A God-like eye of cinema in Dziga Vertov’s cinematography
by Viktorija Samarinaite
by Viktorija Samarinaite
Cinema is a form of escapism and it helps to break out the box of reality. Also, it is a form of reality in itself focused on documentation of the present and the truth to be told through the lens of the artist. Since the dawn of cinematography cinema has also served as a means of protest and this super-power nowadays is of high importance.
One of the revolutionaries is Dziga Vertov, a movie director of Ukrainian descent. Not only is he titled as a pioneer of documentary, but also the author of classical, emblematic piece of art - “A Man with A Movie Camera”. It was made almost a hundred years ago, but still interests the masses.
After all this time the movie holds a strong 8th position among the best and most influential movies of all time. It fascinates cinema professionals, amateurs and cinephiles because of its actuality, modernity and avant-garde. “A Man with A Movie Camera” is being screened at the halls of academias around the world as the exclusive example of early cinematography.
Ordinary movie-goers might find it quite boring: intentionally it lacks storyline, dialogues, narrator, vibrant characters or any kind of staged action. Originally, this movie did not even have sound, the soundtrack has been created and added years later. “A Man with A Movie Camera” is half documentary, half an experiment of telling the truth.
This was an unusual choice among the other directors of classic Soviet cinema. Back in time everyone was obsessed with depicting the ideal reality of socialism, staging everything to the tiniest detail. Vertov was against such projects and treated them as a harmful bunch of lies. Many times Vertov expressed his opposition towards the tradition. To him a camera was a way to explore reality, to widen the perspective. The images he captured were entertaining on their own and the professional editing made them unforgettable.
Dziga Vertov is a nickname. Originally, he was born as Denis Kaufmann. He studied Psychoneurology at the university of Moscow. After the October Revolution his best friend communist found him a job at the board of Moscow’s Cinema Committee. In 1918 Vertov was working with the war operators, organizing the publishing of the cinema magazine „Kinonedelja“. But he did not restrain himself to the official job only, he was also all the head into the cinematographic experiments.
Vertov’s creative standpoint is already strong and viable in his first movies: even though the cinema was a means of socialist agitation, Vertov refused depicting staged reality or creating a narrative driven by the heroic characters. Vertov and the very idea of cinema were inseparable.
In 1922 Vertov initiated publication of cinema magazine “Kino Pravda”. Each and every issue of the magazine (1922-1924) was meant to be of the different artistic approach: talking about the meaningful events and reflecting them through the God-like lens of a camera. Actually, Vertov had no clue that he started a completely new sort of art: his progress can be traced in his articles-manifestos: “We”, “He and I”, “Kino-Eye. Revolt”, “Kino-Eye” and others.
Dziga Vertov matured as an artist during really difficult times, so he grew to believe that art must serve the purpose of spreading revolutionary ideas. But throughout his career he remained more interested in the form of a movie than its contents: he was born to experiment with an image, editing techniques and usage of movie titles. Movies “Kino-Eye”(1924), “The Eleventh” (1928) and “Man with A Movie Camera” (1929) are the best examples of his innovative work.
Back in the 40’s Vertov became a victim of the government's fight against cosmopolitanism and charged for formalism - exaltation of the form against the content. He was suspended from filmmaking and spent his remaining days walking the dark corridors of Central Studio of Documentary Films and editing the official cinema chronicle “News of the Day”. This sentence separated and isolated Vertov from the community of independent filmmakers and jailed him for life in a huge government building - lonely and forgotten.
To Vertov the eye of a camera meant an objective glance, sight - far more perfect than is available to the eye of a human being. Naturally, his fresh perspective attracted a bunch of congenial artists and they formed a creative group - “kino-eye”. The main idea behind it was to follow the truth, to deny staged plot and artists right to fantasize.
“A piece of cinema is a closed, perfect and subtle sketch of a deepened vision using all optical tools – firstly, a camera able to experiment in space-time. Field of vision - a life, constructive material for editing - a life, decorations - a life, actors - a life. Of course, we cannot forbid the painters to paint, composers to compose melodies and poets to write poems to their better-halves. We let them play. But all of these are simply toys, not pieces of art.” (excerpt from manifesto „Kino-Eye“, 1923)
Dziga Vertov was convinced that the documentation of reality is the main purpose of cinema itself and the eye of a camera is the only medium to actually document it. He sought to show the world as it is, that is why he chose only cinematographic tools. Artists appeared to Vertov as a subjective and unreliable medium. Truth and only the truth was higher than any aesthetic values, objectivity meant naturality and loyalty to reality. Thus, this is why the editing came second to Vertov.
In his opinion, an edited image has nothing in common with a literary narrative. To achieve that distinction he employed a wide range of filming and editing techniques: he used double-exposure, acceleration and retardation of images, suspension of frames, rapid transition, division of images, unusual zoom-ins, following of objects, reversion of the material and animation of frames. He simply was a magician in the cinema world.
