How does the urban landscape incorporate representations of the world in modernist cinema?: Berlin, Symphony of a City and Man With the Movie Camera

Modernist cinema’s enduring preoccupation with how the urban landscape as an amorphous, microcosmic ‘screen of signs’(1) upon which representations of the world may be projected, explored and incorporated dates from the very inception of film when images of human figures caught unawares negotiating distinctly urban spaces featured prominently amongst the first reels of footage produced.(2) Indeed, the relationship between city and film was almost inevitable because, due to the aesthetics of visual stimulation and heritage of mechanisation the former shared with the latter, ‘modern culture was “cinematic” before the fact.’(3) Consequently, urban life as captured on film has profoundly shaped how human corporeality, behaviour and perception are visualised and mediated because, as Stephen Barber explains, ‘the city adroitly negotiates and enforces its own mass within the image, applying intricate pressure around the human forms which that image holds.’(4)
The ‘city symphony’ films of the early 20th Century epitomised by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City (Berlin) (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man With The Movie Camera (MMC) (1929) formed a continuance of this tradition in their attempts to not only refine the, by then, stock visual vocabulary employed to articulate a ‘day-in-the-life of ‘the city’ (i.e.: scale, movement, speed, crowds, traffic, labour, consumerism, etc) but also to recreate the ‘experience’ of urban space in cinematic form. Although both Ruttmann and Vertov were widely praised by contemporary audiences for their replication of the sensual aspects of city life through technical innovativeness and evocative visual dynamism, many critics felt that the films fell short of their documentary agendas by offering little more than beautiful yet content-free images'(5) and ‘mere formalistic jackstraws and unmotivated camera mischief’(6) respectively. Such criticism was, to a large extent, motivated by how this alleged form-over-substance approach left the urban landscape open to confronting representations of a world in which city, human, camera and machine are contentiously interrelated, as shall be demonstrated below.

The central source of contention in Berlin is the ambivalence with which Ruttmann treats the German capital’s inhabitants. For much of ‘Akt 1,’ people are conspicuously absent but for the city structures, dormant machinery and waste they have left behind, as perfectly captured by the solitary piece of paper shown dancing on the breeze across an eerily deserted, motionless street. The, by then, highly anticipated arrival of the train previously depicted speeding towards Berlin in the establishing sequence is ultimately anti-climactic because rather than the train-load of potential protagonists convention dictates will alight with one finds an endless sea of bodies and blurred feet rushing forth, preventing the camera from lingering for any longer than an instant on their roughly interchangeable faces. This eschewal of plot and disinterest in individual, subjective view-points continues throughout the film as various everyday human activities and interpersonal encounters are observed but only ever in a fleeting, distant and episodic fashion. In addition, while the camera may casually survey people entering private buildings, it resists following them inside, designating the private sphere unimportant. Consequently, one becomes increasingly aware of the various, usually imperceptible ways in which the urban landscape shapes the public behaviour displayed. Reflecting the post-war popularity of Taylorist scientific management and the assembly-line standardisation of Fordism in Europe, both natural time and the thematic progression of the mise-en-scène in Berlin are structured around work, making the inhabitants glimpsed appear to be merely functions defined by what they do rather than actual people.(7) Following the synchronised mass movement demanded from the Berliners to, at and from work, one would assume that implied in their reward of free-time would be a return to individual agency but leisure too is portrayed as entirely collective and ruled by mechanization, as epitomised by the way in which the legs of the chorus-line kick and fall echoing the rhythms of the aforementioned train. Similarly, shots of children performing routinized activities that mimic those of their adult counterparts, from walking to school to pushing toy prams, are juxtaposed as if to emphasise how the city completely pre-programs social behaviour.

