Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

Dziga Vertov in his Soviet fashioned outfit

Man With a Movie Camera

Vertov's 1929 film has a reputation similar to Citizen Kane in film studies as the most analyzed movie of all time. A brief prologue announces that Man With A Movie Camera will contain no intertitles, plot or theatrical devices—Vertov considered fictional projects untruthful and counter-revolutionary—and will be an attempt "at creating a truly international, absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature." Vertov created a landmark of cinematic history, reworked lately by the Soviet montage theory and the underground movies of the 1960s.

Vertov investigates the camera as a tool for controlling and shaping our perceptions of reality and perhaps reality itself: the film opens with a theater that is getting ready for spectators without human intervention. Vertov planned every shot, every cut, meticulously and Man With a Movie Camera is still an important work for film classes and visual theorists. The film shows a series of glances at modern Russian life, with the action moving from filmed scenes, to scenes of people filming, to scenes of film being edited, to scenes of an audience reacting to the film and back again with fascinating fluidity. The camera itself is detached and also the subject of the film.

The story behind Vertov's film is perhaps more interesting than the story itself. Vertov spent several years filming, then just retired to an editing room where he supposedly threw every technique he had at the print, just to see what would happen. What we have is a film without a naration that shows the possiblities of the cinematic language.

When Vertov places the word "experiment" in the opening credits, he opens up a great deal of speculation to the meaning of his images. He could be trying to tell us something in an ethnographic way about realities in Soviet Union, but he's already said he's playing with the art form, so how ethnografic relevant is the significance of a scene?

Despite numerous differences, a good comparison lies in Luis Bunuel's breakthrough avant-garde Un Chien Andalou. Both 1929 experimental films contain surreal imagery and were created for artistic purposes to explore new directions for cinema, and both have influenced filmmakers ever since. Although Vertov primarily wanted to explore the technological possibilities of cinematography and the visual medium, while Bunuel focused on shocking audiences with representations of dreams, they both converge with cinematic expression that forces audiences to form their own meanings from the wordless imagery.