MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

Dziga Vertov can be regarded as a pioneer of Database Cinema, with his film ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ being an earlier representation of this form. The film is shot like a ‘documentary’ (recording and exploring visual phenomena that unfolds before the camera). Furthermore, the structure of the film reflects ‘database cinema’ (in that images of city life are collected, selected and assembled in an un-conventional way, that goes beyond simple human navigation through physical space). We can identify the film as being experimental in form (which implies a certain rigidity, uncertainty exisiting, in regard to shots), and as one which offers an alternative model to narrative, established by the beginning title that states the film as being created “Without a scenario” e.g. which implies that the film does not have any ‘one’ particular location, character or plot, and the film is not ‘scene’ based, (although things still happen in spaces).

From the opening sequence we are provided with a framework for the workings of the film, (that is a tripartite structure based on three orientations of the camera). First we have the man with the camera (cameraman filming material for his film), then images of the ‘recorded’ (shots of an audience watching the completed film in the theatre), and finally that which has been captured on film (the actual film which projects collected shots from street life in Russian cities, which, unlike the first two sections of the film, is structured chronologically, presenting the movement of cities from day to night). I’d like to suggest that what is made most explicit by Vertov’s ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is the relationship between cinema and everyday life. In this, Vertov’s inclusion of the cinematic apparatus in his sequences supports this idea, and indicates the camera and or the cinema as belonging in the space of the ‘everyday’. Through the Kino-Eye (cinema-eye) he records life as it is (that is, without the presence of the camera), and life unaware (life surprised, provoked and energised by the presence of the camera). Furthermore, through the film we observe Vertov’s interest in the everyday with his artistic inter-splicing of images of visual phenomena e.g. life, death, work, love, birth, movement, happiness, melancholic moments, emergency etc.

Another aspect of the film which is most interesting is its self reflexive nature. It is here that the following screen titles “A record on celluloid in 6 reels” has relevance. This, I would like to suggest, can be interpreted as an instruction for viewers to think toward rather than away from materiality. This highlights the self reflective nature of the film, in that the viewer is now able to identify themselves within the filmmaking process. What can be taken from this is that the film is the archetype of the reflexive mode, for it takes into account the viewer’s knowledge of filmmaking techniques and the editing processes, thereby presenting the cinematic reality as something which exists as separate from our own ( through the camera lens, the ‘Kino-Eye’), but formed from our own. In essence, the film presents itself as a representation of reality rather than actual reality by showing the actual editing process of the film, with editors cutting the film and splicing it together.