless man splayed uncomfortably across a bench: problem in need of solution, or a simply accurate shot of the park in the morning? We see another man standing on railroad tracks, and we watch the train by staring upwards from wheel level as it bears down on him: do we feel for him, or fear the train’s awesome power? Or indeed skip out of 1929 entirely and think of the scene from the Wall where an equally impressive train is derailed by the coin young Pink places in its path, and the passenger’s heads are replaced by deathmasks?
It is clear, from historical context, that the human-machine interactions have political meaning. The Soviet government, consolidating its power after beating off the U.S.-supplied monarchist soldiers five years before, was promoting rapid industrialization as a way of catching up to the enemy west. Hence it was good for workers to be shown happy at their jobs, and good for machines to be shown as powerful tools to make plentiful goods.
But it’s just as clear that politics can’t explain Dziga Vertov’s cinematography nearly as well as love can. You can say “industrialization will make you rich!” all day, on command, easy. To make an assembly line look like a roller-coaster fun ride for vacationing rivets, though – and to then show people cheering and excited for high jumpers who look just as proudly mechanical – you need to believe that industrialization is making new souls.
And maybe it’s just the charming incompleteness of the project in 1929, but it’s hard to watch Movie Camera without rooting it all on. The cars toodle along, ducking and dodging, underdogs in a fierce horse-eat-oats world, their drivers standing up and leaning out and giving thumbs-up signs. We can think the workers weren’t all happy to be there, but we _see_ them happy, and Vertov has a camera, and this is a documentary, so obviously they were happy. Who wouldn’t be when their motions build dazzling patterns that would bemuse a 3-card Monte dealer?
Nowadays in our CD collections we can have Radiohead announcing that we’re becoming like machines, soulless and will-less. We can have Grandaddy reporting that machines are becoming like us, heartbroken and abandoned. We can have Kraftwerk hoping that we’ll grow up to be computers: cold and impenetrable, invisibly busy, our emotions as buried as the process by which a computer decides to kick you off of AOL. And here, instead, we have an orchestra playing Michael Nyman. As elevators and trolleys are assembled into vertical mazes, we hear the quirky staccato march music of krumhorns and tubas, stopped flutes and muted bells. As humans play chess with humans, still the unchallenged champion species at the game, dissonant strings and clarion trumpets pull along an elegant melody of flute and trombone. Sometimes the music stops so we can lose our breath at an image; sometimes it moves along gently and prettily. Always it is interesting, and always it is helping to tell us how perfect we can be.
To Vertov, we are our imaginations. We build machines to live our dreams for us. From them, we learn to embody a world _we_ created, instead of the world we were handed one day with a card that read “Good luck and don't commit adultery” in Aramaic. We force our eyes to see beauties and invent better ones; we don't just accept their terse reports.
And maybe it’s nonsense. I’m still glad that most movies are about people as individuals. I still treated Las Vegas as a place from which to go hike in the mountains, and I'm still glad that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is attached to a small, tainted, but recognizable forest. Man with a Movie Camera is not a document of most of my aspirations, and it’s not a document of most of my politics. But it is a document of a world with more wonders than we realize we’ve made. It deserves every bit as much love as it gives.
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