Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera: Between Documentary and Utopia
Author: Hanna Protasova, The University of Western Ontario
Dziga Vertov’s experimental silent film “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929) has been an object of numerous studies that focus on the issues ranging from innovatory cinematic techniques to the peculiarities of gender representation in the movie. The following essay, however, suggests a slightly different approach to Vertov’s film. Here, I will try to demonstrate that the genre that was picked by the director to produce one of his first full-length films – a documentary – also entails the elements of mass entertainment. Eventually, these elements produced a utopian dimension of Vertov’s cinematic world. In this paper, I will focus on the film as a whole, but also specifically on the part of the film that showcases different types of leisure experienced by Soviet men and women.
One of the implications of my analysis here is the role that entertainment plays in authoritarian societies. While propaganda aims at creating a one-dimensional connection between the dominant ideology and citizens of the authoritarian state, entertainment can be seen as a two-way street. As Richard Dyer argues, entertainment that is understood either as escape or as wish-fulfillment entails “the sense that things could be better, that something other as what is can be imagined and maybe realized” (Dyer 20). However, unlike the classic utopia of Thomas More, entertainment does not create a model of an ideal world; rather, it provokes special feelings and associations with the things to come (ibid.). It is at this point, as I contend, that avant-garde film, entertainment, and utopianism intersect.
In a similar fashion, Mark D. Steinberg argued that the relation between utopia and dystopia can be seen “not as a simple opposition, but as a complex interrelationship” and that creative utopian imagination strives “to negate the darkness” of “lived human experience” (Steinberg 430). According to Steinberg, “intolerable social conditions in the here-and-now nurture utopia’s horizon of possibilities, its counter-ideals, its dreams” (ibid.)
Dziga Vertov, born David Kaufman in what is today’s Poland, began his artistic search in pre-revolutionary Petrograd, where he was a student of the Psycho-Neurological Institute. He became interested in experiments with sound and later in poetry of the leading Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky. Vertov’s experiments that included recording and rearranging the elements of the auditory world aligned with “the linguistic theories and experiments done by the Soviet formalists” (Petrić 25) and especially with “their investigation of poetic structure, the musical function of words, and the subliminal impact of syntax” (ibid.). In Petrograd, Vertov also met Viktor Shklovsky, who was a leading theorist of Russian formalism.
The avant-garde art emerged as an opposition to classical art, and futurists aimed at replacing traditional forms of visual culture and literature with works done in a new manner and with a different purpose. Vertov, just like Mayakovsky believed that cinema had to break with the theatrical conventions of representation and to serve the goals of exploration and analysis. The task of the new type of representation can be accomplished by the use of new technology – movie camera. However, in one of his early writings (We: Variant of a Manifesto, 1922) Vertov emphasized that camera was not merely an instrument of filmmaking, but “a true subject for film” (We: Variant of a Manifesto 7). In that same text, he described his cinematographic method of Cinema-Eye (also translated as Kino-Eye, Russian: Kino-Glaz).
Yet another source of Verotv’s cinematic style was his preoccupation with such phenomenon as literature of fact. In the 1920s, Russian formalists Osip Brik, Viktor Shklovsky, and Sergei Tret’jakov argued that literature of fact allowed formalists and futurists to better reflect on the everyday reality and its problems. Thus, it could serve the interests of post-revolutionary society better than imaginative works of art. As Sergei Tret’jakov noted, “There is no need to wait for Tolstojs, for we have our own narrative literature. Our narrative literature is the newspaper.” (quoted in: Barooshian 41). In a short essay “The Factory of Facts” (1923), Vertov attested to his devotion to this type of narration: “Filming facts. Sorting facts. Disseminating facts. Agitating with facts. Propaganda with facts. Fists made of facts” (The Factory of Facts and Other Writings 112).
During the years of 1918–1922, Vertov worked for the Moscow Cinema Committee where he produced the first Soviet newsreel series called Cinema Weekly (Russian: Kinonedelya). This was also the time of his first engagements with the genre of propaganda for the masses: he was in charge of producing two compilation films, Anniversary of the Revolution (1919) and A History of the Civil War (1922) (Feldman 45). During 1922–1925, Vertov gathered his production team that included himself, his brother and cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, and his wife and footage editor Elizaveta Svilova. These people would later produce The Man with a Movie Camera.
In 1927, Vertov left job at the Moscow Cinema Committee and, along with his team, moved to the VUFKU film studio in Odesa, Ukraine (the abbreviation VUFKU stands for the All-Ukrainian Photo and Cinema Administration). With the material that he had already shot in Moscow, Vertov embarked on a journey of creating an innovative documentary.
The cinematic aesthetics of The Man with a Movie Camera was original in at least three aspects. First of all, it was produced without a script or the intertitles. Second innovation referred to the replacement of film production “from the studio to the street” (Tomas 42) to engage with new social practices that could be found there. Lastly, Vertov consciously shifted the emphasis from the film itself to the mode of its production.
In order to better understand how public and private life as well as labor and leisure are represented in The Man with a Movie Camera, it will be helpful to give a summary of this one-hour film. During the first two minutes, we can observe the artistic credo of the director: “This is an attempt to show the phenomena without the aid of intertitles, without the aid of script... The film aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema” (The Man with a Movie Camera). Then, a large cinema hall is shown, and people hurry to occupy their seats before the film begins.
The first narrative part of the movie features the beginning of the day in a city, starting from a glimpse at a sleeping woman in a private apartment and moving forward to show residential buildings, street traffic, bus depots, shops, and hair salons. The image of a sleeping woman is juxtaposed with the figures of homeless adolescents who sleep in the streets. This part ends with a woman putting on her clothes and washing her face before starting her day.
In the beginning of the second narrative part, we meet the protagonist of the film – the cameraman, who is going to show us more aspects of the everyday city life and human labor. The cameraman is omnipresent: he is shown while capturing the crowded streets, in the coal mines alongside the miners, and while trying to capture the functioning of the train wheels that are shown in close-ups. Beginning from the 25th minute, we are following several episodes of private lives in a big city. First, a man and a woman show up at an office to get their marriage certificate. In the next scene, another couple is filmed at the same office; this time, however, they are shown getting their divorce papers. After that, we observe the funeral procession, which is juxtaposed with a scene where a woman gives birth to a child. Then, we once again dive into the city life during the day.
With its emphasis on the depiction of the city life, The Man with a Movie Camera had been compared to Walter Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). However, it is important to note that the cityscape in Vertov’s movie is a composite made of numerous episodes filmed in different places across the Soviet Union (Hicks 176). We can identify Moscow (by the shots of Bolshoi Theatre), Kyiv (the scenes of two couples’ marriage and divorce are accompanied by close-up shots of the inscriptions in their documents), rural regions somewhere in Ukraine (a young postman is shown carrying a postal box with an inscription in Ukrainian), and Odesa (people are shown on the shore of the Black Sea). Such an approach to the organization of cinematic material aligns with the director’s intention to create “a truly international... language of cinema” (The Man with a Movie Camera). At the same time, depicting everyday life in a socialist city gave Vertov numerous opportunities to juxtapose old and new (as in the scene where a horse-drawn carriage is shown yielding to a car) and to create his own urban utopia.
When depicting the scenes from the city life, Vertov and Kaufman used the method of “life caught off guard” (Hicks 184). Such an approach signalized about the intention to blur the boundaries between private and public spheres and to “undermine the notion of bourgeois privacy and individual space” (Latteier 1). The method implied that people could be recorded while performing their working obligations, conversing, or going about their daily lives. The typical reactions of those who were “caught off guard” included surprise, embarrassment, and even hostility to the camera operator. In the first part of Vertov’s film, this reaction itself is often an object of depiction. For instance, we may see that street kids who wake up in the street smile when they notice the man with a camera. At the same time, a homeless woman who is recorded sleeping on the bench feels frustrated with being captured by camera and hurries away. Finally, in the episode mentioned above, the man and the woman who are about to get divorce demonstrate completely different reactions to the presence of camera: the husband evidently enjoys being in the limelight, while his wife tries to cover her face with the handbag.
