Cinema history generally treats Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) as the prophet of montage, with the Odesse steps sequence with the runaway baby carriage from "Potemkin" as the archetype and prototype. There was a Soviet director before the dominance of "talking pictures," Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), who considered even Eisenstein's frequent jump cuts as insufficiently "cinematic."

Starting in 1922 Vertov filmed a series he called "Kino-Pravda" (film truth, "pravda" being the title for the chief Soviet newspaper), denouncing "beauty" and "grandeur" as desirable attributes for the new medium (cinema) in the country that was forging the revolutionary "New Man" (the USSR). Luckily for Vertov, his increasingly experimental work was done during the time of loosened official supervision of the arts of Lenin's New Economic Policy era (when Bulgakov plays were staged and there was a florescence of aesthetic experimentation in cultural domains. After Lenin's death, the NEP was championed by Nikolai Bukharin, who lost the power struggle to Josef Stalin as we all know. And Stalin clamped down on running culture, micromanaging even, as is also well known (see Shostakovich and Stalin).

After four years of filming in Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev, Vertov finished his masterpiece "Cheklovek s kinoapparatom" (Man With the Movie Camera) in 1929, during the twilight of the NEP. It is, the exemplar of Vertov's cinema freed of theatrical and literary contaminants (absolute cinema). Vertov had denounced the reenactment of events in "Potemkin" and proclaimed a policy of "life as it is" -- that is, life unaware of being filmed, as well as being unscripted, with no inter-titles, no dialogue, no costumes, no staging, and--most certainly!--no actors.

The "man with the movie camera" was Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov's brother, who used telephoto lens and shot much of which those filmed were unaware of being filmed. However, the title "character" is frequently shown cranking his camera, sometimes with alternation of the photographer and the photographed -- including a car full of women with big black hats. I think that the equation of "life as it is" with life of those unaware of being filmed has to have been a misunderstanding (mistranslation). We see quite a lot of the intrepid cameraman, including in some precarious positions.

And the woman dressing near the start knew she was being filmed. The machines, including the many streetcars shown, did not know they were being filmed or react to the heightened observation. Personally, I found the shots of the mix of cars, streetcars, and horse-drawn conveyances enthralling (there were not very many private cars, and a lot of streetcars -- an aspect of the vanished world I wish had not vanished.

The similar bureaucratic rituals of marriage and divorce may have seemed startling in 1929, but doesn't now. The romance of industrialization (heavy industrialization heavily pressed by Stalin) also seems very long ago (and international -- see Paul Strand photos, paintings by Charles Scheeler and Fernand Léger).

The valuation of editing above everything else (even camera angles) was revolutionary, though Buster Keaton, Jean-Luc Godard and MTV have dulled its edge for viewers now. And the music of Alloy sounds more 1980ish or 1990ish than late-1920ish. The music purportedly follows Vertov's notes, but often sounds rather like the similarly narratorless look at the world of "Koyaanisqatsi."

The movie's editor was the director's wife, Yelizaveta Svilova. The project was very much a family affair. There are visual effects that prevent the eye on the 1929 world from becoming too staid (along with the cuts to the cameraman cranking away). The film is not just opening a shutter. It is very, very, very constructed, but still shows something of how people dressed and the urban landscapes of the NEP Soviet Union, so that I think it is of interest as a document of history as well as for its place in the history of cinema.

The film is, arguably, naturalistic, but not at all what Stalin and his henchmen considered "socialist realism." Indeed, if there is a film that typifies "formalism" (the charge aimed at many modernist artists in various media),"Cheklovek s kinoapparatom" is it!

---

Although, I saw ""Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqquatsi" long before seeing "The Man with the Movie Camera," I did see Walter Ruttmann's 1927 "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City" before seeing "Man." "Berlin" is more scripted, less showily edited, and does not shows the camera operator/operation. But it does have the same pretense of showing a single day from early to late. And a lot of choices about what to shoot and then what to show in the nine segments of the 68-minute film.

Vertov never again had any measure of artistic freedom. He did hackwork as an editor, but did manage to outlive Stalin. Though he considered himself a part of the communist revolution, his movie is not propagandistic in the way Eisenstein's "Potemkin" and "October" are. Near the end, there is a Lenin sculpture and a worker's cafe with "Workers of the World Unite" on the wall, but even in the fascination with machines, Ruttman's "Berlin" is a clear precedent, not just Stalin's beginning forced industrialization program(s).

© 2008, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD