No thorough survey of Dziga Vertov’s film “The Man with a Movie Camera” would be complete and accurate without some prior background knowledge and understanding of both the personality of Vertov, today recognized inventor of modern film documentary, and his writings. This paper geared towards an historical perspective of his most famous film would subsequently suffer immensely from these absences. It will therefore undertake the presentation of this vital background. In the first place, a short biography about the author will be provided in order to place the work in historical context. Then a brief summary of Vertov’s main didactic writings, his manifestoes, will be skimmed over and so in order to validate the subsequent critical research. Virtually all the critical writings about Vertov’s films have been and continue to be analyzed in the light of these writings. The two, films and writings, appear to be inseparable. Furthermore, neglecting to acknowledge them in relation to each other would also seriously injure the well-foundedness of this paper for the obvious reason that these writings deal exclusively with film theory. Vertov was indeed, like many of his Russian peers, not only a great filmmaker but also a great experimental theorist. Following this groundwork establishing both historical and artistic tenets, the paper would then move onto the actual study of the criticism of “The Man with a Movie Camera,” (Chelovek s Kinoapparatom). Some definitions, nonetheless, have to be clarified in order not to confuse writings and films, which often bear the same title. For example the distinction of words such as “кино-глаз” (kino-glaz) is often unclear. The words can refer both to a conceptual theory in the first instance, or a film, as the title of the film. For the sake of eligibility, a standard among Vertovian scholars, “Cinema-eye” will refer to the theory and the “kino-glaz” to the film.

Finally, one short word should be said about the nature of the sources. Up until the booming of Film Studies Departments around the world during the late 60’s and early 70’s, the volume of critical writings about Vertov (and films at large) had remained, although consistent, manageable and relatively accessible. The bulk of these writings is located mostly in Europe. Russian of course constitutes the main language to access criticism about Vertov. Yet, numerous sources in French, Italian, German, and Spanish helped to fathom this paper. The last twenty years of academic endeavors, in media and film studies (probably caused by the development of the media culture) have seen a substantial increase in the volume and interest of Vertov’s works. What first appeared as an accessible and controllable project leading to a thorough and encompassing research turned out to reflect a vast and inexhaustible scope. The present dedication and interest about Vertov and his works are simply astounding, covering thousand of articles worldwide.[1] The process of investigation then had to work in reverse—through selection. The task, nonetheless, retained some difficulties, resulting in further limitations. Indeed, a great deal of materials remained inaccessible. The foreign volume of criticism about Vertov translated is still relatively low compared to its production. The first obstacle arose from locating these articles either in their original or translated formats, within the States. In some instances, this investigation of sources turned out to be too time consuming for the time-scope of this paper. In other instances, the foreign locations of these sources simply denied access to precious materials: some seminal articles and books had to be excluded, remaining unavailable.

Paradoxically, compared to the massive academic interests that he has experienced over the last seventy years, outside the academic circles, Vertov remains an unknown figure. His reputation, notwithstanding, as a revolutionary filmmaker-director, combined with his critical innovative legacy, places him on the same rank in the pantheon of legendary figures with no less than Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, and Dovzhenko. All these Russian directors together transformed the filmmaking process and the history of film. Because of their innovations and discoveries, their influences are still felt to this day. Likewise, Dziga Vertov’s contributions have been enormous. Dziga Vertov was born Denis Arkadyevitch Kaufman in 1896, in Bialystok (today’s Poland). After fleeing the German invasion in 1915, the Kaufman family relocated to Petrograd,[2] then the cradle of Russian artistic life. Exposed to the then currents of new artistic trends, Denis Kaufman, while studying medicine, became a follower of avant-garde movements such as Formalism, a spin-off on Italian Futurism, Suprematism, and Constructivism, which included personalities such as Osip Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Sergei Essenine. As a consequence with these associations, Denis Kaufman decided to change his name to Dziga Vertov, where “dziga” means a child’s toy top, or in Ukrainian a word describing Gypsies. “Vertov,” on the other hand, refers to something spinning or twirling. Thus “Dziga Vertov” must either mean “Spinning Top” or “Spinning Gypsy.”[3] Within three years after his arrival in Petrograd, the newly converted Vertov had begun to apply his theoretical writing about the destiny of art to filmmaking, experimenting later with sound recording and assemblage. He was hired as a secretary to the newly appointed director of Moscow Cinema Committee, Kol’tsov, which was about to release the first Soviet weekly newsreel, Kinonedelia, in Moscow. The Russian revolution had just occurred, and the Bolsheviks needed new artists to support their causes. Vertov’s career was launched. For the next five years, he was to tour Russia to collect materials for his newsreels. He became the first to experiment with the compilation genre of footage, the documentary films. The impact of this former learning process remains visible in all his subsequent films. Kino-Pravda,[4] the newspaper’s newsreels, made for the State Film Studio, Goskino, been produced in 1922, became the springboard for the use of the candid camera. Vertov, in 1922 and 1923, wrote two of his first representative theoretical manifestoes on the use of the camera, We and Kinoks-Revolution. His first film-reportage, “Kino-Glaz,” made in 1924, marks the beginning of a new era in film documentary following Vertov’s critical doctrine, which echoed Lenin’s feeling about the future of cinema, according to which “cinema [understood as documentary and educational films, the famous factual films] represented the most important art.”[5] This belief worked in complete opposition to fictional filmmakers, such as Eisenstein and Kuleshov, whose films Vertov rejected for their sappy sentimentality. Nonetheless, succeeding the application of cinema-eye, Vertov realized a series called “Life Caught Unaware” (Zhizn’ Vosproch), of which “Kino-Glaz” was the first installment. Vertov went on making films after films, whether newsreel or reportage, with the distinction that each time his theories applied to cinematic techniques became more and more abstract, anti-realistic. The reception of his work grew increasingly damaging on the part of fiction film directors who saw their work favorably received abroad. Vertov was finally fired by Goskino in 1926. It was in the following two years that he was to make his three most famous films, with the technical and financial helps of VUFKU (All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration) where he gained independence and freedom of creative expression, “Odinnadtsatyi,” (The Eleventh Year) 1927; “Chelavek c Kino-apparatom,” (1929); and “Simfoniia Donbassa,” (Enthusiasm) 1930, his first sound film.