Between minutes 33 and 43 of the footage the viewers observe different kinds of labor: from manicuring and haircutting to manufacturing, producing steel, and coal mining. Within this part of the film, machines play a significant role: in particular, one can see the giant mechanical wheels of Volkhov Hydroelectric Station. Machines and people who run them are depicted in an optimistic manner. This optimism is especially noticeable if we compare Vertov’s approach to the representation of machinery to Charlie Chaplin’s treatment of the same issue in “Modern Times” (1936). While Chaplin depicted assembly line as an enslaving mechanism that deprives the workers of their free time and personal happiness, Vertov showed some kind of kinship between man and machine. As he himself noted, “our path leads through the poetry of machines, from the building citizen to the perfect electric man” (quoted in: Latteier 2). Such researchers as Turvey (Turvey 1999) and Latteier (Latteier 2002) argued that Vertov’s effort to demonstrate the affinity between men and machines was the implementation of his “Cinema-Eye” (Russian: Kino-Glaz) method that implied the parallel between human vision and the ability of the camera to “see” the world. In particular, Latteier mentions the scene in the first part of the film where a woman’s blinking eye is juxtaposed to the sequence of shots with the shutter of the camera opening and closing (Latteier 2).
Starting from minute 43, the viewers are exposed to the different types of leisure in the Soviet Union. As I contend, Vertov’s depiction of leisure can be interpreted as an effort to showcase Soviet utopia. This seventeen-minute part of the film differs from the preceding ten-minute fragment in at least two aspects. First of all, the emphasis here is placed on human bodies, not on human faces. Secondly, the role of machines is kept to a minimum, with carousel being the central image that combines entertainment and machinery.
The fragment starts from the depiction of the beach with lots of people, predominantly women, sunbathing and getting mud baths. The sunny sky of Odesa and the smiling faces of women on the beach create a relaxed, slow-paced atmosphere as opposed to the rush of the city life in the previous fragment. Next, we can observe wide shots of women in swimming suites doing calisthenics on the beach. Right after this, we can see individual athletes (both men and women) doing high jumps in front of the audience, also under the open sky. The shots with the athletes are juxtaposed with the episodes where ordinary young men play football on the football pitch.
Although Soviet state did not explicitly glorify physical beauty and able-bodiedness, the attention to public health and “physical culture” (the Soviet term to denote sports in schools and higher educational institution) was certainly present. The public discussion of the 1920s favored “physical culture” over competitive sport because “competitive sport diverted attention from the basic aim of providing recreation for the masses; it turned them into passive spectators” (Riordan 83). Interestingly, in the 1930s the same idea was worded by the Nazi politician Robert Ley, who, in his capacity as head of “Strength through Joy”, state-operated leisure organization (German: Kraft durch Freude) proclaimed that “it is not our goal to raise matadors; we only want to have healthy and happy people in the factories. For, having a healthy people is 90% of the solution of the whole social question.” (Timpe 37).
Vertov aimed at showing “healthy and happy” masses enjoying their spare time on the seashore, as well as ordinary people doing team sports just like professional athletes. Such a vision was, however, utopian, because it represented only one side of reality. First of all, this type of entertainment was only possible in the city where those who worked at the offices and industrial plants had days-off during the week. The dwellers of the countryside, however, had to perform a lot of agricultural work because they relied on the harvest as the source of their income. We can hypothesize that those young and able-bodied men and women captured by Vertov on the seashore were, in fact, peasants who relocated to big cities from the countryside during the years of 1928–1929, when a big wave of urban migration hit the Soviet villages. During 1928–1932, “urban population in the Soviet Union increased by almost twelve million, and at least ten million persons left peasant agriculture and became wage-earners” (Fitzpatrick 140). Therefore, older population in the countryside had to deal with bigger amount of agricultural labor and probably had little to no time for leisure.