As a result, the humans depicted in Berlin come to resemble, depth-wise, the moving mannequins that feature in the various shop-fronts depicted both prior and following the appearance of actual people, though, as Siegfried Kraucauer observes, ‘[i]t is not as if these dummies were humanised; rather, human beings are forced into the sphere of the inanimate. They seem molecules in a stream of matter.’(8) In contrast, Berlin itself appears at once human and machine-like, aided by the sense of unreality and universality that Ruttmann’s avoidance of a comprehensive, all-encompassing aerial shot of the city creates.(9) Appropriating the common 18th and 19th Century literary trope of descriptively anthropomorphising the city, Ruttmann depicts a series of windows, shutters, roller-doors and curtains opening often autonomously just as humans and networks of transportation begin to simultaneously appear in the streets, prompting one to associate the former with the eyes of a waking organic entity and the latter with a pulsating circulatory system. Extending the body analogy, attentive close-ups revealing vital fluid or sweat-like condensation suggest that the tirelessly whirring and thumping, seemingly unsupervised machines portrayed are at once vital organs and themselves bodies effortlessly engaged in a complex, rhythmic dance. Conversely, Ruttmann himself described the city in Berlin as being akin to ‘a complicated machine that only works if the various parts, even the smallest, interact with the highest precision.’(10) Indeed, both machines and the, as already demonstrated, machine-like humans alike are shown to spring into action as if in response to the pushing of a lever shown in an immediately preceding close-up. Similarly, a shot depicting a street-light’s normally hidden wires being exposed for maintenance as traffic rushes past in the background dissolves into a series of overlaid close-ups of intricate wires and switches, pointing to the intricate, interconnected web of mechanisation that underlies even the city’s most unassuming façades. Thus, Ruttmann’s urban landscape appears profoundly cyborg-like.(11)


Figure 1. Raoul Hausmann, Elasticum (1920). Collage and gouache. 31 x 37 cm.

Though the term ‘cyborg’ is somewhat anachronistic in that it did not exist as a word in Weimar Germany when Berlin was made, the era’s fascination with techno-organic synthesis was real, embodying in equal measures both a fearful response to the destruction of the unprecedented, full-scale mechanized conflict of the first World War and the projection of the utopian hopes and fantasies of Weimar cultural modernists for their fledgling, inherently unstable republic.(12) German Dadaists created photomontages of human-machine hybrids that challenged the perceived threat of authoritarianism (Figure 1.), whilst proponents of the Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) movement that had gained increasing momentum during the 1920’s created close-up portraits of machine parts, seemingly revelling in their surfaces.(13) More generally, Berlin formed the centre of discourses on the positive and negative aspects of urban modernity because it was the more recently and thus more obviously marked by industrialisation and modernisation than any other European capital, having only been established as the German capital in 1871.(14) Indeed, as Anton Kaes argues, the film can be read as an allegory of the dislocation of the millions that migrated to Berlin in the first two decades of the 20th Century because the camera follows the arrival of a train, then conveys a sense of dislocation in the flurry of urban images it captures that is at once traumatic and exhilarating, and, finally, remains in the city at the film’s conclusion.(15) Many at the time, such as Oswald Spengler, viewed the city as ‘the symbol of soullessness’ for the way in which its abstract rationality seemingly denies authentic human experience, cultural roots and morality,(16) whilst others celebrated the city’s ambivalence, as captured in Walter Benjamin’s flâneur who actively strolls the city streets of modernity whilst maintaining a critical, highly aware yet blasé and detached attitude towards it all.(17)

Berlin can be read as confirming and refuting both sides of this debate due to the flâneur-like depiction of potential sources of social tension which are instantaneously reincorporated and neutralised. When one of liberal Berlin’s many working ‘Neue Fraus’ (‘new women’) is shown catching a man’s gaze through the a department store window, any hint of prostitution or female sexual assertiveness is suppressed by the brief but telling shots that follow of a bride happily being led from a car by her father and the genital-less groin of a prepubescent mannequin. The differences in the quality of the food consumed and leisure pursued by the upper and lower classes are freely displayed but the images inter-cut between both of a lion devouring a hunk of meat and an elephant resting suggest equivalence. Lastly, while the wild-eyed woman’s obviously staged suicide amidst inter-cut images of plummeting rollercoasters and trains racing menacingly towards the screen may attract a crowd, so too does the fashion show depicted immediately after, suggesting that it was just another forgettable aspect of urban life.(18)