These three films, especially “The Man with a Movie Camera,” marked the end of an artistic era, when the value of films and their implementation in the Russian social life became the center of political focus. The bitter breech opened by the differentiation between fiction films and reportage-documentary increases in depth and virulence. Vertov not only already condemned the sentimentality of fiction film directors for coaxing their audiences into easy emotions but also attacked other film documentary directors for their “documentalism,” a concept that must be understood in the light of the end of the first NEP,[6] which sought to celebrate Stalin’s politic of reconstruction. “Documentalism” was thus a method of filmic depiction based exclusively on facts and realism, contrary to Vertov’s documentary stylistic approach favoring an inclination towards an artistic avant-garde. Unsurprisingly, before moving on to the second stage of this paper and scrutinizing Vertov’s writings, we must add that the conflict born from the divergent artistic interests plagued Vertov for the rest of his life[7]. He went on to make other films until his death, in 1954, with growing difficulties and never succeeding in recapturing the creative freedom of his youth. His articles failed to find publishers; his film proposals were rejected one after the other. Only with the German invasion in 1941 did his career resumed for the remaining of the war. He made in total 29 films ranging from the four-reel reportage to the twenty-three issues of “Kinopravda.” “Three Songs of Lenin,” (1934); “Lullaby,” (1937); and “Sergo Ordzhonikidze” constitute other interesting works.[8]

As already mentioned at the beginning of this paper, Vertov, besides his films, is also known for his publications. His involvement and contribution with the Russian avant-garde made him a proponent for the experimental filmmaking. This intellectual devotion in fact supported and was applied to his filmmaking. In other words to understand Vertov’s films one must comprehend his writings, and vice-versa. The key texts establishing and developing his theories of “non-acted” films have been widely translated and printed; some are still currently in print[9]. They can be recapitulated in three major texts: We, his first manifesto; Kinoks-Revolution; and Cinema-eye. Although at this point replicating large extent of these texts would be both a consuming and unnecessary project, a brief summary of the key nomenclature still calls for attention. These texts, however, like the films cannot be understood outside the historical context from which they resulted. The determining event that allowed these theoretical manifestos to materialize was the Russian Revolution, in 1917. The event exposed clearly that until then Russian directors were accustomed to take their ideas from abroad. Heavily influenced by Italian Futurists and French cubists, the new generation of filmmakers decided to invent their own version of artistic progress. Vertov happened to be interested in this intentional Cultural Revolution. In 1919, he proceeded to pass a “death sentence on all films made before 1919[10] (footnoted in Feldman p 25). “The Man with a Movie Camera,” ten years later, became the supreme achievement of this deconstructive intellectual trend, whose central premise dictated a move towards a scientific system of composition instead of an accumulation of facts and personal opinions. Since machines could produce things, cameras could produce their own films. The direct implication of this filmic strategy was to remove the human subject from the center of attention. Melodramatic films, in the light of the new proletarian society, were perceived as inadequate to the new fusion between humans and machines.[11] This condemnation lies at the heart of We. The opening sentences are explicit about the movement’s aim.

WE proclaim the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and likes, to be leprous.

Yet, in a revolutionary model set by the Russian Revolution, Vertov understood that the construction of a new order could not occur without the deconstruction of the old “regime.” The end of the manifesto echoes the artistic methodology to follow:

Cinema is as well, the art of inventing movements of things in space in response to the demands of science; it embodies the inventor’s dream—be he scholar, artist, engineer, or carpenter; it is the realization by kinochestvo of that which cannot be realized in life.

Drawing in motion. Blueprints in motion. Plans for the future. The theory of relativity on the screen.

Our eyes, spinning like propellers, take off into the future on the wings of hypothesis.

We believe that the time is at hand when we shall be able to hurl into space the hurricanes of movement, reined in by our tactical lassoes.

Hurrah for the poetry of machines, propelled and driving; the poetry of levers, wheels, and wings of steel; the iron cry of movements; the blinding grimaces of red-hot streams. (Vertov p 9).

The dogma asserted in such manifestoes came to be the foundation of the Formalist artists. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, a new society looked eagerly towards the future; the present was to be suspended in order to secure the success of the revolution. In turn the new non-acted “life-caught-unaware” documentary became both the proposition for the future generations and the revolution (as well as a severe critic of subjective and sentimental western cinema). The critic was taken a step further in his subsequent manifesto, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in which Vertov made a segue with realism. The text illustrates a concern with the move away from “the limitations imposed by a desire to copy human vision,” (Feldman p34).

