A Visual Essay on a Visual Essay: Reading 'Man with a Movie Camera' as a Visual Essay on Radical Aesthetics/Politics

Since its inception, film has had two separate functions – one of documentation and one of narrative. Naturally, the two can coalesce and exist as one, if not always. But remember the first time you were given a photograph camera and couldn’t stop taking spontaneous pictures? Or when you bought a videophone and just recorded everything and anything? Though, the irony of it is that documentaries, the genre of film aimed at documenting ‘real’ subjects, are often full of narratives, and this transparent narrativising of ‘real life’ is sometimes necessary for viewers to comprehend the subject matter. Similarly, narrative films are not composed entirely of artifice nor of fiction that escapes all senses of realism – there includes an aspect of documentation. The act of narrativising can be considered an innate human instinct. So therefore, it is very challenging to watch a film that vehemently subscribes to document without the added narrative.

In the prologue of Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom) (1929), the ‘author-supervisor’ Dziga Vertov advises audiences that his film is “an experiment in cinematic communication of real events without the aid of intertitles, without the aid of scenario/story, without the aid of theatre. This work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature.” Vertov provides a more elaborate annotation of these intentions in Kino-Eye, in the section ‘WE: Variant of a Manifesto’ as he proclaims that “the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, [are] leprous.” Vertov explains that this is because these films involve ‘Synthesis’, “the mixing of the arts,” and such “should come at the summit of each art’s achievement and not before.” Vertov goes on to declare that he wants to search for film’s own material, meter, and rhythm; indeed, such intentions for the development of the medium’s technical capabilities are very virtuous and admirable. However, the question that now remains is ‘Does he succeed in creating this new language?’ and, if so, ‘Is it worth the trade-off of narrative?’
Yes, Vertov does succeed and it is very much worth the trade-off. Man with a Movie Camera can be considered seminal and pioneering by all means; the camera ‘techniques’, ‘experiments’ and ‘exercises’ that Vertov uses are remarkable because of their spontaneous, natural mise-en-scène and also their contribution to the language of cinema. One example is the fast-forwarded moving clouds (a denotation for the passage of time) which is now a cinematic technique/motif/convention used prominently by modern filmmakers, most notably Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola. The experimental camera angles, shots, and edits (split screen, jump cuts, superimposition, juxtaposition, slow and fast motion) have created images that possess a poetic, ‘natural’ mise-en-scène reminiscent of photographs – revealing how this non-narrative film can be read as a series of moving photographs.
At the time of its release in 1929, these radical and progressive images must have bedazzled viewers as they transformed everyday public icons and figures such as building fronts, streets, crowds, and bridges into sublime, alien abstract spectacles. For example, seeing the bridge from a nether point of view; though, this image mightn’t be foreign to certain audience members who happen to pass the infrastructure daily. Equally, the film must have surprised viewers by providing the private world in an unpolished light for public spectacle – examples include the woman washing, dressing, cleaning and even giving birth. Moreover, we also get to see the bourgeoning industrial world in action as Vertov catalogues the rapid developments of the modernity period; again, such would have been alien to audience members had they not worked in those industries. Vertov also attempts to capture society in all its varying facets yet also primarily focusing on the working class proletariat lifestyle – we are shown the bars that these people congregate in, their political offices, and religious institutions. Singularly, Vertov has challenged the aesthetic-politics of what is an appropriate film subject – the images, or rather scenes, which he captures are so evocative that within them must lie an ocean of narrative.Another issue that this film inspects is the idea of being filmed unaware versus being filmed when aware. Vertov seems to capture both the performative nature of humans when scrutinised as well as the intuitive habitual behaviours of humans when left to their own devices. These two separate notions of 'acting'/'performing'/'being' on screen tie in very closely to the film's foremost issue of documentation versus narrative. Even though narrative, in a conventional sense, has been sacrificed for the sake of broadening film aesthetics and technicalities here, there still exists in Man with a Movie Camera a sense of storytelling, of aiming to capture Moscow in the 1920s as it was; therefore, it becomes the job of these new, radical, pioneering camera techniques/tricks to imbue meaning into the images - demonstrating how every and any subject that is captured on film will have attached to it a narrative sensibility, be it intentional or unintentional.