Man with a Movie Camera is a highly experimental film produced in 1929 by Dziga Vertov, a Soviet pioneer film and newsreel director.
Structurally, The Man with a Movie Camera is a combination of four chapters: the prelude to the entrance of the cinema audiences, the city waking up at daybreak, the hard work of working people during the day, and the rest after work. In this article, six screenshots of two scenes in the chapter of the city waking up are selected.
The first scene is a street scene of the city’s morning public transportation opening from a new and novel perspective of the film camera view. This sequence begins with a cameraman climbing onto a viaduct at a construction site,
then capturing a railroad train leaving a parking depot,
followed by a series of overhead shots of the train alternating with pedestrians at a city intersection.
These shots can be done as a wide-angle frame, as the viewer can see a wealth of elements and perspectives through the camera. This is connecting to Vertov’s literal theory on the kino-eye: ‘Kino-eye is the cinematic documentary decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye (Vertov 87).” The sequence is certainly a new record of the morning in the city as it is known to the everyday viewer or city citizen-the pedestrian at ground level. However, by this sequence, the viewer can follow the film and see the city as it is in the morning, but in a much grander, more elemental way.
What is even more impressive is that this set of scenes constitutes a typical montage, successfully leading the audience to observe a different morning in the city. In the construction cite, a cameraman climbs a high shelf, suggesting to the viewer that some of the shots to follow will be from an overhead perspective. The next thing shown is the trains in parking depots making a leave at the depot, indirectly imaging that it was now a time for the city to wake up and start on works. Following is a top-down view of the city intersection in Figure 3, which corresponds with the previous hint of the construction site. These three scenes were displayed connectively in a back-and-forth montage, showing the morning of a city to the fullest.
The second scene is a beautiful montage of Vertov using close-up, fast motion, and defocused shots that portray the soul of the kino-eye he wanted to show. This is a montage of a woman waking up early in the morning. The blinds show the rapid opening and closing of the blinds, and when the window was open, the flowers outside the window can be clearly seen.
The camera then switched to the front of the lens of the camera.
This was an extreme close-up, capturing the opening and closing of the camera aperture. When the aperture became small, the camera quickly switched back to the flower again, and by now, the flower had become blurred because it is out of focus. Then the camera switched to a woman washing her face.
At this point, the woman was washing her face quickly while only her eyes were permanently fixed on the camera. Close-up skills have succeeded in making the elements in the picture more single, which can better highlight the main body of the picture because the main body of the picture already occupies all the basic frames of the shot. And this technique can bring a lot of visual impacts, be used to emphasize the camera language, and deepen the impression given to the audience. Here the close-up is clearly portrayed to the eye. The close-ups here, including lenses, windows, and human eyes, all clearly depict the element of eyes, a way to observe.
These short shots were sequenced to express Vertov’s dense idea on observation through the eye of the camera, which again shows the powerful expression conveyed by the montage skills. What Vertov called the “kino eye” is, in fact, constructive thinking in terms of the camera. The cinematographic camera lens is similar to the human eye but beyond it. Here, a large close-up of a woman’s eye is paralleled with a wind-blown window and the camera lens. This tells the audience at all times how everything they see in the film is presented through the camera’s filming and editing.
All of this is intentional, and the change of intention is shown through the focused and defocused images of the flowers. The “intention” displayed to the audience is also self-referential or self-mirrored presented by Vertov. The director directly showed the production team at work and the fact that the audience is watching a processed film rather than “reality”.
Overall, the film is merely a grouping of meaningful fragments in relation to the visual, but still, the “life as it is” as seen by the camera (the cinematic eye) is sharply contrasted the “life as it is” as seen by the imperfect eye. And there lays the inspiration of kino-eyes.
