Transcript
Felix Brinker, MA ● 1
Movies, Machines, Modernity: On Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera In his brief introductory talk given before our screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis three weeks ago, Shane Denson suggested that we might think of the somewhat haphazard title of our film series – “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity” – as a frame through which we might consider “cinema as a machine not just for the reflection, but the production of modernity.” Films, as we put it in the announcement for our film series, have “from the beginning ... presented themselves as the preeminent machines of modernity;” serving both “as a medium for imagining and envisioning modern landscapes and machinic cities” as well as “being involved directly in the making of modernity.” What I want to point out today is, that Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, perhaps more strongly and more openly than the other films in our series, not only presents itself as a film that consciously and programmatically affirms and foregrounds cinema’s productive role in this respect, but that it does so with an explicitly political agenda, namely as part of the greater utopian project of the ongoing socialist revolution and the transformation of the Soviet Union into a modern society. Man with a Movie Camera thus presents itself not only as an artistic experiment in film language, but as an overtly political filmic experiment that is located within the broad transformation processes that would bring about soviet modernity. In order to outline the reasoning behind the films’ formal strategies more concisely, it might make sense to recall Vertov’s professional career. Vertov began his filmmaking career as an editor for Kino-Nedelya, a weekly series of newsreels produced by the Moscow Cinema Committee after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. He spent some of his time at Kino-Nedelya as the operator of a film-car on a train that toured the country during the ongoing civil war between communists and the counterrevolutionary White Army, and which put on propaganda shows for red army troops and the general population. Looking back on this time in his 1926 manifesto “Kino-Eye,” Vertov emphasizes his dissatisfaction with the propaganda materials targeted at Russian peasants, who constantly appeared to misunderstand, misread, or ignore the agitational content of the film dramas and theatrical plays staged and produced by train’s crew. In this essay, Vertov recalls his impression of the peasants’ differing reactions to propaganda films and newsreels as follows:
Felix Brinker, MA ● 2
“1920. I’m in charge of a cinema-train car. We’re showing films at a remote station. There’s a film-drama on the screen. The Whites and the Reds. The Whites drink, dance, kiss half-naked women; during the interludes they shoot Red Prisoners. The Reds underground. The Reds at the front. ... The Reds win and put all the drunken Whites and their women in prison. The content’s good, but why should anyone want to show filmdramas based on the same old cliché used five years ago? The viewers- illiterate and undeducated peasants – don’t read the titles. They can’t grasp the plot. ... These still unspoiled viewers don’t understand artificial theatricality. ... These viewers are seeing the film screen for the first or second time; and when, after the sugary actors of a film-drama, real peasants appear on the screen, they all perk up and stare at the screen.” (“Kino-Eye,” from: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 61)
For the rural population who had little familiarity with the codes and conventions of theatrical dramas and feature films, as Vertov is quick to point out, the propaganda films seemed to be less interesting than the newsreel images chronicling recent events and technological advances made in the young soviet union. Where the propaganda films seemed to fail, the newsreels and actualities shown would succeed in capturing the audiences’ attention and interest: “The more remote the place, the less the peasants grasped the general, urgent, agitational meaning of propaganda films, drawings, and plays. At the same time, however, the newsreels played after those features would never fail to capture the attention of their audience: A real tractor, which these viewers knew of only from hearsay, has plowed over a few acres in a matter of minutes, before their very eyes. Conversations, shouts, questions. There’s no question of actors. On the screen are their own kind, real people. There isn’t a single false, theatrical movement to unmask the screen to shake the peasants confidence.” (61) Vertov is quick to attribute this difference to the artificial and constructed “social fantasy” of the film dramas shown which would, as a kind of “film-moonshine,” intoxicate their viewers with false and romanticized ideas about labor and social life in general, and which would work mostly through “stupefaction and suggestion” (61, 62). However, his examples also suggests that the spectacularity of the cinematic apparatus, its status as a modern scientific marvel – and the images of modern machinery it projected – succeeded in capturing the audiences attention where the more overt propaganda pieces seemed to fail. As a mobile “cinema of attractions” (Gunning), Vertov’s cinema-car not only brought
