Study Guide and Questions for The Man with a Movie Camera
NOTA BENE: The term “silent film” is something of a misnomer. It’s true that movies in the first 30-some years of filmmaking (roughly 1895-1929) didn’t have soundtracks. It is not as though people in those years—moviemakers or audience members–thought films were lacking sound and needed to have it. Movies were always accompanied by some kind of music, however, be it played on a piano, an organ, by a small ensemble, or an orchestra in big-city theaters and for premieres. Some films had music scores written expressly for them, although these were not always used, and over the decades most of these have been lost, even if the films, only about 20% of which survive, have not.
The Man with a Movie Camera, one of the last silent films, has been made available in recent years with wildly differing music scores. On the version I’ve linked to, the score is composed and performed by the Alloy Orchestra, “based on musical instructions written by Dziga Vertov.”[1] ALSO: See Bordwell & Thompson’s analysis of The Man with a Movie Camera, 434-438, as well as their section on Soviet Montage, 472-475.
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The Man with a Movie Camera (Cheloveks Kinoapparatom). 1929. U.S.S.R. Directed by Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) Edited by Yelizaveta Svilova. Cinematography by Mikhail Kaufman. 68 minutes.
I am cinema-eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.
Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an aeroplane. I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along with their resultant path, maneuvering inthe chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations.
Free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them.
My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.[2] — Dziga Vertov, 1923.
The Man with a Movie Camera might be one of the best examples there is of the durability and incandescence of cinema, even as—in our 21st century–the incandescent light bulb, and cinema-on-celluloid go the way of the pterodactyl. It is the capstone work of Dziga Vertov, a Futurist poet-turned-documentary filmmaker in the crucible of the Bolshevik Revolution and the first years of the Soviet Union. “Dziga Vertov,” which means “spinning top,” an apt way of describing his cinematic style, was the pseudonym of Denis Kaufman. Vertov collaborated on his films with his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, who is the cameraman seen in TMWAMC, as well the cinematographer of the film. Dziga Vertov’s wife, Yelizaveta Svilova (1900-1975), likewise, is the editor shown in the movie, and also its actual editor. Svilova was an accomplished filmmaker in her own right. After the Stalin regime prevented Vertov and other Soviet Montage filmmakers, most notably, Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), from making films in the highly sophisticated, theoretical style that the powers that be considered too difficult for the proletariat to understand, Svilova, who stayed in the regime’s good graces, continued to find work for her husband. Vertov died an obscure editor of newsreels. After his death, Svilova smuggled out his considerable archive from Moscow to Vienna.[3] Another brother, Boris Kaufman (1906-1980), defected first to France and then, to America, where, based in New York City, he became an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, known for such films as On the Waterfront (1954) and Twelve Angry Men (1957).
Soviet Montage was the leading film style in the brand-new revolutionary nation of the Soviet Union. Young Soviet filmmakers and educators such as Vertov, Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin seized upon the new form of movies, approaching them not as the stolid, stagey mode associated with the White Russians defeated in the Revolutionary War, but a dynamic form centered upon editing. This art form would celebrate Soviet ideology and life under the new order. But whereas Eisenstein and Pudovkin concentrated on narrative films that told stories of Russian history, Vertov had no interest in narrative, which he thought still depended too much upon novels and the theatre, but instead wanted to demonstrate the relevance of movies to the life of the everyday Soviet citizen.
The hallmark of Soviet Montage is juxtaposition, the principle that one image, cut after another image, will produce in the spectator’s mind a concept that never would have existed had the shots not been juxtaposed. Montage grew out of the desire to art in a Marxist aesthetic. Montage also demonstrates editing, not in continuity to tell a linear story–what Eisenstein derided as the “brick-by-brick” approach–or to create the type of spatial realism we saw exemplified in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Soviet Montage celebrates editing in its capacities, as we’ve been learning, to create relationships between people, places, times, and to create rhythm.
Soviet Montage as seen in The Man with a Movie Camera displays graphic, temporal, spatial, and rhythmic relations in their purest, most naked form. And yet at the same time, TMWAMC looks, even to our 21st-century eyes, like a startlingly innovative and exciting film, a silent movie which, although it celebrates a now defunct society, looks up-to-date and audacious in its experimentation, a movie that can make one feel hopeful about the transformational power of art. It is for these reasons that this 90+-year old film continues to grow in stature, reaching for the first time, in 2012, the top ten in Sight and Sound magazine’s decennial film critics’ poll of the greatest films ever made (TMWAMC hit #8; Vertigo was voted number one, displacing Citizen Kane, which had held the top spot in the previous five polls, 1962-2002).
Vertov’s desire, as shown in every minute of The Man with a Movie Camera, is to utilize film to bring together all the people of the far-flung Soviet republics. It’s a didactic film, teaching its audience (and perhaps trying to convince the Communist authorities) that the moviemaker, who climbs towers and dams, descends into coal mines, even climbs out of a mug of beer (in one of the film’s more infamous double-exposure effects), and the editor in her well-organized workspace, are workers just like them, and that they make a valuable contribution to Soviet life.