The key to understanding the motivation behind the calculated levelling of difference and conflict in Berlin and it’s portrayal of a cyborg-city lies in the opening and closing sequences. The film begins with a close-up of an unidentified gently running body of water, evoking a sense of primordial, timeless flow and natural beauty. Rather than continuing in this vein of bucolic rural imagery to indict the city one expects, given the film’s title, to eventually see, a series of moving, interconnected abstract lines and circles begin to overlay the natural phenomena, complimenting the water’s ebb whilst also foreshadowing the wheels, wires and tracks of the train about to burst forth into the frame from the left.(19) By setting up the arrival of the train, which epitomises industrialisation and modernity, in this way, Ruttmann seems to visually reconcile the inherent conflict between nature and the mechanized urban landscape by, as Carsten Strathausen asserts, ‘fusing the linear time of technological progress with the cyclical time of nature’ and thus cast the city as a ‘second nature’ for humanity.(20) This also explains why Berlin is portrayed as cyborgian and also the film’s de-emphasis of human individuality in favour of a symphony of bodies all of which must contribute to the greater whole; a sentiment best captured by the film’s final moments where, despite their absence, people are implicitly present as part of the humanised city-machine that is being celebrated by the fireworks display as the beacon of light emitted from the radio tower unites cityscape and sky through illumination.(21)

Given that the two films were released within two years of each other, it is hardly surprising that the same binary collapses that occur in Berlin between urban and human, human and machine, private and public, and so forth, may be traced in MMC. Human movement is equated, both physically and rhythmically, with that of machines, from the general frequent in-shot double exposure of humans and machines to the specific alternating close-ups of a woman’s hands and face as she diligently folds small boxes in a swift, always identical movement which are repeatedly cross-cut with close-ups of equal duration of a machine similarly sorting boxes. Similarly, Vertov roughly divides his film into two halves, the first of which is devoted to labour, the second to leisure, not only to reflect the working day’s strict organisation of time and human behaviour within the city but also again to allow semantic associations to be drawn between the two through visual rhymes stressing behavioural equivalence and conditioning.(22) For instance, the pale women at the beach coating themselves in mud and applying dark lipstick in the leisure half recall the fair and dark skinned 18th Century costumed shop-front mannequins featured in the work half. Also, the city once again appears anthropomorphised, in this case through the cutting back and forth between close-ups of a various parts of a woman’s sleeping body beginning to stir and shots of empty urban spaces and motionless mannequins and machines gradually coming to life, punctuated by the rapid juxtaposition of a speeding train with her legs finally springing out of bed.

However, there are also numerous subtly yet significant ways in which Vertov’s film differs from Ruttmann’s in terms of how the urban landscape in each incorporates representations of the world. Firstly, though both more or less capture a day-in-the-life of a city, MMC is not set in a particular city but freely and often imperceptibly shifts between footage of Moscow, Odessa and Kiev, suggesting that the urban landscape depicted is somewhat transitory and thus universal, at least on a Soviet level. Similarly, while the progression of the day from work to leisure is honoured and time is shown to naturally pass through the use of conventional time-lapse shots of clouds, Vertov nevertheless continually disrupts any sense of temporal continuity. The reverse-motion used to make it seem that pigeons taking off from a rooftop are instead landing, the sudden cut from the end of the working day signalled by a series of shots of men washing their faces, women combing their hair and an arched metal bridge silhouetted against an evening sky to a beach in broad daylight, and the clock pendulum seen swinging during the film’s final moments that unnaturally gathers momentum to the point where it becomes blurred are all examples of Vertov’s deliberately generated discord. The element that, for Kracauer, saved MMC from the same aforementioned criticisms he directed at Berlin was that Vertov’s detached, surface-oriented observations were still ‘permeated with communist ideas,’(23) as evident in the sequence where alcoholism is seemingly equated with fascism by cutting from a beer hall, to a stern portrait of Lenin overhanging a worker’s hall wherein people are pursuing more intellectually rigorous pastimes like chess and reading the newspaper, and finally to a woman in a shooting gallery who hits a target we are told is ‘Uncle Fascism.’ One final difference between Vertov and Ruttmann’s films is that while both devote lengthy amounts of screen time to machines operating anthropomorphically to suggest the physical kinship between human and machine, the former often displays machines in purely aesthetic terms. For instance, the constantly present trams which glide and weave unexpectedly and with miraculous coordination in and out of frame seem objects of beauty divorced from their banal purpose, particularly when they are shown harmoniously superimposed and multiplied towards the film’s end.(24) Thus, overall, Vertov is far more concerned than Ruttmann is with how the urban landscape he depicts is perceived, rather than the actual urban landscape itself.

