Together with Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), Man with a Movie Camera is undoubtedly the most famous (and perhaps the most radical) city symphony. Made by Dziga Vertov (1896–1956, pseudonym for Denis Kaufman), the film was shot in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa, and it evokes the optimism of the post-revolutionary Soviet society by depicting key aspects of modern metropolitan life on a single day. Focusing on the icons of urban modernity (industry, motorized traffic, anonymous crowds, shop windows, mass entertainment), the film evokes the rhythms of metropolitan life by means of experimental techniques such as fast editing, split screens, fast motion, jump cuts, freeze frames, multiple exposures, and stop-motion animation. In addition, Vertov did not hesitate to include several scenes featuring obvious stagings such as the scene in which a woman is getting out of bed and is getting dressed.
Much more explicit than in many other city symphonies, Vertov introduces an element of avant-garde self-reflection, since the film also includes images of its own making. First and foremost, we look at the omnipresent man with the camera (Mikhail Kaufman) shooting the film, who, on the one hand, acts as a kind of abstract, almost disembodied protagonist. On the other, he is also presented as a heroic figure, who climbs factory chimneys, rides cars and motorcycles, and hangs onto trains to make the most impressive shots. Apart from the titular cameraman, the film also features the woman (Elizaveta Svilova) editing it, the film operator screening it, and spectators watching it. Taking the pulse of the city and quite literally translating it into the rhythm of cinema, Vertov’s meta-film makes explicit the connection between film spectatorship and the stimulus-response mechanisms said to be produced by metropolitan modernity, with its dizzying kaleidoscopic atmosphere and sensory overload.
When it was released, Man with a Movie Camera was often criticized for putting form before content, both in the Soviet Union and in the West. Eisenstein famously described the film as “pointless camera hooliganism” while Paul Rotha said that in Britain, the film was regarded as a joke or mere trickery that couldn’t be taken seriously. Over the last few decades, however, the film has often been regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and it is considered a landmark in both documentary and avant-garde cinema. In fact, when the British Film Institute/Sight and Sound list of the Best Documentaries of All Time was released in 2014, Man with a Movie Camera occupied the #1 position.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Graf, Alexander, “Berlin—Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s,” in Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (eds.), Avant-Garde Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 77–92.
Tsivian, Yuri, Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Pordenone: Il Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004).
Turvey, Malcolm, “City Symphony and ‘Man with a Movie Camera’,” in The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 135–62.
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