. . . I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a word, the likes of which only I can see.

I free myself from today and forever from human immobility, I am in constant movement, I approach and draw away from objects, I crawl under them, I move alongside the mouth of a running horse, I cut into a crowd at full speed, I run in front of running soldiers, I turn on my back, I rise with an airplane, I fall and soar together with falling and rising bodies.

This is I, apparatus, maneuvering in the chaos of movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.

Free from the obligation of shooting 16-17 shots [sic] per second, freed from the frame of time and space, I coordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I may plot them.

My road is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you. (Vertov p53).

Even though these proclamations represent a radical departure from a mimetic cinematographic representation, both manifestoes still failed to explain in details the manner to achieve the new freedom. Until the publication of Cinema-Eye, representing the practical experimentation of the design, the concept of non-acted documentary free from the desire of human representation remained mostly abstract. Cinema-Eye was to restore this practical lacuna. Inversely to the first two texts mentioned whose intellectual essence preceded their conceptions, Cinema-Eye resulted directly from practical experience. Vertov gives concrete evidences of the way to achieve his filmic revolution. This piece of writing (first tested in “Kino-Glaz) also no longer addresses a general public but a selected public who, given the technological jargon used, possessed a thorough filmic knowledge. The crux of this technical proposal insists on the importance of montage,[12] the essential riddance of artistic personality, and the cult of the machine, in this instance, the camera itself. Vertov distinguishes three phases of montage: the montage of evaluation consisting in grouping footage by themes; the montage synthesis, dealing with personal observations on the themes; and the general montage, which establishes the order of exposition of shots according to the thematic selections (Vertov p60-61). For the next following ten years, Vertov materialized his theories. He and his “troika” team[13] became real Kinoki (Camera-eyes, derived kino-glaz), completing thus the full theoretical circle where kino-eye means “I see through the camera” added to kino-write “I record with the camera” added to kino-organize “I edit” (Leong p 2). Being Kinoki suggested to them and implied the possibility of deciphering what is visible and invisible to the human eyes. Kinoki were therefore true militants of a revolutionary movement gearing towards erasing the narrative’s structure of fiction films to substitute it with hard facts in order to give the new society a strong and original voice. After the publication of the original text of “Cinema-eye” (1929), which coincides with the release of “The Man with a Movie Camera,” the machine-camera becomes the star of Vertov’s documentary films. “The Man with a Movie Camera”[14] deifies precisely the human-made machine, the camera.

No criticism could be fully understood without a brief description of the film. MMC consists of a series of footage taken both in Moscow and in various locations in Ukraine which depict a Day in the Life of a Soviet city. The film is a documentary without verbal narration, although the film is definitely structure around a temporal theme. The film begins by showing an empty movie theater under diverse angles, an employee threading the film, getting ready to work, the audience coming in, and the projectors warming. This is the phase of induction. Section one could be called “waking:” a woman is waking up, she washes up, dresses up, she gets ready to go to work. To this short sequence succeeds the beginning of the day at work: factories open, machines are switched on, etc. The next segment relates to the day’s work: workers are performing miscellaneous tasks. Follows section three: work stops and leisure begins. To conclude, we go back to the movie-theater with its audience. The film shows various shots of the city once again.

Montage becomes the issue of investigation. The montage sequences are present in every single segment of the film. For example, every single time that a trick is shown on the screen, the presence of the cameraman in the subsequent shot on the screen, next to the depicted subject, reveal to the audience the trick that has just been used. This process of explanation sought to show and inspire the laborers of the possibilities gained by using machines. If machines could help to have and live better life, the workers could enjoy leisure. Yet, the message was not received as intended. Even though the film was explicit about its own propagandistic aim, controversy began to appear in political intelligentsia who complained about the unrealistic representation about the worker’s lives. The film employed too many unnatural visual effects greatly misleading the masses. The remaining of this paper is devoted to the history of this open-ended controversy.

Despite Vertov’s relative obscurity outside film departments, his works have been the focus of a vast body of criticisms. The earliest writings (compiled by Feldman, published 1979[15]) date back from 1922, and their output remains consistent until the early sixties with an average of four to six articles per year. Since the late seventies, a date marking the establishment of a broad network, development, and instituting of academic film studies departments around the world, the literature and publication have soared. Feldman’s groundwork, despite the twenty-one year caesura separating us, offers a precious insight into a global filmic research, especially dealing with materials pre-dating the mid-sixties that current digital technology still fails to cover. Hence, the work-cited pages compiled for this paper began with this book, which was then supplemented with a thorough personal research based on the most important seminal articles. Furthermore, these work-cited pages completely eschewed reviews and biographical articles about Vertov. Indeed, Feldman’s book offers both a bibliography about the films and a bibliography about Vertov’s own writings mixed with biographical publications. Because both bibliographies are juxtaposed, and their subjects are often intertwined, selecting an appropriate article relevant for this paper could have become a headache. Yet, because of the theoretical understanding supplied at the beginning of this paper, the comprehension for a brief historical research about MMC gains clarity. Also two books edited by R. Taylor and Ian Christie add some significant texts helpful to further a thorough study about the climatic era of Soviet film industry and were often consulted. The Film Factory offers seminal texts per years of composition in relation to the creation of films. Some critical Russian texts by authors other than Vertov shade some light into the understanding of Vertov’s theoretical cinematographic approach. Inside the Film Factory extends the previous debate in relation to the technical improvement of filmmaking process. It is no longer a compilation of manifestoes retrieved from Russian film archives; it is a researched analysis in which both authors, painstakingly and in extreme details, break down the advance of Russian and Soviet filmmaking, moving from early compilation works to sound editing.