In spite of Vertov’s strident proclamations against the influence of literary devices and language upon cinema, he started out as a poet. TMWAMC is a poetic film, based most of all upon, ironically, the verse of the late-19th century American poet Walt Whitman, whose epic catalogues in “Song of Myself,“ the signature work in Leaves of Grass, the collection that Whitman first published in 1855 and continued to revise until just before his death in 1892, celebrated all aspects of American life as equal in a democracy, with the poet as their chronicler. The influence upon Soviet artists of Whitman, whose poetry was first published in a Russian translation in 1905, has been well documented. Eisenstein, for example, in a 1944 essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” referred to “Whitman’s huge montage conception.” Compare Vertov’s “Kino-eye” manifesto, printed at the beginning of this study guide, to the opening stanzas of “Song of Myself”:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you . . .
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.[4]
Like Vertov, with his disdain for literary traditions in cinema, Whitman fought the American dependence upon European conventions, as well as the anti-intellectualism in American life that thinks of poetry and art as reeking of stale European civilization. Whitman aimed to sing of American democracy, diversity, and multitudinousness through his poetry (“I contain multitudes,” the poem famously sang). The bulk of “Song of Myself” is made up of long catalogues of people and activities, which the poet audaciously juxtaposes, cataloguing dozens and dozens of various types of people, some respectable and revered, others barely or rarely acknowledged in polite society. Here is a short excerpt:
The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,
The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,
The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!)
The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,
The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;)
The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly,
The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips,
The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,
The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,
(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)
The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries,[5]
Imagine each item in Whitman’s catalogue (following a comma) to be a motion picture shot. Then consider that Whitman was intoxicated by the new mid-19th century medium of photography, and was known to haunt New York galleries of Daguerrotypes (an early form of photography). Look at the juxtapositions, where Whitman daringly makes equal the bride and the opium-eater, the prostitute and the President. Then look at the similar juxtapositions in Vertov: from a manicurist doing a woman’s nails (probably, as Bordwell and Thompson suggest, Vertov’s sardonic comment on unwelcome remnants of bourgeois life) to a blacksmith sharpening an axe, and then to barber shaving a man’s face–graphic matches all. The camera swivels this way, then that, Whitman’s “I” replaced by Vertov’s “eye.” It cuts from the couple filing for a marriage license, to another pair applying for divorce (one woman covering her face with her purse); from a funeral procession and a mourner at the burial site to what is believed to be cinema’s first live birth. The latter is an example of how Vertov broke through norms of what should be uttered, or shown, in public, following Whitman’s lead. Notes found in Vertov’s archives reveal that some sanitizing was required of the filmmaker. Crime, drugs, and prostitution are nowhere to be found in Vertov. A man sleeping on a park bench is one of the few signs of poverty allowed in the film; alcoholism is highlighted, as Bordwell and Thompson mention, but clearly because it was a social problem about which the authorities in Russia were concerned, then as now.
I bring up the parallels with Walt Whitman, which have long fascinated me, because they point up how Dziga Vertov is working in a cinematic form analogous to poetry, not narrative. This film is ostensibly a documentary; no actors are used and all locations are actual. This documentary is highly formalized, however. Some shots, like those of a young woman getting dressed in the morning, are evidently posed (as well as voyeuristic). In some ways, the documentary is a fitting form for Soviet aesthetics, with their disdain for the individual and their preference for the collective protagonist. The country, the people, the cinema and its audiences are the protagonists of TMWAMC. This is where even the analogy to “Song of Myself” breaks down; one feels a protagonist itching to tell his or her own story in each of Whitman’s catalogue items. Vertov’s smiling factory workers and miners are part of the collective.
The film is designed as a “city symphony” film, a popular documentary subgenre in the late-1920s, begun by the German film, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walther Ruttmann, 1927). Rather than a dawn-to-midnight “symphony of a city,” however, TMWAMC is the symphony of a country, with the cameraman the conductor, as well our entry to and exit from each location. In Berlin the vehicle is a train, which serves as a great camera subject in film after film, regardless of national origin. (The cameraman’s filming of a train is the action that first brings the early morning to life in Vertov’s film.) Furthermore, true to the movement’s name, the Soviet Montage movement emphasizes editing, often to the detriment of the films’ photography, which is quite accomplished and striking. All the time that we see Vertov’s “man with the movie camera” at least one other camera is making movies of him, rendering the film more illusionist that it might appear (beyond the obvious photographic legerdemain, which Eisenstein, no fan of Vertov’s work, dismissed as “formalist jackstraws and unmotivated camera mischief”[6]). Moreover, with an apparently unsupervised cameraman and an editor ubiquitous in the film, Vertov effaces his own presence as the director, who is in fact controlling most of what we see, just as his Kino-Eye manifesto proclaims.