Secondly, after the introduction of the Five-Year plan (the instrument of Stalin’s planned economy) in 1928, most factories were under the pressure to fulfill and overfulfill the plan (Fitzpatrick 132), which meant that workers had either to work more during their regular hours or to work overtime. Consequently, during their days-off workers could have demonstrated less desire to play outdoor games.
While the part of the film that showed outdoor entertainment and sports can be called utopian, the subsequent shots featuring the beer pub (perhaps somewhere in Germany, as it has a signboard that reads as “Bierhalle”) and the Soviet workers’ club inside the church building, are more propagandistic in nature. The juxtaposition of the beer pub in the capitalist country and the workers’ club in the Soviet state, where both men and women read newspapers and played chess, was intended to demonstrate the “superiority” of a Soviet citizen over a German petit-bourgeois. This message was enhanced by one of the subsequent scenes where a young woman targeted an object with a Nazi swastika in a shooting range.
At the same time, the scene that showed a workers’ club operating in the church building decorated with Lenin’s portrait had yet another meaning in the context of mass leisure. This meaning was connected to the Soviet campaign against religion. The new phase of this campaign has just started in 1928, and entailed legislation that severely prohibited all types of religious activities for believers. Such a prohibition deprived a significant number of people of opportunities to visit churches and religious gatherings, which for many used to be a common way to spend holidays. Those people may have viewed playing chess and reading newspapers as an insufficient replacement for their engagement with religious practices.
Finally, while depicting different types of entertainment, Vertov makes very few connections to the so-called “high culture,” including opera, theatre, concerts, libraries, or art galleries. He makes an emphasis on the fact that new socialist world aims at creating a new culture of its own. Even the shots featuring a pianist playing the piano focus on pianist’s hands – in such a way Vertov highlights the fact that an artist works with his hands just like any worker does. The final scenes of The Man with a Movie Camera where director juxtaposes the beginning of a theatrical performance in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with the beginning of his own film in a crowded cinema hall reiterated the director’s idea of a new type of leisure for a new life.
As demonstrated above, The Man with a Movie Camera was not only an embodiment of Vertov’s cinematographic method of Cinema-Eye, but also a film that contributed to the creation of socialist utopia. Vertov’s effort to show Soviet life as it was, in all the smallest details, conformed to the principles elaborated by the literature of fact (in Russian creative writing of the 1920s) and to the method of “life caught off guard” (in film). However, the director had an ambition to show the life of Soviet people not only as it was, but also as it had to be. The scenes of mass leisure in particular offered a number of opportunities for such a depiction. By showing young, able-bodied, and happy Soviet citizens enjoying their time off, Vertov brought to the viewers “feelings and associations with the things to come” (Dyer 20). The part of the film that depicted mass leisure, just like the preceding footage dedicated to labor and the role of machines, transmitted a powerful message to the viewer. This was in accordance with the utopia’s intention to transform the “darkness of lived human experience” (Steinberg 430).
Fortunately, Vertov’s approach to showcasing Soviet utopia turned out to be too sophisticated to fulfill the main tasks of Soviet propaganda. The masses needed uncomplicated, one-dimensional messages of what should be considered acceptable or hostile. The explicitly propagandistic films were more suitable to achieve this goal than experimental cinema. Consequently, the reception of the film in the Soviet Union was not quite positive. As Jeremy Hicks notes, although the formal merits of the film were acknowledged, “its relative paucity of unambiguous Communist propaganda and its lack of clear characters, or a plot, meant it was not widely appreciated” (Hicks 188). At the same time, Vertov’s film had a profound impact on European cinema, including the French style of documentary filmmaking known as cinéma vérité that developed in the 1960s. Most recently, an American artist of Canadian origin Perry Bard created a project Man with a Movie Camera: the Global Remake (2007 - ongoing), which is a web platform that allows everyone to upload the remakes of the footage of the original film. Consequently, Vertov’s experiment occupied its place in film history not only as an encyclopedia of Soviet life of the 1920s, but also as an ambitious endeavor that went beyond the time and place of its creation, inspiring artists all over the world up until today.
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