The first most interesting articles of the early criticism occur around the years of the release, in 1929-31, of MMC which puts Vertov on the map of greatness as one of the most innovative filmmakers. Yet, these articles tend to describe the content of the subject on the screen in very unengaging fashion. Such is Blasketon’s article[16]. Blakeston simply depicts the shots on the screen and then attempts to infer what they may have suggested. Although he remains enthusiastic about Vertov’s work, his argument, to say the least, remains considerable weak, very much limited to personal impressions, which isolate the work from doctrine and historical contexts. The article clearly betrays an old-fashioned “close-reading” type of approach, suggesting that works of art float on their own and are removed from the world they produce them. For example Blakeston notices that MMC “is grand propaganda” without ever establishing his position, the causality of the statement that will prove his premise. The article is overall tedious but quite pertinent to show the disparity that, perhaps, existed between the highly politically and theoretically minded Vertov and his Western artistic counterparts.

Rudolf Arnheim’s article, on the other hand, departs from Blakeston’s weak engagement. Arnheim[17] argues against the technical validity of Vertov’s cinematic montage method, then showing a rigorous approach to critical writing on the par with today’s current academic research methodology. Although the article still fails to include Vertov’s political aims, Arnheim tackles the films from an expert’s point-of-view (he probably was then the first serious and diligent Western film critic). The whole article is devoted to the montage technique and its effects on the viewers. In a very eloquent style, Arnheim chagrins over Vertov’s stubbornness to discard mise-en-scene, to do away with the story, as well as the value of individual in his films. He criticizes the overload of the montage technique stilting a possible easy flow of urban depictions. Although Arnheim, nonetheless, credits Vertov for his brilliance, his intelligence and courage for materializing his theoretical writings, he still concedes that the resulting images produce a film “quite unanalyzable because of its abstractness.” Arnheim fails to understand the pleasure embedded in such filmic approach where the spectator is thoroughly driven to frustration.

Osip Brik and Victor Shklovsky, likewise, echo Arnheim’s disapproval of the dubious consequences of Vertov’s montage technique. They underscore the film’s lack of unity: “that Vertov has ignored the vital need for an exact clearly-constructed thematic scenario,” (Brik p83). Their critique of Vertov is therefore more dialectical and polemical than Arnheim’s straight discursive academic observations. Brik and Shlovsky bitterly condemn the absence of a global structure in the film. They favor instead a predilection for an organized theme around which the filmmaker should organize the footage. In contrast they cite Shub,[18] The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, who by putting old film footage together manages to achieve a remarkable level of coherence, mainly because the construction of her film reflects thorough concerns with theme and montage. Logically, they pursuit their point to its most radical supposition, claiming that since Vertov disregarded the story entirely, Vertov’s cameraman, M. Kaufman,[19] could not possibly understand what he was shooting, the film being nothing else than an aesthetic exercise instead of a documentary. Even though Brik and Shklovsky were also members of the Russian avant-garde in the aftermath of the Revolution, the article plainly exposes how much dissention existed within the film industry. They disavow emphatically Vertov’s experimental technique.

Siegfried Kracauer, without discrediting the merit of Vertov’s experimental documentary, places the debate on a philosophical forum. Far from imposing a rigid opinion such as the two previous writers, Kracauer[20] ponders over the effect of the duality reality versus its representation, the world of life and its objects, present in MMC. Kracauer distinguishes Vertov from other filmmakers mainly for succeeding in extracting “meanings from the connections between the fragments of reality.” Other documentarists tend to juxtapose footage without offering explanation. Vertov does not; his shots converse. Kracauer goes on to notice then the contrast in the film’s temporal organization: night shots precede day shots, again inferring a twofold movement between life and death (the film does start with night scene and moves on to day scenes). Perhaps influenced by the then surrealist movement, he remarks that this dichotomy is “revealed to the surrealist artist who perceives the conversation that Life’s disparate inanimate facets is conducted with living things” (Kracauer p11). The article at this point adopts a metaphysical dimension. Indeed, when placed in the context of the Russian Revolution, Kracauer ponders over the question concerning the role of the collective existence and the one of the individual within the society. For Kracauer, who astutely shies away from judging Vertov’s methodology, Vertov’s film interrogates this fundamental question.

Karl Radek approaches Vertov’s work with all the radicalism of political convictions, in this instance, communism. Failing to understand, Vertov’s esthetic endeavor, Radek laments Vertov’s lack of propagandistic message. Believing firmly that spectators should leave the theater moved and affected by the film, he claims that Vertov has grown tired and confused. Radek[21] goes at great length to prove his point. He mocks what he calls the “Hallelujahism” of the film, the positive critical reception, which are in fact political errors. Since propaganda consists in exposing the latent injustice of the workers in the film, propaganda can only function in contrast. The film should then expose, for example, the living conditions of the masses under capitalism, show the way to industrialization and socialist collectivization, “the mechanism by which they should be defeated.” In an admirable list of absent parameters, which he wished to see present in the film, he denounces the film’s major flaws preventing it from being an effective propagandistic film. A film that lacks cowards, forgets to show the action of shock-workers, a film in which negative aspect are blurred, in which militants do nothing, and which does not represent the greatness of the Five-Year plan by which peasants “are transformed into factory workers and into kolkhoz-workers,” cannot bring nothing at all. It is false and useless. While admitting not understanding much cinematographic technique, Radek attacks Vertov precisely for failing to portray the historical process and social complexity, conveyed by the age, where so many others had succeeded. This political statement became the norm of many politicians concerned with the effect of art on the screen. One cannot learn without comparison. As a result, MMC fell into oblivion.