In his 1928 manifesto Vertov writes that “Man with A Movie Camera” “is a movie of discoveries. It opposes the main idea of making movies as schematic as possible. The faith in this idea is the reason why we are deprived of rest even though we are so tired… (...) This complicated experiment liberates us from the custody of theater and literature and allows us to stand eye to eye with a cinematograph.”
Dziga Vertov is one of the most consistent artists in the field of avant-garde cinema. His style opposed the mandatory manner of social realism and earned him the suspension from making any kind of films. Despite that, his theories and movies still influence the evolution of cinema processes.
“Man with A Movie Camera” tells a modern unstaged tale about the Soviet city. The director wanted to depict a single day in a Russian city: to convey its rhythm, to show the streets empty and full of people, the rush hour, to present a city as a monument to the modernity. Vertov succeed, but it took 4 years and 4 cities to accomplish his goal. He decided to widen the range of locations and managed to imply the message that no matter the city, their routines are identical. Movie “Man with A Movie Camera” is about a city as a symbol of modernism, cinema as an opportunity to capture the truth and about a man with a movie camera. Camera itself is a character in this film, a participant, agitator, able to provoke certain situations. But all in all, this movie is about making movies.
Vertov managed to tell a complex modern story without any plot or narrator. He let the images speak for themselves. Even the soundtrack was designed quite recently: artist Pierre Henry made the first version in 1993. To this day, there are 12 different versions of the soundtrack created by different authors. Spectacular symphony by Michael Nyman has been chosen as the main soundtrack of the renewed film. Truth to be told, the sound adds up the dramatic depth to this movie and allows to focus on the man with a camera in the modern times and not the city as an individual organism. Not all the works of Vertov were silent: in 1930 he made the first movie with sound in the whole Soviet Union – “Enthusiasm: The symphony of Donbas”.
John McKay, the author of Dziga Vertov’s biography, says that elimination of such irritants as actors, titles and subtitles, plot, sound granted the movie “Man with A Movie Camera” the meaning: “We can see this film as a meta-narrative about the vision of a human being. Vertov actually tells us how a movie can provide an innovative perspective, which normally is not accessible to the individual viewer. I think that a movie-making to Vertov was his way to privatize the channels of perception.” Concepts of truth and perception are especially important for the 21st century, as it becomes hard to distinguish objectivity from subjectivity, news from the fake-news and the truth from fiction.
This text was composed by the team of the international educational workshops project for the art department “Art Department Masterclass” as a gesture of solidarity with the Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian artists during these harsh times.
One of the revolutionaries is Dziga Vertov, a movie director of Ukrainian descent. Not only is he titled as a pioneer of documentary, but also the author of classical, emblematic piece of art - “A Man with A Movie Camera”. It was made almost a hundred years ago, but still interests the masses.
After all this time the movie holds a strong 8th position among the best and most influential movies of all time. It fascinates cinema professionals, amateurs and cinephiles because of its actuality, modernity and avant-garde. “A Man with A Movie Camera” is being screened at the halls of academias around the world as the exclusive example of early cinematography.
Ordinary movie-goers might find it quite boring: intentionally it lacks storyline, dialogues, narrator, vibrant characters or any kind of staged action. Originally, this movie did not even have sound, the soundtrack has been created and added years later. “A Man with A Movie Camera” is half documentary, half an experiment of telling the truth.
This was an unusual choice among the other directors of classic Soviet cinema. Back in time everyone was obsessed with depicting the ideal reality of socialism, staging everything to the tiniest detail. Vertov was against such projects and treated them as a harmful bunch of lies. Many times Vertov expressed his opposition towards the tradition. To him a camera was a way to explore reality, to widen the perspective. The images he captured were entertaining on their own and the professional editing made them unforgettable.
Dziga Vertov is a nickname. Originally, he was born as Denis Kaufmann. He studied Psychoneurology at the university of Moscow. After the October Revolution his best friend communist found him a job at the board of Moscow’s Cinema Committee. In 1918 Vertov was working with the war operators, organizing the publishing of the cinema magazine „Kinonedelja“. But he did not restrain himself to the official job only, he was also all the head into the cinematographic experiments.
Vertov’s creative standpoint is already strong and viable in his first movies: even though the cinema was a means of socialist agitation, Vertov refused depicting staged reality or creating a narrative driven by the heroic characters. Vertov and the very idea of cinema were inseparable.
In 1922 Vertov initiated publication of cinema magazine “Kino Pravda”. Each and every issue of the magazine (1922-1924) was meant to be of the different artistic approach: talking about the meaningful events and reflecting them through the God-like lens of a camera. Actually, Vertov had no clue that he started a completely new sort of art: his progress can be traced in his articles-manifestos: “We”, “He and I”, “Kino-Eye. Revolt”, “Kino-Eye” and others.
