Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov) (Patreon)

88/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995...though I watched significant chunks of my DVD* on several occasions during the years when I wrote Scenic Routes for the A.V. Club, without ever successfully finding a section that seemed to "work" as a discrete unit for my purposes in that column. Images just keep coming at you, dizzyingly, at a pace that still seems frenetic almost a century later (and must have looked downright psychotic at the time); before you can finish processing one jarring juxtaposition, Vertov has already moved on to several more. Some, like the rapid flicker of blinking eyes with opening/closing window shutters, are a form of visual poetry, equating animate and inanimate. Others amount to goofy jokes, e.g. cutting back and forth between a woman having makeup applied and another woman who's aggressively throwing mud at a wall for what seems like some construction-related reason. Many are just pure experimentation with technique: double exposures galore, of course, but also split-screen duplication employed in surreal ways, including more or less the same buildings-folding-in-upon-themselves spectacle that Nolan turned into Inception's dream-logic centerpiece. It's a truly dazzling onslaught that expressly poses, via Vertov's opening statement of intent, a fascinating question: Wouldn't it be fantastic if every movie were like this, freed from the straitjacket of theatrical and literary influence? If we created a cinema of nonstop formal sensation? Somehow, I can consider this a near-masterpiece and yet still answer that question with a resounding No thanks. For one thing, it'd be fucking exhausting, even if average length were held to under 70 minutes. And precious few could likely achieve anything like the sustained sublimity that Vertov does here. (Hell, I don't even know whether Vertov ever equaled it, having seen none of his other features.) Koyaanisqatsi clearly took Man With a Movie Camera—particularly the mechanization montage—as its model, and I like that film a lot; it's definitely a lesser achievement, though, and Reggio's subsequent attempts to duplicate it reportedly produced diminishing returns. (Haven't seen those either, though I did see Baraka, directed by Koyaanisqatsi's D.P.) Were everybody doing this sort of thing, its impact would speedily become negligible. Ironically, we need a "boring" conventional standard to give geniuses something to deviate from. 

And then there's the reflexive element, which struck me much more forcefully this time than it did 28 years ago. It's not mere whimsy that we're constantly seeing the title character at work, even if he gets optically shrunken to fit inside a beer mug and enlarged to loom over entire cityscapes. In fact, Man With a Movie Camera (actual cameraman Mikhail Kaufman) keeps delivering his footage to Woman With a Moviola (Or Something Like It; I'm No Expert On Silent-Era Editing Equipment), played by actual editor Yelizaveta Svilova, who was also Vertov's wife. We don't actually see the handoffs, but it becomes quite explicit that the film he's shooting and the film she's editing are the film we're currently watching—at one point, Svilova actually cross-cuts frames with shots of those same frames, which sounds confusing but is very clear when you're looking at it. (Think of comparing a photo with its negative, but taken a step up.) Obviously this has a rhetorical function w/r/t Vertov's "here's the kind of cinema we should strive for" argument...but it also inadvertently and perhaps to Vertov's horror creates a narrative of sorts, or at least a structural foundation. All the shots of Kaufman speeding around various Soviet cities in the back of trucks, capturing life on the fly, create a sense of urgency that Svilova's busy cutting reinforces. What they present may come across at random, but the act of filmmaking itself accrues meaning, if only as labor. (It occurs to me that this film might only have been possible as conceived during the period when film cameras were still hand-cranked. We really need to see that motion.) Another quick juxtaposition Vertov and Svilova offer is that of editor and seamstress, which put me in mind of The Grand Bizarre and its remarkable final sequence, throughout which we hear Jodie Mack arduously taking the stop-motion photographs that we're seeing zip past in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind. Again, it's not at all what I'd ever demand that the medium exclusively be, but I tend to cherish every example I encounter, just for its reminder of what else the medium can be, and of how much human effort goes into that particular state of being.

* Purchased in the late '90s and featuring a first-rate score by the Alloy Orchestra—music that I believe also accompanied the print I saw in '95. This time I watched it with Michael Nyman's score, which likewise suits it very well.