The great French film critic, George Sadoul, was to be a key personage in rescuing Vertov from the overshadowing communist party line, in other words, from the dustbin of history. Early in the sixties[22], Georges Sadoul[23] was entrusted with Vertov’s diaries following a trip to Russian. An opening quote taken from a diary explicitly shows how much people such as Radek had misunderstood Vertov’s intention. Vertov writes, “The extraordinary flexibility of the structure of montage makes it possible to introduce into a film study any political, economic, or other kind of theme whatsoever.” Radek had fallen easily into this trap, failing to comprehend the aleatory quality of theory. Sadoul’s essay, on the other hand, shows a great understanding with film theories, criticism, general film history, and Russian film history. It remains open to dialogue. Sadoul points out that the destruction of the official icons had to go hand in hand with the erections of new ones. Having the advantage of hindsight (since overtime filmmaking went on to apply and exploit more and more Vertov’s montage technique), Sadoul goes on to declare after examining all the facets of Vertov’s experimental filmic approach that, in film such as MMC, “ Vertov the dreamer proved to be a sure prophet,” (Sadoul p22). Leaving out the increasing personal isolation Vertov suffered, Sadoul, seeing in MMC the themes and concepts that he wishes to see, finally asserts that Vertov had succeeded in expressing “the revolutionary current that had formed him,” in other words, in materializing the ideals of the Russian revolution. The essay, nonetheless, is still symptomatic of its time. Indeed, it reflects perfectly well the political preoccupation of the sixties, peculiar to a French heavily concerned ideological group.

Vertov’s rediscovery in the sixties and his rise to a legendary status appear to become the pretext to forward once again a socialist dogma. As new film directors rose to prominent and notable positions, writings about Vertov and MMC became the excuse to disseminate a style of movie making based on revolutionary methods, best illustrated in the writings and filmmaking of Jean-Luc Godard, for example. Along with other film critics, such as Jean-Luc Gorin, in the mid-sixties, under the code name of Dziga-Vertov Group, Godard wrote in the seminal Les Cahiers du Cinéma[24] radical political pamphlets. Even though this paper is not a political discussion, the borrowing of Vertov’s name is indicative of the revolutionary meaning associated with Vertov’s method, a posture best embedded and exhibited in works such as MMC.

It was after the acquisition of MMC by the Cinémathèque Française in 1953, marking a renewal of interest for the film in the West, that the ambiguous relationship politic and art in the film experienced a new enthusiasm. In 1952, Les Cahiers du Cinéma with the presence of communist and artistic personalities held a debate about MMC. Of course, the debate parallels Vertov’ personal history: the communist leaders failed to see the propagandistic construct and the communist message, whereas the artistic perceive them clearly (Cahiers du Cinéma p55). The political personalities suggested that the art form and content had to subordinate to the party line; the artists proclaimed either the opposite of this strategy, or the mutual reciprocity of both. The debate was a classic one. Still, given the numerous reproductions of Vertov’s writing in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, as well as the existence of debates questioning the broad connections between art and politics, MMC showed that it had retained all its political nature (see Vertov, in French, p 58).

Some years later, in 1974, Leong dismissed the above critical approach by remarking how the film appeared to be constructed on opposites, not mutually exclusive but inclusive with each other. Taking for his basis Vertov’s writings, Leong astutely observes that the very scenes and sequences selected to be portrayed in the film suggest a “dialectical tension between life and death” (Leong p3). A most notable fact since MMC characteristically offers such a perfect example with the montage of what appears to be an agonizing woman, having her brow mopped by the hand of a nurse, whose images are juxtaposed with those of an hearse carrying an opening coffin. It turns out that the succeeding sequence shows the agonizing woman smiling; she has just given birth. Life is often in the propinquity of death. In Cinema-Eye, Vertov does claim to base his filmic montages around several binary juxtapositions: the new next to the old; children to adults; cooperative to market; city to village; the theme of bread; of meat to obscure themes such as dark deeds, tuberculosis, madness, and drinking. Since health echoes sickness, poverty wealth, fallow fields blossoming industries, etc., Leong concludes that the very method applied in the film documentary production parallels also the intrinsic life and death duality. The system of narration functions in relation to spontaneous shooting and craftsmanship to confusion (Leong p3). In Leong’s terms, MMC loses its political edge.

