Audient Authentic: Man With a Movie Camera

This is the second in my 2020 monthly series watching “classic” documentaries, i.e., significant documentaries from before 1990.

Man With a Movie Camera should have hit my viewing schedule long before now, if only because it was 2012 when I marvelled over it making the top ten of the Sight & Sound poll, making it the highest rated movie I had never seen. It’s closer to the 2022 Sight & Sound poll than the 2012, but I’ve finally now seen it.

I probably didn’t see it before now because I viewed it as a chore. I don’t remember who made a snide comment over how insufferable it was, but that comment lodged in my head and stuck there.

Well, whoever made that comment was wrong.

Really impressive stuff here.

If you are somehow not familiar with Man With a Movie Camera, it is Dziga Vertov’s 1929 experimental film whose title is kind of a literal explanation of what it is. There do not seem to be any guiding principles to this film beyond Vertov and his camera operator, Mikhail Kaufman, traveling around the Soviet cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa, filming the daily lives of average Soviets.

This sounds boring. It decidedly is not.

The filmmakers experiment with all sorts of different camera setups, the crazier the better, and they also film themselves in the act of filming, to shine a light on the process of filmmaking and its inherent challenges and acts of derring-do. There’s a third collaborator who plays an equal role in what we see here, and that’s editor Elizaveta Svilova, who is also shown on camera in the midst of plying her trade. She was Vertov’s wife. I’ve always known that editing was a business that seemed to attract women disproportionately to other behind-the-scenes film roles, but I had no idea that was the case as long ago as the 1920s.

And Svilova’s editing is, in a way, the star of the show. I was pretty astonished by the small number of frames – sometimes only one or two I would guess – Svilova would splice into longer scenes, or sometimes alternate small numbers of frames from the same two scenes in such quick succession that it created a strobe effect. It’s especially astonishing given the prevailing wisdom about filmmaking at that time, when an uninterrupted sequence that’s way too long was far more common than one that was too short. Not only that, she seems aware of the eerie effect this editing can have, as when a face is ominously edited into a longer sequence for only a couple frames, then vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived.

This is not the only way they’re playing with the capabilities of the moving image. There are a number of scenes here where images are superimposed over one another, which may have been accomplished by double exposure or some other technique. There’s a great stop motion technique in which a camera and its tripod appear to come to life, unpacking themselves from their box, beeping at an appreciative audience like R2-D2 (in the version of the score I heard, anyway) and then slinking off the side of the frame. There are also split screens, with several scenes appearing side by side, and even an effect that I most closely identified with Inception, where a building appears to be folding in upon itself. Whether Vertov influenced Christopher Nolan or the other way around, I’m not sure.

The actual content goes from mundane to enthralling. There are many people at work, in factories and such, but there’s also plenty of play, as people lounge on the beach or compete in sports. One sequence in which a woman is repeatedly making some kind of hand-folded object at high speeds was particularly memorable. There are people in transit, and people in stasis – in fact, a funeral is filmed. But so is a birth (and yes, you see the immediate aftermath in close biological detail). And then there’s a sequence of people signing marriage licenses in an office.

I wouldn’t say that I was in this film’s thrall at first. In fact, as I was developing what I would say in my head, I thought my perspective would be that the lack of a narrative meant that it was only necessary to see some of Man With a Movie Camera, to get the gist of what it was about. Getting up to get something from the fridge was not a cause for needing to pause the film.

But as it continued on, I found each sequence to be more essential, and often profound. The film is not structured narratively, but at least, for the most part, it keeps like parts together. If the whole thing was interspersed seemingly at random, it might start to feel tedious the way a Terrence Malick film can feel. But it moves from work to play to vehicles to machinery to sport, sometimes doubling back to revisit a previous topic, but never losing a sense of forward momentum in its structure.

The only thing that somewhat marred my experience was the fact that YouTube was playing up on me. I watched it through the YouTube app on my TV. It being periodically broken up by ads was annoying enough – it was quite a jolt out of the moment to suddenly be seeing an ad for Picard – but the real frustration came when the video would quit and say “Something went wrong.” This happened about five times. I’m not sure if it was a YouTube issue or my shitty internet, which was also lagging significantly, but the end result was that I needed to go back in and fast-forward back to where I had been. And since I couldn’t see what the timecode was when it crapped out, I mostly had to guess at this, sometimes repeating sequences. I was also jumping around between about five different versions of the video, as the one that had stopped working could not resume, or at least, could not resume straight away. These videos varied in quality and also, I believe, had different scores.

Then again, I think Vertov might appreciate the disjointed and disrupted way I watched his film. Man With a Movie Camera uses disjointedness as its central ethos, and it sure was a disruptor in early cinema.

I’m undecided on a movie for March. I had a candidate in mind but found out that it’s only 25 minutes long, and I’m trying to decide how married I am to the idea of a documentary being (approximately) feature length. My first two movies were over an hour long, but the most significant documentaries of the 1930s seem to be a fair bit shorter than that. Since you aren’t likely following along with your own viewing anyway, maybe I’ll just surprise you.