Understanding Man with a Movie Camera

Author(s): Anne Nesbet

Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 59, No. 1 (Fall 2005), p. 3
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2005.59.1.3

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C LO S E U P
THE CENTERPIECE of the 23rd Porde-
none Silent Film Festival was a glorious
retrospective: just about every extant
film made by Dziga Vertov. It was partly
to trouble our comfortable assumption
that we already know a thing or two
about Vertov that University of Chi-
cago film historian Yuri Tsivian under-
took this mammoth project, which
involved bringing hundreds of films
(and a few rare manuscripts) to Sacile,
Italy, in October 2004.
With his customary dry wit, Tsivian
asks,“Can anyone say one really under-
stands Man with a Movie Camera—
even if one knows it like the back
of one’s hand—unless one has seen,
say, Kino-Pravda No. 18, or State Kino-
Calendar No. 47?” Having seen all the
rare Kino-Pravdas (Nos. 1-23) except for
the still-missing No. 19; about 20 news-
reels from 1918 to 1919; four issues of
the State Kino-Calendar; all of Vertov’s
feature-length documentaries from the
silent era—and a number of films made
by Vertov’s rivals, relatives, acquain-
tances, and admirers—festivalgoers
can now try to answer that question.
Following a suggestion made by
Aleksandr Deriabin, State Kino-Calendar
No. 47 (1925) was shown on the same
program as Man with a Movie Camera
(1929). “Poles in top hats; new trains;
100 years Bolshoi,” read my notes. The
latter theme is the one that Deriabin
and Tsivian would have us recall as we
watch Man with a Movie Camera, in
which there is a famous image of the
Bolshoi made to collapse in on itself by
means of visual tricks (an “implosion”of
the outmoded past, as Tsivian points
out). But formal experimentation in the
earlier newsreel comes chiefly in the
form of the juxtaposition of shots
122.15.82.81 on Wed, 21 Aug 2019 09:06:06 UTC
Anne Nesbet
Understanding Man with a Movie Camera
taken at ground level with some taken
of the crowd from far above, the point-
of-view of the famous horse statues
that grace the Bolshoi’s roof.The mean-
ing of these experiments is in no way
as legible as Man with a Movie Camera’s
“implosion.” One might argue, in fact,
that the main effect of having State
Kino-Calendar No. 47 in mind as one
views Man with a Movie Camera is to
underscore the huge gap between the
1925 newsreel and the 1929 film, both
thematically and stylistically.
Between the basic newsreels and
the feature films, however, comes a
sort of evolutionary missing link, the
astonishing series of experimental Kino-
Pravda shorts. No. 12 features extra-
ordinary 3-D titles constructed out of
wood and paper by Aleksandr Rod-
chenko. No. 18 sends the camera racing
up the Eiffel Tower, flying into a Soviet
airport, visiting a House for Workers,
and then becomes a photo-essay on
the subject of cooperation between
workers and countryside, one peas-
ant’s trip to the city, and “the movie
camera that follows him.” Already we
have moved—at a clip!—from the
technological achievements of the Old
World to the construction of the New;
this process is then raised to an ecstatic
climax in the portrayal of a “Red Bap-
tism,” as an infant Soviet receives the
blessing of not only a crowd singing
the “Internationale” but also a kind
of chorus of machines spinning ever
faster in his honor.
Here we have the theme of birth
that holds an important place at the
heart of Man with a Movie Camera
combined with (earlier versions of )
the dizzying montage techniques, self-
referentiality, and essayistic cinematic
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structure we have come to think of as
“Vertovian.” And yet it is again the
amazing atypicality of Man with a
Movie Camera that strikes the viewer:
how the choice not to use titles
changes the feel and effect of the
“essay”; how the baby born in Man with
a Movie Camera has becomes a rela-
tively universal Everybaby.
If Man with a Movie Camera remains
an outlier in Dziga Vertov’s oeuvre, it is
rivalled in interest (if not in sheer aes-
thetic brilliance) by a number of more
rarely seen and more overtly political
films. The ideological structure of Ver-
tov’s Shestaia chast’ mira (1926), for ex-
ample, a visual paean to Gostorg (the
State Trade agency), with its attempt to
link visually the fates of the “backward
nations” incorporated into the Soviet
world with the fate of industrial capi-
talism, reminded me of nothing so
much as Eisenstein’s unrealized project
of filming Marx’s Capital.
There is something inherently arti-
ficial in sitting down to watch “every-
thing Vertov filmed” over the course of
a few days. It is a dizzying, even surreal
undertaking (certain shots, reappear-
ing many times in many different films,
began to feel like old friends), and I
have to say it made for one of the most
visually exciting weeks of my life. We
owe a huge debt of gratitude to the
Giornate del Cinema Muto and to Yuri
Tsivian for reacquainting us with Dziga
Vertov, the poetry of whose Man with a
Movie Camera can now be appreciated
in a newly visible context.
Anne Nesbet, author of Savage Junctures:
Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking,
teaches film and Russian literature at the
University of California, Berkeley.
© Anne Nesbet