It is, nonetheless, precisely the crucial rapport that made the famous Austrian filmmaker, Peter Weibel, approached MMC from a semiotical point-of-view. Since all debates about MMC boil down to a question of representation of reality, Weibel propends that there exists one way to resolve the film’s ideological dissention, by studying the nature of signs. He claims[25] that MMC was not a point of departure from reality but from the material of the film. Weibel goes on to show that Vertov intended to create a reality that only existed in the medium, a “media reality,” different from the perceptible world. Vertov wanted to show that reality was in fact constructed by the material and constructed nature of the film. The camera alters reality. In MMC the cameraman and the camera’s numerous interventions on the screen suggest self-reflexive elements. “The apparatus of representation is not without influence upon the object being represented, the link between signans and signatum is not accidental, it influences the denotatum,” (Weibel p22). The construction of reality is, therefore, also a reflection upon the construction of other realities. Weibel’s article has the merit to praise the film for its genuine testimony of articulated meanings specific to films, even though the approach isolates the film from its historical context. Logically, Weibel claims that this articulation of meanings had been Vertov’s intents since the inception of the film, and that critics until then had failed to understand this simple notion. Their failure to understand the specific language to films had brought them onto the muddy ideological battlefields. If this is true, in a similar fashion, Weibel must recognize that his interpretation then is also the product of historical conjectures. Forty years of research and criticism had allowed to him to draw such a conclusion. In such framework, we can safely conclude that the very nature of criticism, its ideological approach and discourse, is intimately linked to historical production and circumstances.

Perhaps in order to do away with the trend towards growing abstract criticism at the beginning of the seventies, Crofts and Rose offers another solution to understand MMC based on a Marxist theoretical approach, claiming it represents the only possible adequate way to come to terms with the film’s ambiguity. According to them “the film thwarts attempts to read into it commonsense ideological constructions, either of forms of cinematic representation or of the contemporary social formation” (Crofts p52). To demonstrate that only a dialectical materialism can apply, Crofts and Rose literally deconstruct the entire film, point by point, sequence by sequence, in a substantial essay. (Covering every single tackled issue would require a paper of its own. It is, to say the least, although daunting yet extremely historically rich piece of writing). The article began by defining Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism, quoting section of Marx’s writing dating 1857 on “The Method of Political Economy.” According to them a crucial distinction must be made between the “theorization of a problem—itself a practice of production, a process of transformation—and explanations which fail to provide a foundation for their own abstractions” (Crofts p11). In other words, Marx would advocate that “the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproducing it as concrete in the mind” (Marx quoted in Crofts p12). This is the key line to understand MMC. The film’s problematics, therefore, can only be understood in relation to the instability and uncertainty of the political and economical conditions of its time. The film no longer reproduces these conditions but conversely their antithesis, by refusing any empirist construction of given phenomenal reality. In order to reinforce their convictions, following a close reading of the film’s textuality, Crofts and Rose end up scrutinizing the history of other critics’ works (doing strangely enough exactly what I am doing right here).

The biggest nuisance with all the literature about Vertov and MMC deals with the enormous amount of irrelevant articles. Often published in magazines though, these articles fail to say anything at all, often relying exclusively on regurgitated anecdotes mounted alongside the paradigmatic of the Russian revolution and Stalinist years, and their subsequent development. Perhaps the level of ideological saturation is inevitable. Murray-Brown offers such article. All the names quoted, cross-references, footnotes, bring back predictably to past research to the point where one must wonder where one must unveil the motivation, the purpose to rewrite such article. The only interesting point emanating from the essay comes when Murray-Brown underscores Vertov’s montage technique, which he views as a severe assault on Western values, equating even Vertov’s film with Hitler’s Nazi policy. For Murray-Brown discussing Vertov’s aesthetics without mentioning their aims would be “like dwelling on the architectural features of Nazi gas chambers without saying what they were used for,” (Murray-Brown p32). Vertov in his eyes has been falsely interpreted since a strong political agenda lied at heart of Vertov’s creative intentions, which in all appearance negates his artistic achievement.

Likewise Fisher’s essay, unfortunately, does not advance much the understanding of MMC for the simple fact that even though the article often relates to MMC, the article focuses on “Enthusiasm” or “Symphony Donbassa,” and its issue of sound. The latter film was to be Vertov’s first sound film. She does insist though on the similarities of construction between the two films but in a way that has been overly discussed and exposed in this paper. Her main source of references concerning MMC comes from Annette Michelson; she does not attempt to discover potential flaws she may have. Time then has come to talk about Annette Michelson who is, along with Seth Feldman and Vlada Petric, one of the major contemporary authorities on Vertov. In a seminal article, published in 1972, entitled “From Magician to Epistemologist” Michelson argues in a most formalist fashion. She begins the articles with a recollection of a symposium to which she seemed to have attended. The entire Russian cinematographic elite is present. The atmosphere appears amicable, and yet, slightly secluded from the main group, stands a man—Dziga Vertov. From the meeting, she jumps into her essay. “That the world of naked truth is, in fact, the space upon which epistemological inquiry and the cinematic consciousness converge in dialectical mimesis,” she writes, (Michelson p97). She then acknowledges that Vertov was the great discover of this principle. After discussing in details the history of Vertov masterful filmmaking technique, Michelson invites to contemplate the big question, the effects of the film’s magic appearance on the viewers, which she calls the philosophical phantasm of the reflexive consciousness, the eye seeing. Jay Leyda, also known as an authority on soviet films, admits to have been so dazzled by the “intricate camera pyrotechnic” that he had no memory of what the film was really about (Leyda p251), giving a real testimony of the film’s magical spell. Michelson deplores the over-intellectualization of other filmmakers who reject the tricks of montage, who “hypostasized an ontology of film into an ontology of existential freedom,” (Michelson p 101). Of course this rejection for her only corresponds to an attempt to strip Vertov from his own artistic articulation. Suppressing, or else condemning, this recourse to complex montage as a key “to the Communist decoding of reality” is a mistake. In order to support the brilliance of Vertov’s innovation and the beneficial reaction with which the technique affects people, Michelson concludes her essay with an eloquent filmic analysis of magical strategies. She then notices that all the sequences are composed as follow, with “the continual reminder of the presence of the screen as a surface; then, the intrusion of animation techniques into the action; the alternation within one large sequence of slow and ‘normal’ speeds; the subversion and restoration of filmic illusion acting to distend and contract the filmic image; the subversion of the cinematic illusion, through processes of distortion, and/or abstraction; and, finally, the process of intellection so constantly solicited by the complex structure, the entire texture of this most assertively edited film. These strategic maneuvers lead to the distancing effect of causality. It is a “systematic subversion of the certitudes of illusion—a new threshold in the development of consciousness” (Michelson p 111).

