Dziga Vertov's Man With The Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera is an incredibly demanding film that is inherently (and perhaps even deliberately) suited to multiple viewings. The mise-en-scene is so visually dense, technically complex and overtly fast-paced that the eye is simply left incapable of unpacking everything that it sees in a single sitting; exposing a profound gap between human and mechanical or cinematic perception.

Consequently, if the self-proclaimed ‘experimental’ aim of the film is to create a ‘truly international language of cinema,’ then the proverbial guinea-pig upon whom this new language is tested (because what’s the point of inventing a language if nobody can understand it?) is the audience (particularly the film’s contemporary audience who, unlike our film-studies-versed selves, would not have been as exposed to the cinema and the mechanics of its specific formal qualities). Indeed, that our relationship with the film is meant to be a didactic one is made apparent in two particular, self-reflexive ways. Firstly, the numerous instances of the cameraman’s lens being pointed to camera seem to suggest that our behaviour and reactions to the film should mirror those of the cinema audience Vertov depicts watching either portions of the film that we have already been privy to (e.g.: a full-screen shot of three airplanes flying in formation cuts to a long-shot of the cinema screen as the exact same image is projected upon it) or the camera and its tripod moving about on screen unaided, i.e.: respectful devotion of one’s full attention and a receptive sense of awe at what effects the camera can so convincingly achieve.

This mindset is also encouraged by the second way in which our perception is primed for the new cinematic language, namely the demystification of cinematic ‘tricks’ moments before or after they appear on screen. The sequence where the cameraman is seemingly being run over by a train in a blur of extreme close-ups of carriage, rail and flailing foot is later exposed as the result of burying the camera under the tracks and clever editing. Full-screen static, portrait-like stills of youths are intercut with shots of the same stills as they appear on a piece of film being edited and are then seen full-screen again but now moving as part of the mise-en-scene.

Ultimately, Vertov seems to be attempting to cultivate us into actively receptive, cinema-literate viewers. Indeed, the closer you read the film and its infinite surfaces the more rewarding they become. For instance, it wasn’t until I watched the film a second time whilst painstakingly stopping and starting it to take notes (on YouTube: arguably the cinema’s new frontier) that I really noticed the numerous intriguing, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them details that litter the mise-en-scene, momentarily rupturing its continuity. The pigeons landing on a rooftop that are in reality actually taking off (i.e.: the shot is played backwards); the rapidly quick extreme close-up of a pair of eyes that is not on screen long enough to identify whether they are human or belong to the mannequins in the shots that precede and proceed it; and the close-up of the cameraman’s hand winding his camera as he films a homeless man being then barely noticeably shown upside-down a few frames after are just some examples. These discordant moments (coupled with Vertov’s interest in conveying the passing of time through, for example, shots of objects silhouetted against time-lapse sped up clouds and the recurring, ever-rapidly swinging clock pendulum in the film’s final moments) bring to mind Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘time-image,’ i.e.: images that make apparent the temporally equivocal status of a shot as an image of essentially a past event being viewed in the present, refracting and thus confusing memory and physical time as if through a crystal.*

* Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 - The Time-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1989), p. 81.