Beyond its specificity to the Soviet Union, The Man with a Movie Camera is a work of Modernism, the international, cross-disciplinary form that swept over the worlds of art, literature, theatre, film, and music, during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Modernism embraced an awareness of form over content, of authorship, and most of all, of machines. Despite the way that Hollywood film, ironically, played out nineteenth- century narrative and illusionism all over again, especially after sound came in, the cinema is itself a modern device, a machine: the product of mechanics, electricity, technology, and of mass production, promotion, and distribution. Thus it makes sense that the Soviet Montage films were infatuated with machinery; here we see gears, wheels, levers, looms, trains, trucks, factories, the movie camera and the editing machine, all waiting for people to come along and make them go. Modernity, however, as seen in the number of horse-drawn vehicles, gone from major American and Western European cities by the end of the 1920s, was slower in coming to the Soviet Union than the likes of Vertov would have preferred. No doubt it was held up further by the costly war of revolution and by the U.S.S.R.’s increasing isolation from the West. Nonetheless, montage, which renders the movies “free from human immobility,” to quote Vertov’s manifesto, is the logical vehicle for a cinema that hews to modernism.
Vertov’s film displays certain Soviet-style editing preferences. One is the disregard of spatial realism and the lack of establishing shots. Notice that in the section of the film depicting leisure-time activities, children watch a magician and spectators see a volleyball match; however, in the way the film cuts from the watchers to the watched, there is no indication that the former are actually in the same places as the latter. Indeed there is every reason to believe they are not. The Soviets thought that montage—and indeed film overall–creates its own reality. Hollywood’s beliefs are not so different, except that Western film prefers that its audiences forget that they are watching reality that has been transformed, if not totally created, by the cinema. Vertov, on the other hand, wants his audience always to remember that. The demands of Stalin and his commissars for a cinema more like Hollywood’s in its undemanding illusionism is one of the ironies of totalitarianism’s relation to public entertainment.
Questions for The Man with a Movie Camera
1. Associational form. The Man with a Movie Camera is two films in one. While Vertov makes a film about the role of the cinema in the Soviet Union, he also makes a movie about his title character. Thus, we often see film of a filmmaker filming. We also see a “day in the life” of the country, with as many aspects of life as the director thinks we should see. Finally, and most of all, the film is about the power of editing, and the aspects of what editing can do.
a. How does sequence 1 use rhythmic relations to associate the awakening of the society in the morning with the movements of the “man with the movie camera”?
b. How do the scenes in the same sequence move us to various locations and allow us to make associations using graphic relations?
2. The power of the editor. The Man with a Movie Camera is so self-reflexive that Vertov even interrupts a sequence to show how the shots are selected. In sequence 2 how are we moved to understand the editing process graphically, and the relationship between the actuality that is filmed, the editor’s job and her process, and her effect upon the movie sequences as we see them?
3. The revolving door and the directional rail controls for the streetcars are metaphors for what the camera does in this sequence. Temporal, spatial, and graphic relations are all involved in this sequence. Explain how.
4. a. In a culminating sequence in the “workday” portion of the film Vertov compares types of work that wouldn’t usually be thought of together. Explain how the film does this.
b. At the same time, how do the rhythm of the editing and the motion inside the shots themselves combine to produce effects upon the spectator? Explain. Make sure you refer to the types of editing relations in your answer.
5. While all editing involves a graphic relationship, Hollywood-style editing creates a realism of space that persuades us that not only is Shot B going on in the same space as Shot A, but also that we understand the space as if it were an actual place in life. These values were not important to the Soviet cinema.
In sequence 5 and sequence 6 explain how juxtapositions that appear intended to function as eyeline matches do not work in the same way as an eyeline match in a Hollywood film from any era. What is missing? Why is the spatial realism that is important to a Western audience’s ability to believe in a film’s illusion of reality not important in a culture such as the Soviet Union?
6. How can we talk about The Man with the Movie Camera as telling a story? Does the story develop out of the juxtapositions, the editing relations? Where does the film take place? What is the chronology?
7. What is the function of the “man with a movie camera”? How is he portrayed as coordinating the various editing relations
[1] The Man with a Movie Camera (Cheloveks Kinoapparatom). Film Preservation Associates. Original Score Composed and Performed by the Alloy Orchestra. Produced by David Shepard. British Film Institute. https://video-alexanderstreet-com.proxy.ulib.uits.iu.edu/watch/man-with-a-movie-camera.
[2] Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, eds. Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. London: Faber and Faber, 1996, 55-56.
[3] Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film, 2nd Edition. New York: Continuum, 2012, 47.
[4] Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Excerpts from Chapter 1 and Chapter 3. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174745.
[5] Ibid, excerpt from Chapter 15. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174745.
[6] Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Jay Leyda, ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949, 43-44.
