Mikhail Kaufman (1897–1980) was Dziga Vertov’s brother, his longtime cameraman, and a key member of both the Kinoks and the Council of Three, and he’s best known to film scholars, cinephiles, and students as the cameraman who shot Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, as well as the one who appears in it as the “man with a movie camera.” Famously, Vertov was both fascinated and “pained” by René Clair’s Paris qui dort when he saw it in Brussels in April 1926, because he felt that someone abroad had made a film whose “technical design” was the exact match for one he had devised two years earlier. When Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City was released the following year, in 1927, Vertov was even more upset, because he was convinced that a German competitor had not only beaten him to the punch, but had brazenly used many of the Kino-Eye movement’s own techniques. Vertov didn’t express it at the time, because they were both officially key members of the Kinoks group, but it must have also bothered him that his own brother, together with Ilya Kopalin (1900–76), who was also a Kinok, had released yet another city film, Moscow, a year earlier in 1926, because we know there were tensions between the two brothers that would eventually flare up into a total rupture in 1929.
For its first two-thirds, Moscow features a rudimentary “day-in-the-life-of-a-city” structure, one that features many of the regular semantic elements of the city symphony style, including shots of street cleaning, factories, construction projects, a zoo, an amusement park, athletics, and so on, as well as a fascination with modern industry, modern communications, modern commerce, modern transportation, and modern congestion. What really distinguishes it as a city symphony, however, is its inventive approach to cinematography and editing, including extreme high- and low-angle shots, daring travelling shots, and rapid, disorienting panning shots, as well as the use of stop-motion, split-screen, and multiple-exposure sequences. Scholars of Vertov and of the Kino-Eye movement will note to what extent Kaufman cannibalized his own cinematography from Kino-Eye (1924), borrowing part of the earlier film’s famous special effects-laden study of diving, as well as how Vertov, in turn, would cannibalize Moscow in the production of Man with a Movie Camera, borrowing shots of the Bolshoi Theatre and adjacent Theatre Square and Revolution Square, and a taxidermic wolf (that he also used in A Sixth Part of the World, 1926), among others.
Its final third is primarily a study of the “official Moscow and the workings of government,” as Malcolm Turvey states elsewhere in this collection, and accordingly the film shifts its tone and its approach, becoming much more conventional and much more strictly expository.
Some of Vertov’s strongest critics expressed enthusiasm for Kaufman and Kopalin’s film, including Sergei Eisenstein, who called Moscow “brilliant,” and argued that it provided a much better model for the path the Kino-Eye movement should take than Vertov’s films, and Lev Kuleshov who declared the film “amazing” and praised it alongside Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) as being among the greatest triumphs of Soviet cinema.
Anthony Kinik
further reading
Kaufman, Mikhail, “An Interview with Mikhail Kaufman,” October 11 (1979): 54–76.
Tsivian, Yuri (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Sacile and Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004).
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