Dziga Vertov matured as an artist during really difficult times, so he grew to believe that art must serve the purpose of spreading revolutionary ideas. But throughout his career he remained more interested in the form of a movie than its contents: he was born to experiment with an image, editing techniques and usage of movie titles. Movies “Kino-Eye”(1924), “The Eleventh” (1928) and “Man with A Movie Camera” (1929) are the best examples of his innovative work.
Back in the 40’s Vertov became a victim of the government's fight against cosmopolitanism and charged for formalism - exaltation of the form against the content. He was suspended from filmmaking and spent his remaining days walking the dark corridors of Central Studio of Documentary Films and editing the official cinema chronicle “News of the Day”. This sentence separated and isolated Vertov from the community of independent filmmakers and jailed him for life in a huge government building - lonely and forgotten.
To Vertov the eye of a camera meant an objective glance, sight - far more perfect than is available to the eye of a human being. Naturally, his fresh perspective attracted a bunch of congenial artists and they formed a creative group - “kino-eye”. The main idea behind it was to follow the truth, to deny staged plot and artists right to fantasize.
“A piece of cinema is a closed, perfect and subtle sketch of a deepened vision using all optical tools – firstly, a camera able to experiment in space-time. Field of vision - a life, constructive material for editing - a life, decorations - a life, actors - a life. Of course, we cannot forbid the painters to paint, composers to compose melodies and poets to write poems to their better-halves. We let them play. But all of these are simply toys, not pieces of art.” (excerpt from manifesto „Kino-Eye“, 1923)
Dziga Vertov was convinced that the documentation of reality is the main purpose of cinema itself and the eye of a camera is the only medium to actually document it. He sought to show the world as it is, that is why he chose only cinematographic tools. Artists appeared to Vertov as a subjective and unreliable medium. Truth and only the truth was higher than any aesthetic values, objectivity meant naturality and loyalty to reality. Thus, this is why the editing came second to Vertov.
In his opinion, an edited image has nothing in common with a literary narrative. To achieve that distinction he employed a wide range of filming and editing techniques: he used double-exposure, acceleration and retardation of images, suspension of frames, rapid transition, division of images, unusual zoom-ins, following of objects, reversion of the material and animation of frames. He simply was a magician in the cinema world.
In his 1928 manifesto Vertov writes that “Man with A Movie Camera” “is a movie of discoveries. It opposes the main idea of making movies as schematic as possible. The faith in this idea is the reason why we are deprived of rest even though we are so tired… (...) This complicated experiment liberates us from the custody of theater and literature and allows us to stand eye to eye with a cinematograph.”
Dziga Vertov is one of the most consistent artists in the field of avant-garde cinema. His style opposed the mandatory manner of social realism and earned him the suspension from making any kind of films. Despite that, his theories and movies still influence the evolution of cinema processes.
“Man with A Movie Camera” tells a modern unstaged tale about the Soviet city. The director wanted to depict a single day in a Russian city: to convey its rhythm, to show the streets empty and full of people, the rush hour, to present a city as a monument to the modernity. Vertov succeed, but it took 4 years and 4 cities to accomplish his goal. He decided to widen the range of locations and managed to imply the message that no matter the city, their routines are identical. Movie “Man with A Movie Camera” is about a city as a symbol of modernism, cinema as an opportunity to capture the truth and about a man with a movie camera. Camera itself is a character in this film, a participant, agitator, able to provoke certain situations. But all in all, this movie is about making movies.
Vertov managed to tell a complex modern story without any plot or narrator. He let the images speak for themselves. Even the soundtrack was designed quite recently: artist Pierre Henry made the first version in 1993. To this day, there are 12 different versions of the soundtrack created by different authors. Spectacular symphony by Michael Nyman has been chosen as the main soundtrack of the renewed film. Truth to be told, the sound adds up the dramatic depth to this movie and allows to focus on the man with a camera in the modern times and not the city as an individual organism. Not all the works of Vertov were silent: in 1930 he made the first movie with sound in the whole Soviet Union – “Enthusiasm: The symphony of Donbas”.
John McKay, the author of Dziga Vertov’s biography, says that elimination of such irritants as actors, titles and subtitles, plot, sound granted the movie “Man with A Movie Camera” the meaning: “We can see this film as a meta-narrative about the vision of a human being. Vertov actually tells us how a movie can provide an innovative perspective, which normally is not accessible to the individual viewer. I think that a movie-making to Vertov was his way to privatize the channels of perception.” Concepts of truth and perception are especially important for the 21st century, as it becomes hard to distinguish objectivity from subjectivity, news from the fake-news and the truth from fiction.
This text was composed by the team of the international educational workshops project for the art department “Art Department Masterclass” as a gesture of solidarity with the Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian artists during these harsh times.