That cinematic perception is the true subject of MMC is made clear by Vertov’s framing of the urban mise-en-scène with people in a cinema preparing to watch and then actually watching portions of what we have seen in between, which consequently implicates our gaze with theirs. Together, we form the class to which the ‘truly international language of cinema’ claims to experiment with shall be taught, free from ‘intertitles,’ ‘story’ and ‘theatre’ conventions. Vertov’s specific selection of the cinema and the city as his educative tools reflects his recognition of how the former can transform and even construct the latter, such as the newsreels which allowed Europeans to visualise for the first time the destruction being wrought upon cities miles from their own during World War I, and also how film was the medium responsible for teaching the sensory values of speed and intensity to those early moderns who had never experienced them firsthand. The lesson consists of essentially three parts. Firstly, Vertov employs many of his camera ‘tricks’ only so that he may demystify and lay bare their constructed-nature either moments before or after they occur. A rapid sequence of extreme close-ups of the bottoms of carriages, blurred rails and flailing limbs convinces us that the cameraman has lost his life heroically trying to film an oncoming train yet moments later we are shown the very much alive cameraman safely burying the camera beneath the tracks, exposing his death by editing. Similarly, a series of full-frame, static, portrait-like images of children is gradually inter-cut with shots of MMC’s chief-editor examining the stills as they appear on pieces of film via a moviola. Moments later, the children appear again but this time as part of the mise-en-scène from which they had been removed watching a magic show, thus completing a tour of the editing process. This points one to the second part of the lesson, namely the importance of memory. MMC demands from its audience a willingness to abandon preconceived notions of narrative and the misleading opacity of film images and push memory and perception to its limits. Meaning in most of the examples from the film given above is generated by one’s capacity to recall the numerous motifs and interpret what is depicted accordingly.

The final aspect of MMC’s lesson, which the two preceding ones lead up to, is, like in Berlin, acceptance of and an ability to identify with a cyborgian element, namely the human-machine gaze of the camera:

I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.(27)

Fearful of the profound gap exposed between human and mechanically recorded perception by the cinema’s ability to render the normally invisible elements of the everyday visible, Vertov and his Kino-Eye movement had called for a ‘new man, free of unwieldiness and clumsiness’ who would possess the ‘precise movements of machines.’(28) This ‘kino-eye’ manifests itself in MMC in a number of ways. Firstly, despite the kinok’s determination to ‘temporarily exclude man as a subject for film’ until able to ‘control his movements,’(29) the cameraman appears to be the film’s protagonist and, given the fact that he is never seen without his camera, meant to be read as a cyborg-like figure. However, as Judith Mayne explains, the centrality of the cameraman is constantly called into question by the fact that he himself is being filmed, thus rendering it uncertain whether the footage we see without him in it is from his point-of-view or an unidentified third party.(30) Secondly, the ‘kino-eye’ is literally visualised by Vertov in his frequent superimposition of a human eye over the camera lens which, regardless of whether the shutter is open or closed, is still able to ‘see,’ making it this all-seeing cyborgian entity which we imagine capturing the birds-eye-view shots of the city and:

...grop[ing] its way through the chaos of visual events, letting itself be drawn or repelled by movement, probing, as it goes, the path of its own movement…distending time, dissecting movement, or, in contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself, swallowing years, thus schematizing processes of long duration inaccessible to the normal eye.(31)

However, this interpretation too unwittingly undermines itself when the camera is depicted dancing on screen to the delight of the film’s internal cinema audience because its fetishized staginess fails to do justice to the overall concept.(32) Lastly, as the discussion above has hopefully shown, the ‘kino-eye’ manifests itself in the nature of MMC itself which, as Joseph Schaub argues, infects the viewer like a ‘virus’ by prompting them to adopt it’s highly aware, pervasive, receptive characteristics.(33) This is memorably visualised when Vertov cuts back and forth between a woman’s eyes and horizontal window shutters opening and closing with increasingly frenzied momentum forcing we, the audience, to also blink and thus mimic the flicker of the camera shutter.

Modernist cinema produced a new, distinctly modern way of conceiving the urban landscape and the self’s relationship to it. In Berlin and MMC, we find urban landscapes open to the incorporation of confronting representations of a world in which the traditional conceptualisation of human as private, autonomous individual independent of the city he or she created and now inhabits has seemingly been supplanted by a vision of the human as not only merely another aspect of a collective, entirely public realm pre-determined by the city but also machine-like. While Ruttmann uses the cinema to reconcile these inherently intertwined binaries by depicting a cyborgian urban landscape capable on incorporating and neutralising the tensions produced, Vertov uses the cinema to reconfigure our natural perception of the urban landscape along the mechanised, cyborgian lines of the ‘kino-eye.’