Felix Brinker, MA ● 3
images of modern technology to the country; in putting the cinematic apparatus on display, it also brought the spectacle of modern technology directly to those had little contact with it before. More than through its content, one might argue, the medium of film thus seemed to carry the revolutionary promise of modernization through its status as a technological wonder. ‘In his “Kino-Eye”-manifesto, Vertov takes these observations as the basis for a new kind of revolutionary film aesthetics that would be distinct from the ‘falseness’ of the theater and the feature film: “If we really want to understand the effect the motion picture has on the viewer, then we must settle two things: 1. which viewer? 2. What effect on the viewer are we talking about? The effect of the usual artistic drama on the steady viewer is that of the customary cigar or cigarette on the smoker. Poisoned by film-nicotine, the viewer sticks like a leech to the screen that tickles his nerves. A film-object made of newsreel footage will do much to sober this viewer, and if we’re speaking of taste, will seem to him an unpleasant antidote.” (62) Newsreel images and documentary film, Vertov argues, would thus constitute a more effective means of mobilizing the revolutionary masses – but not as a means of manipulation or suggestion, but as a more neutral tool to inspire the viewers to consciously engage with their own historical situation, to bring about a revolutionary class consciousness that would transform the peasants from passive subjects of feudal domination into revolutionary historical actors who would be able take control of their own lives: “We oppose the collusion of the ‘director-as-magician’ and a bewitched public. Only consciousness can fight the sway of magic in all its forms. Only consciousness can form a man of firm opinion, firm conviction. We need conscious men, not an unconscious mass submissive to any passing suggestion. Long live the class consciousness of the healthy with eyes and ears to see and hear with! ... Long live the class vision! Long live kino-eye!” (66)
Felix Brinker, MA ● 4
In order to fulfill its desired function as an antidote to the false magic of the film drama,
Man with a Movie Camera thus relies on a documentary aesthetics and takes it to its logical end point: not only does Vertov’s film present its scenes of urban life without any obvious narrative framing or character-centric narration, it also engages with the concrete material and social practices involved in the production of film itself. Next to its images of urban social life in the soviet union, Man with a Movie Camera thus repeatedly displays camera men filming their subjects, cutters editing film stock, and film projectors screening film images; and it does so, arguably, to render its own constructedness and its process of production transparent to an (perhaps imagined) revolutionary audience of class- and selfconscious viewers. Furthermore, by juxtaposing scenes in which filmmaking practices are put on display with others that document life and work in soviet cities, Vertov’s film situates itself, and film production in general, squarely within the totality of material practices that constitute and reproduce the social life in modern societies. Man with a
Movie Camera, as Jonathan L. Beller has argued, thus “is necessarily about its own conditions of production” and invites its viewers to map the “analogies between the actions of the individual, the city, and its [that is, the film’s] own operation” (155). Other then the other films in our series, Man with a Movie Camera thus tries to let its scenes of machines, trains, movie cameras, and city life stand for themselves, without providing an obvious framing narrative or prefabricated logic of signification which its viewers could simply accept or ignore. This aspect especially comes into sharp focus if we contrast it with Metropolis’s nightmarish imagery of man-devouring machines which Lang’s film perhaps unsuccessfully tries to subordinate to the essentially social-democratic message of the “heart” that should mediate between the “hands” and the “brains” of its futuristic society. (“Mittler zwischen Hirn und Händen muss das Herz sein“ ). Vertov’s film, in contrast, asks its audience to come up with their own framing narrative to connect the movie, its image of itself, the machines it displays, and the modernity it envisions. Works Cited: Beller, Jonathan L. “Dziga Vertov and the Film of Money.” Boundary 2 26.3 (1999). 151-199.
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Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avantgarde.” The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Ed. Wanda Strauven. Amsterdam: UP, 2006. 381-388. Vertov, Dziga. “Kino-Eye.” Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Trans. Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. 60-79.