In 1995, Vlada Petric from Harvard University[26], published an interesting article (one of my favorite ones) on the duality embedded in all work of art. The article focuses on the two levels that change a work of art over time: the aesthetic, affected by the artistic concepts, and the ideological, which depends on the socio-economic conjectures. Petric observes precisely that the on-going popularity of MMC[27] stems from the film ability to transcend the epistemological level of mere documentation. MMC “represents an outstanding cinematic transposition of life-facts, by giving priority to aesthetic expressiveness over the observational photographic recording of reality,” (Petric p3). This divergence of priority would have inevitably led the young Vertov confronting the Party. Indeed, since the film advances the cause of progress through filmic experimentation, Vertov came to realize that the very revolutionary cause he promoted was hostile to original, imaginative individuals[28]. Petric underlines that Vertov forced isolation originated precisely from this misunderstanding: “Vertov’s vision of Lenin differed from the myth of Lenin promoted by the party.” MMC was too abstract for the masses to grasp and understand Lenin’s potential prophecy. Curiously Petric goes on to make a comparison with German director, Leni Riefenstahl[29] whose films, he thinks, carry a similar ambiguity, the difficulty to separate the artistic achievement from the promotion of the political content. Indeed, Riefenstahl, promoted Nazi ideas; she was in fact the Nazi chief film propaganda. Yet, film historians generally argue that her films carry more than just historical political records for autocratic regimes, because inversely, like Vertov’s, her films “expose the horrifying power of militaristic hysteria [the manipulations, through ritualistic collective behavior creating brimming enthusiasm over the masses] and, therefore, demand critical analysis,” (Petric p6).

Following this short segue, the essay grows in psychological depth, as Petric ponders over the role of the artist in society. Vertov would have been aware of the duality, personal versus collective. The film’s technique (MMC) reflects this artistic and ideological duality. This duality is perfectly reflected in “the metaphorical connection between the worker and the machine,” the close-up of a smiling young woman worker is superimposed over a huge, rotating spinning wheel, which could stand for Vertov himself (Petric p10). Thus, Vertov’s film depicts the merging of Vertov’s epistemological attitude towards the medium and aesthetic view of film structure, which must also be divided in two aspects, one emphasizing the shot’s dialectical function in relation to reality, and one trying to recapture without disturbing the ontological authenticity of the shot per se (Petric p14). Vertov’s method (and this conclusion should apply to both documentary and fiction filmmakers) implies that the artist should interfere with reality by “presenting it on the screen in a highly aesthetic manner.

Finally, Petric distinguishes another particularity, a Vertovian special feature, inspired by Constructivism, [30] which considered form in art equal to or superior to the content, (a feature strangely absent from the essays of this paper). This feature is called kinesthesia[31]. MMC encapsulates kinesthesia like no other Vertov’s films, because, in MMC, the form itself comes to function as content without compromising the ontological authenticity of the individual shots. (A thought echoed by Vertov’s own experimentation: he sought to reach a unity of form and content, a quality which writers, composers, filmmakers had not achieved then yet. Through a careful montage, a perfect balance between the kino-glaz (the montage structure of the associated shots) and kino-pravda (the ontological authenticity of shots), Vertov succeeded in presenting reality “as it is” and generating, through kinesthesia, a new vision of the world (Petric p 15). This new vision of the world, the better world, embraces an ideology that cannot be separated from its aesthetic formal expression.

Although fascinating, Petric’s essay reflects the void of artistic and ideological direction the art suffers in our time. Fundamental questions such as the role of the artist in today’s society is raised merely in relation to current intellectual crisis, or void. I would like, therefore, to introduce and close this paper with an essay published in 1999 written by Malcom Turvey, which appears to confirm my previous remark. Indeed, by discussing the role of machine in MMC, Turvey also acknowledges indirectly the concerns we have and role-playing we acquiesce in our increasingly technological dependent society. The essay is mostly about the role of the camera, which is able to see things and depict things that the human beings cannot. The article is opaque, especially when Turvey starts questioning the real function of the camera. Does the camera really improve our perceptual predicate, he asks (Turvey p27). To back up the validity of the question, Turvey does not hesitate to import lines of reasoning from philosophical and psychological authorities, such as Wittgenstein, Charles Taylor, which somewhat obscures his reasoning. Turvey’s starting point used to question the camera as a tool of enhancement of knowledge stems from the famous shot of the eye superimposed with the camera lens. In this opinion this shot is destined to “highlight the morphological similarities between the two” (Turvey p29). This connotation between the camera-eye and the human eye is further reinforced in the portrayal, later on in the film, when the camera (like in an animated film) behaved as it had all the human appearance: it bows and walks out of the screen. The danger then, if it is one, lies in the certainty that the camera demonstrate an ability to be more perceptive, able to perform alone, to see things that the human eyes can. Ponderous over why would Vertov have believed that by aestheticizing machines in order to induce a sense of harmony between beings and machines, Turvey goes as far back as to the retrieve the classical debate of Kant’s aesthetic, who believed that such visual pleasure originated from a mental harmony. Yet, this harmonious relationship only results in a seemingly contradictory conceptions of human beings, the materialist and humanistic. This contradiction just predates the narcissistic quality (machinic narcissism) that humans observe by building machines capable of reflecting the images of their desires. In other words, MMC exposes and extols our latent narcissism, even though nothing is said about the cultural implications of the deduction.

