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Andre Parfeniuk Student # 10260974 December 3, 2001 The Impact of Dziga Vertov on Film " The main and essential thing is: the sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as a point of departure the use of the camera as a keno-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space. " - Dziga Vertov, Manifesto The Council of Three (1923) The innovative theories and filmmaking techniques of Dziga Vertov revolutionized the way films are made today. Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a documentary that represented the peak of the Soviet avant-garde film movement in the twenties, displayed techniques in montage, creative camera angles, rich imagery, but most importantly allowed him to express his theories of his writings of Kino-eye (the camera). The film has a very simple plot that describes an average day in Russia, yet the final pieces of this film emerge a complex and fast-paced production that excites the audience. Vertov's ability to use radical editing techniques with unconventional filming to present ordinary things has inspired many directors around the world. And still now modern avant-garde movies apply many of these same techniques to dramatize simple and complex stories.
Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema in the post WWI era. During this time, the freedom to make films was limited due to low stock of supply. Vertov and his colleagues had to be very creative and innovative if they were going produce anything at all. 'The Kuleshov Workshop', a workshop class at the Moscow Film School led by Lev Kuleshov included famous Soviet filmmakers like Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, but excluded Vertov. This is significant to the fact that Vertov was very different than any other Russian director.
Unlike the other Russian filmmakers, Vertov usually captured people with a candid-camera that allowed him to portray the truth, for example in his series called Kino-Pravada 1922 - 1925. "Not 'filming life unawares' for the sake of the 'unawares', but in order to show people without masks, without makeup, to catch them through the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting... " (41 Vertov) His original ways of thinking, isolated him from all other filmmakers. Even his style of using "montage" (editing style commonly used by Soviet directors) in Man with a Movie Camera was very different. In this film, hours of footage are edited together in many cuts, which is the style that Vertov is well known for. His cuts are very rapid and he displays them accordingly to music to add excitement to the sequence. The sequences act on all three levels of montage: narrative, intellectual, and emotional. For example in the beginning of Man with a Movie Camera, there is a sequence in a theatre where the cameraman sets up the film for the audience to watch (appendix 1).
The lights come on, the seats go down, the cameraman sets up the projector, the audience enters, the lights dim, the orchestra awaits and then the manifest begins. The narration comes from the editor throughout the whole film. The cameraman cannot possibly be the narrator since he is randomly out of frame and it is a silent film. "From the very beginning the centrality of the cameraman's vision is put into question, since he moves out of frame in the third shot of the film. In other words, the cameraman cannot be equated with a central character, or even the central narrating intelligence of a narrative film, since visual perspective is not localized in a single figure, but dispersed through multiple perspectives. " (162). From this point, the film is bombarded with sequence after sequence of 9 daily ordinary events that occur from morning to night in an orchestral movement manner.
Bombarded are the cuts because of the abundant amount of imagery and plenty of assorted camera angles. There are a large variety of metaphorical cuts that search an intellectual response of the audience. For example, when the woman wakes up from bed at the very beginning, a clip of window shutters, a camera lens opening and closing, are juxtaposed in a sequence of her blinking (appendix 2). This sequence is a metaphor connecting the lens of a movie camera as "an extension of human vision." As the rapid-fire cuts increase with the music, tempo and rhythm, an emotional response is experienced, and this thesis (metaphor) of the film is emphasized.
Other examples of this same technique are thoroughly presented in each other of the nine events. Amongst this array of symbolism, there exists other editing techniques that makes the film even more powerful at certain times. About twenty-one minutes into the film, Vertov's wife Elizabeth Svilova appears at the beginning of a movement at the editing table, with a pair of scissors. She is in the midst of cuts between her and a series of freeze-frame stills, beginning with a horse pulling a carriage and ending with close-up faces of people (appendix 3). At this point, the importance of the editor is achieved, and as more editing techniques or "visual treats" (Mast, 187) are displayed to the audience, we realize that the editor is the other central figure in the plot. Formal cuts, an example of another editing technique, emphasize the importance of the circles or circular motion in machines, such as those of sewing machines, train and car wheels, and the movie camera itself.
This demonstrates the machine as a major figure in film now as well. Accompanied with tonal, rhythm tic, and directional cuts, the filming comes from all different types of angles which grasps the audience's intellectual response. From the very start, the cameraman is picked up in a car that is viewed traveling across the frame from a very high angle overhead (appendix 4). Then he is taken to the railway where the music heightens as he lies on the railway tracks to get a very dangerous shot of the train approaching. The peak of this sequence becomes loud with music and extremely fast with cuts from all angles of the train (appendix 5). A very powerful editing technique is used here to emphasize the importance of the cameraman in the scene.
By adding blackness to the frames, giving the video a strobe lighting effect, the viewer becomes attentive to what is visual (not black). Slow motion, split screens, dissolves, and the use of prismatic lenses are some other "visual treats" that make the audience appreciative of the film. Closer to the end of the film, there is even a stop-motion animation of the movie camera setting it-self up. The audience is brought into this sequence so that the film reminds us that this is a show for the audience. The camera has a job to entertain us, and Vertov who has always been very fascinated with the movie camera's tricks, wants the audience to realize all the little tricks it is capable of doing. These tricks are more than just entertainment, but these editing techniques serve as the camera's superiority to the human eye.
Vertov explains this idea in his writings of Kino-Gay (Kino-eye or Cinema eye). "Starting today we are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite direction - away from copying. The weakness of the human eye is manifest. We affirm the kino-eye, discovering within the chaos of movement the result of the kino-eye's own movement; we affirm the kino-eye with its own dimensions of time and space, growing in strength and potential to the point of self-affirmation. " (7) The relationship between man and the camera is one the main focuses of this documentary, which was a very rare focus in the times of a harsh state of communist propaganda. Man with a Movie Camera takes a break from the all the other Soviet films that only focused on unity between people, communism, and praising Stalin and mother Russia. The film has an excellent message describing the relationship between the worker and the machine. We discover the souls of the machine, we are in love with the worker at his bench, we are in love with the farmer on his tractor, the engineer on his locomotive.
We bring creative joy into every mechanical activity. We make peace between man and the machine. We educate the new man. [Lynton, 110 ] Vertov uses this message to explain his job and his relationship to his camera. Declaring the lens of his camera as an extension of human vision, he searches for an "absolute language of cinema. "He moves outside of Hollywood storytelling, and closer to an absolute language of cinema that he seeks. " (Dennis 7) Run Lola Run The language that Vertov discovered has inspired the works of many filmmakers from all over the world.
The film Run Lola Run (1999) by Tom Tykwer, is probably one of the most innovative films of today's Hollywood style movie, which many similar filming and editing techniques originated in Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. Tykwer uses a number of different ways to film Lola as she runs to save her no good boyfriend from certain death. From an artistic po...
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