From Word To Word

Considering that I teach courses in documentary film, I should probably not admit that I just this morning watched Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera for the first time.  I have read quite a lot about the film, of course.  It is impossible to pick up a book on the subject of documentary without reading about its significance to the development of the genre through its experimentation with various filming and editing techniques, its use of montage, and its self-reflexive treatment of the cameraman, the director, the editor, and the machinery of film.  I have even lectured on all of this, more than once, but I have never seemed to find the time to actually watch the film.

As is almost always the case, the experience of the film surprised the expectations that my reading had formed for me.  What impressed me most about the film was its attention to the everyday.  It takes for its subject the people of the city in their daily activities. but it attends to these things in ways that make them strange and beautiful and fearful and compelling.  It shows their rhythm, not only the natural rhythms of day and night, of waking and sleeping, but the artificial rhythms and  repetitions of the worker and the machine, of the cog and the wheel and the engine and the piston.  It is this labour that the film valourizes, this repetition that is a vitality and a strength rather than a tedium.

Vertov is very concerned to show that the film and the filmmaker are also a part of this rhythmic labour and this driving vitality.  The camera or the cameraman or the editor appear in every scene, and they are always engaged in the same kinds of activity that are being filmed.  As the town wakes, the filmmaker leaves his house and leaps aboard the open car from which many of the shots are taken.  As the trolleys carry the crowds to work, the camera is riding aboard them as well, or it is placed closely among them and among the throng.  As the people begin their labour in the factories, the film stock is whirled on its spools, sliced and joined, labeled and arranged in neat rows for the eye of the editor.  As the town retires to the beach in the afternoon, the camera is shown in the water also, the cameraman bathing beside it.  The clear and insistent argument is that the camera is a significant part of the vital and productive city, that its artistic function is not distinct from the labour that drives the city and the nation.

Interestingly, this vision of the working city and of the working camera remain compelling, even if its valourization of the industrial landscape and the automated existence now seem somewhat idealistic and naive.  Despite ninety years of increasing disillusionment with the industrial enterprise, whatever its politics, the film still manages to make the worker and the factory and the worker and the machine seem things worth romanticizing. Its propagandist function remains effective even at this far a remove.

Of course, there are other reasons to see the film also.  There are some truly beautiful scenes, like the images of a sleeping woman’s arm as it lies on the coverlet, or like the flames of a foundry’s furnace that remind me of Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness.  There are also some charmingly flippant moments, like the scene where the camera seems to assemble itself for an audience, or the one that captures the interaction between a couple filing divorce papers.  My version of the film also has a beautifully apt musical score composed by Michael Nyman, music that captures perfectly the rhythmic drives of the film.  All of which is to say that I should now have a better vantage from which to discuss the film the next time I teach a documentary course, and I should also have more credibility when I recommend it tp you, as I very strongly do.