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Crofts, Stephen and Rose, Olivia. “An EssayTowards ‘Man With a Movie Camera.’ ” Screen

* Denkin, H. "Linguistic Models in Early Soviet Cinema." Cinema Journal 17:1 (1977) : 1-13.

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[1] The testimony of this late accrued interest can easily be traced in the enormous retrospective presented by the Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in NY, from April 24 – May 6, 1984, entitled “Dziga Vertov Revisited: a Russian Filmmaker and his Legacy.” A twenty-eight page newspaper-size program was issued containing critical essays of the most eminent Vertovian critics, Seth R. Feldman, Jay Leyda, Annette Michelson, Lucy Fisher, Georges Sadoul, and Richard Taylor, among so many others. The program gives an excellent concise introduction to Vertov’s life and works.

[2] Which means the town of Peter (The Great), which would later become Leningrad (the town of Lenin) after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

[3] This explanation can be found in virtually every single book about D. Vertov.

[4] Pravda, “truth”, was the name of the newspaper founded by Lenin. Kino-Pravda would be known today as “cinéma-vérité.”

[5] See Enzensberger’s fascinating article about this historical topic. Films like MMC were not the product of a shortage for raw stocks or a study of Kuleshov or W. D. Griffith’s films. She actually traces down and then ascribes the creation of MMC to a Lenin’s memo proclaiming that the factual films represented the future of Soviet film industry.

[6] The first Five-Year-Plan.

[7] He found growing hostility from Studios and administrators and even from the Soviet Artist Union.

[8] All the above biographical data can be found in most of the books consulted.

[9] Annette Michelson, one of the authorities on Vertov, has edited a precious compilation of Vertov’s writings. Durgnat reviewed her book and described it as “magnificent (…) and indispensable to film historians” (Durgnat p 78).

[10] Dziga Vertov. “Kinoki. Perevorot” Lef 3 (1923) p 137.

[11] For a thorough survey of Vertov’s writings in relation to history consults Taylor’s book The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1927 – 1929, p 124-34.

[12] A French word, generally accepted, for the concept of editing.

[13] Vertov at the beginning of his career had formed with his wife, Svilova, and his brother, M. Kaufman, an alliance that aimed at revolutionizing filmmaking.

[14] I will refer to the film, “The Man with a Movie Camera,” from now on as MMC.

[15] The unexpected discovery of this annotated bibliography turned out to be a gold mine even though the book only covers the productive research up to 1979, a time which sees the productive output about Vertov and his works literally explode.

[16] Taken from “Three Russian Films.” Close Up 2 (1929). Reprinted in “Dziga Vertov Revisited”: 8-9.

[17] “About Enthusiasm.” Trans. Stuart Liebman. Die Weltbuhne 09 (1931). Reprinted in “Dziga Vertov Revisited”: 8.

[18] Esfir Shub was another great Russian documentary filmmaker. Vertov strongly influenced her.

[19] Mikhail Kaufman was Vertov’s own brother.

[20] From “The Man with a Movie Camera.” Trans. Stuart Liebman. Frankfurter Zeitung 05 (1929). Reprinted in “Dziga Vertov Revisited”: 11.

[21] From an article originally published in the Russian newspaper Mir (The World), december 4, 1931. Trans. Annette Michelson. Reprinted in “Dziga Vertov Revisited”: 13.

[22] Vertov died in 1954.

[23] G. Sadoul (1904-1967). Although written in the sixties, this essay was compiled with others, and only published in 1971.

[24] Les Cahiers du Cinéma were headed by the even most famous French film theorist, Hervé Bazin.

[25] From “Eisenstein, Vertov, and the Formal Film.” Film as Film Catalog, 1979. Translated Phillip Drummond. Reprinted in “Dziga Vertov Revisited”: 22

[26] I am using here a synthesis of Petric’s writings, since essay in book Beyond Document merely repeats the dialectics of the present article.

[27] In Petric’s words “a Masterpiece,” p3.

[28] Quite a paradoxical twist of fate, since most of the other “fiction” film directors, against Vertov’s theories, saw themselves continually alienated and eventually destroyed for the same reasons. Their great personal artistic innovations worked against the party’s communal evenness. So were the fates of Eseinstein, Pudovkin, Shubs, Dozshenko, and Kuleshov.

[29] Triumph of the Will is perhaps her most famous film, along with the documentary about the Berlin’s Games in 1936.

[30] Vlada Petric happens to be the author of an amazing book about Constructivism in film, devoted as it turns out to MMC and Dziga Vertov. A comprehensive guide to the film in relation to the artistic movement.

[31] Kinesthesia stands for the dynamic interactions of movements occurring on the screen.