References
(1) Jean Baudrillard, America (London; New York: Verso, 1988), p. 56.

(2) For instance, consider the work of Louis Le Prince, Max and Emil Skladanowsky and Auguste and Louis Lumière.

(3) Leo Charney & Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p. 1.

(4) Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion, 2002), p. 20.

(5) John Grierson, 'First Principles of Documentary' in Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary Kevin Macdonald & Mark Cousins (eds.) (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 100.

(6) Sergei Eisenstein cited in Carsten Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), p. 28.

(7) Anton, Kaes, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience’ New German Critique no. 74, 1998, p. 191.

(8) Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Rev. and expanded ed., Leonardo Quaresima (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 186.

(9) Wolfgang Natter, ‘The City as Cinematic Space: Modernism and Place in Berlin, Symphony of a City’ in Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film Stuart C. Aitken & Leo E. Zonn (eds.) (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 218.

(10) Walter Ruttmann, ‘Wie ich meinen Berlin-Film dreht’ Lichtbild-Buhne 8 Oct 1927 cited in Kaes, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience,’ p. 190.

(11) Carsten Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), p. 27.

(12) Matthew Biro, ‘The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture’ New German Critique, no. 62, 1994, p. 71.

(13) Martin Gaughan, ‘Ruttmann’s Berlin: Filming in a “Hollow Space”?’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), p. 41.

(14) Gaughan, ‘Ruttmann’s Berlin: Filming in a “Hollow Space”?,’ pp. 41-43.

(15) Kaes, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience,’ pp. 184-185.

(16) ‘The Soul of the City’ cited in Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov,’ p. 20.

(17) See The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999).

(18) Kaes, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience,’ p. 188.

(19) Natter, ‘The City as Cinematic Space: Modernism and Place in Berlin, Symphony of a City,' p. 216.

(20) ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov,’ pp. 32-33.

(21) Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov,’ p. 32.

(22) Anna Lawton, ‘Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: A Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema’ Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 13, 1978, p. 46.

(23) Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 187.

(24) Malcolm Turvey, ‘Can the Camera See?: Mimesis in Man With a Movie Camera’ October vol. 89, 1999, pp. 43-44.

(25) Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space, pp. 16-17.

(26) Lawton, ‘Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: A Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema,’ p. 47.

(27) Dziga Vertov, "The Council of Three," in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Annette Michelson (ed.), trans. Kevin O'Brien (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 17.

(28) Dziga Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’ in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov Annette Michelson (ed.), trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1984), p. 8.

(29) Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto,’ p. 7.

(30) Kino and The Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), p. 162.

(31) Dziga Vertov, "The Council of Three," p. 19.

(32) Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov,’ p. 32.

(33) ‘Presenting the Cyborg's Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye’ The Cyberpunk Project [Online] Accessed 22 October 2007.
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyborg_futurist_past.html

Bibliography

Barber, Stephen, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion, 2002).

Baudrillard, Jean, America (London; New York: Verso, 1988).

Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999).

Biro, Matthew, ‘The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture’ New German Critique, no. 62, 1994, pp. 71-110.

Charney, Leo & Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

Gaughan, Martin, ‘Ruttmann’s Berlin: Filming in a “Hollow Space”?’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 41-57.

Grierson, John, 'First Principles of Documentary' in Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary Kevin Macdonald & Mark Cousins (eds.) (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

Kaes, Anton, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience’ New German Critique no. 74, 1998, pp. 179-192.

Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Rev. and expanded ed., Leonardo Quaresima (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Lawton, Anna, ‘Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: A Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema’ Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 13, 1978, pp. 44-50.

Natter, Wolfgang, ‘The City as Cinematic Space: Modernism and Place in Berlin, Symphony of a City’ in Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film Stuart C. Aitken & Leo E. Zonn (eds.) (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp. 203-228.

Schaub, Joseph Christopher, ‘Presenting the Cyborg's Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye’ The Cyberpunk Project [Online] Accessed 22 October 2007. http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyborg_futurist_past.html

Strathausen, Carsten, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 15-40.

Turvey, Malcolm, ‘Can the Camera See?: Mimesis in Man With a Movie Camera’ October vol. 89, 1999, pp. 25-50.

Vertov, Dziga, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’ in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov Annette Michelson (ed.), trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1984).

Vertov, Dziga, "The Council of Three," in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Annette Michelson (ed.), trans. Kevin O'Brien (London: Pluto Press, 1984).