Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

In 1929 Russian newsreel filmmaker Dziga Vertov was interested in creating a new type of film, one that showed the world as it was far from the fictitious films common in that time period. Vertov sought to manifest a new form in the cinema, one not tied down to a narrative story or followed the conventional forms of movie making, and thus was the genesis of the idea that would become Man With a Movie Camera.

The film is difficult to explain for it is simple yet deeply complex at the same time. Simply put it is a series of random shots made by camera man Mikhail Kaufman assembled by Vertov in a way that creates a form of meaning or purpose drawing off the normal everyday lives of the people of Russian, mainly around the city of Odessa. Their are no characters to follow other than an unnamed cameraman (Kaufman) going from location to location shown to try to capture shots of people at their normal lives. Other than seeing the cameraman walking, setting up, or recording there is no arch at all to say for him, simply him recording life. The editing follows the day in a life of people with the subjects not knowing that they are planned to be recorded (With an exception of a few set ups including where we see a woman dress at the beginning of her day). We see people go to work, toil at their labor, end their work day, and celebrate the freedom of life afterward drinking, playing, dancing, and all around goofing off.

Vertov's assemblage of shots from Kaufman's film stock was an art piece. It is a silent film with no title cards to tie one thing to another. The picture opens with an explaination that the film is an experiment, separating language from the film. Vertov dives right in with a split shot where a cameraman stands atop of a giant camera (or at least that is what he trying to convey) giving the sense that the camera is the real star of the picture as it roams around society recording the people unsuspectingly. His use of split shots and double exposure adds a little to the piece, giving it a new form of meaning and transition to the next shot, but overall the film is for the audience to watch and enjoy whatever they may see for themselves in the film making it fresh and different, devoid of the static structure that Vertov disliked in modern (late 1920s) film.

With a film created simply out of the editing room, the cuts of each shot was very important to the overall motion picture. The film contains many tracking shots created from moving vehicles but it never seems jarring as it cuts to the next shot. Vertov played with film speed and even stops on many frames for moments at a time breaking down walls of editing from that structure Vertov hated so much. The shots in the film (approximately 1750-1800 of them) where not made for any purpose, but Vertov would give them new meaning with the art of editing. (This is a wonderful place to note that reasons like this show how editing is an art and that is why it has awards as a cinematic art and not just a technical job.)

The film was not a particular success as it was well before its time. Vertov's experiment may not have won many over, but it did manifest the skill of filmmaking, its deep deminsions, and how it should not be held to a simple formula. Film, and by that I mean the art of motion picture production, was not to be kept in a box, but should be allowed its freedom as it would be an ever expanding medium of storytelling and communication that would explode with creativity for years to come.