The Digital Legacies of the Avant-Garde
The Man with a Movie Camera
A Record of Celluloid in 6 Reels
An Excerpt from the Diary of a Cameraman
For Viewers’ Attention
The Film Presents an Experiment
In the Cinematic Communication
of Visible Events
Without the Aid of Intertitles
(A Film Without Intertitles)
Without the Aid of a Scenario
(A Film Without a Scenario)
Without the Aid of Theater
(A Film Without Sets, Actors, etc)
This Experimental Work Aims at Creating a Truly International Absolute Language of Cinema Based on Its Total Separation From the Language of Theater and Literature
Author-Supervisor of the Experiment
Dziga Vertov
Self proclaimed, duly noted and reappropriated “author,” Vertov, opens his magnum opus with the above provocative proclamation: a series of statements that register both in their dialectic framework as well as within in each frame of the film. The man who controls the movie camera-a tool- captures the world before him in stunning honesty. Vertov’s own personal vocation for “Film-Truth” is communicated with brilliant reserve, every detail sincerely chronicled and visually rendered and seemingly reduced to their “natural perspective.” As Lev Manovich would describe;”[Vertov’s] goal is to decode the world purely through the surfaces visible to the eye (of course, its natural sight enhanced by a movie camera),” and thus reveals the metaphysics behind the apparatus along with another layer of the film Manovich seeks to explore in his declaration on Database as a Symbolic Form.
As the audience-both literally, within the film and “figuratively” outside of it-is drawn towards the theater, a place of “Bourgeois Art” as defined by Peter Bürger, we (as both the voyeur and the viewed) begin to understand the abstract notion of the camera as a “second-eye,” the “Kino-eye” or the only vessel through which perspective can be both destroyed and created.
Vertov even admits that his one true creative endeavor would be to “explode Art’s Tower of Babel;” the foundation of his experimental approach to a medium in its artistic infancy. "My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you." It is in this statement, similar to fellow Soviet filmmaker Eisenstein’s cautionary Statement on Sound, that Vertov aligns himself with Bürger’s definition of the avant-garde: “Movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society.” Man with a Movie Camera is just that, the catalyst for the explosion Vertov seeks—a fascinating deconstruction of “life,” seemingly as mechanical as the apparatus through which it is recorded.
To Vertov, the lens was an eye that had yet to see beyond the veil of the theater, covered by spectacles of the spectacle that have yet to be discarded. In Man with a Movie Camera the lens truly transforms into Vertov’s desired “second-eye;” an eye with the potential to abandon the previous notion of framing and establish “itself” as an individual. In this way, he thought, “Film-Truth” could be discovered; he states, “by combining fragments of actuality as to reveal a deeper truth.” Similarly Manovich describes the process as the “paradigm [being] projected onto [the] syntagm.
Abstaining from the bourgeois interpretation of narrative, or what critic and theorist Noël Burch refers to as the “desire for totalizing illusionistic representation,” Vertov delivers reality; what appears on the surface, “a mechanical catalog,” as Manovich describes, but also coding of something metaphysical. To Manovich, life is portrayed on three levels with the narrative ultimately progressing as and into a database film. The “mechanization of life” is equally matched in the mechanical features and techniques of the camerawork, editing, etc. It’s beyond meta, it’s an expression of absolute honesty teeming with subsurface socialist bias; it is the ultimate cinematic communication.
**Berlin: Symphony of a City, is a notable film that predates Vertov’s (who openly acknowledges borrowed stylistic elements) by two years, has striking visual comparisons and similar thematic explorations. It also was re-mastered with a Cinematic “Orchestra” recording. **