Such a proud little man he is, in his breeches and tucked in checkered shirt, stomping about efficiently with his camera over his shoulder, swapping it to the other every so often with practiced ease. Such a proud man with such a jaunty stride. His eyes are open, hyper-open and fixed to his camera lens, and he thinks everything is marvellous. Ah, look at the prettiness and strength of those girls, those men, with their cars and their machines. Ah, and look what I can do with this camera of mine - I can show it all to you: all the glory of modern man I give to you with my movie camera!
I watch this little man with his movie camera, touring his city with reverence and pride for industry, progress, and a Five Year Plan, with a small bite of something like nostalgia. Watching Vertov's film, I am reminded of the experience of watching home movies from childhood. The little girl who is - impossibly- me, so startlingly alive. My parents' young likenesses moving, talking, breathing on the screen. I regard the individual faces in Man With The Movie Camera with this same personal interest. What is it about this film that gives me such an overwhelming sense of the human, and moreover, such a sense of a lost and irretrievable past?
Unlike the grainy black and white still image sitting anciently on a mantle, viewing historical images through the film medium is illusionary, like seeing some apparition or ghost with all its human faculties in order. Unlike the artifact that is the still image, the frozen moment with a thousand potentials on each end -what happened before the shutter fell? - what happened after? - the human represented on film is her own agent: she moves independently of my imagination. Unlike the artifact of the still image, the cinema is alive. It is hot, for movement generates heat generates energy - and energy means heartbeats. Thus Vertov's cute Russian girls, all plump energy and bright eyes - are to me like living apparitions, rising quite miraculously to show us what was.
I see something quite lovely in The Man With a Movie Camera: optimism, hope, admiration for the achievements and potentials of human beings. It is a film about the relationship - and love affair - between humans and their machines. In his stern way, Vertov demonstrates the "poetry of machines" [1] - the "poetry of levers, wheels, and wings of steel; the iron cry of movements; the blinding grimaces of red-hot streams" [2]. In the kinok's manifesto, Vertov proposes that in film-making of this kind, which treats the human much like a most glorious machine, the "perfect electric man" is conceived. "We introduce creative joy into all manual labour," he says, "we bring people into closer kinship with machines; we foster new people." [3] Thus when watching this film, the viewer is made to reflect on the very notion of the movie camera as a most ingenious machine, which, when coupled with man, is capable of a power so great that it can see everything in the city - even the most intimate of moments when a woman's vulva is exposed at the moment of childbirth. We see hands, a flurry of busy hands engaged with machines: women in call centers, typists, paper-folders. All this is sped up to emphasise the efficiency of it all; the clean symbiosis between human and machine. Don't these workers look flushed with pleasure, and aren't they the lovelier for it.
I think this film represents Modernity at its highest point, experienced "in the processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation... and gives as its key institutions the factory, the city and the nation." [4] In Vertov's manifesto towards the "new people", we see the modernist faith in answers, rationality, and grand narratives. He endorses the idea of a "truly universal absolute language" - note the use of the word absolute. We see a fascination in the power of machines; the film is a series of triumphant moments in which the human body and the machine unite. And in fact, towards the end of the film, the audience watches in delight as the movie camera actually springs to life on its tripod legs - which do, all of a sudden, look endearingly human - even cute - unpacks itself from its box, and looks about inquisitively. The camera is a most benign cyborg at this moment; a friendly cyborg. In fact, the fusion between human and machine is endorsed entirely here, in the most positive - dare I say innocent - way.
Postmodernity has changed all this. It has changed the way we think about machines, and changed the way we make film. I would like to use Donna Haraway's idea of the cyborg in relation to Ridley Scott's markedly postmodern film Blade Runner (1982) to support this.
Haraway says in her "A Cyborg Manifesto" (note the use of manifesto) that "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs." Haraway uses the cyborgian model to confound the boundaries between things that that defined modernity, like masculine/feminine, animal/human, animal/machine - a confusion that translates onto the postmodern screen. Postmodern theory asserts that "we can never, finally, know these hidden truths [of modernity] with full confidence, better to accept that we live in a world of appearances (a world without depth) or simulacra (in Beaudrillard's terminology)" [5]. I want to use Blade Runner to illustrate - or should I say animate - [ha!] - my point.
I presume that everyone has seen this film, so will not labour over the plot. I will say only that in the dystopian future represented in this film, humans have engineered "replicants" which are completely human physically, different only in the fact that they have no temporal past: they were manufactured in labs and do not have a history to speak of. Yet they can cry, feel, yearn. They are true cyborgs, true hybrids of machines and organisms, true simulations a la Baudrillard that cannot be separated from the original. And how miserable they are.
Likewise, the city represented in Blade Runner is "not the ultramodern, but the postmodern... it creates an aesthetic of decay, exposing the dark side of technology, the process of disintegration." [6] This film is interesting to look at beside Man With The Movie Camera because these two films - one representing a far-gone past, the year 1929, one a distant future, a hundred years later, the year 2029 - present polar opposite cinematic representations of the "cyborg" and the industrial city. Comparing the beautiful vision of the modern city in Vertov with the postmodern filmaker's opinion of the future of our cities now is really quite harrowing. Moreover these two films in conjunction show cinema's unparalleled aptness - because of the aliveness of movement that I spoke of before - for immersing us in the mood of the time.
Vertov and Scott have both made films which labour over the idea of the human and machine. Both, I would argue, have a preoccupation with the idea of the cyborg: the fusion of the human and the machine. However, one is a celebration of human ingenuity, creativity and boundless industrial possibility through the machine, while the other is a reflection of the idea that while "the industrial machine was one of production, the postindustrial machine [is] one of reproduction" [7], which has led to exhaustion and decay. In Man With The Movie Camera, there is a lovely naivity in Vertov's representation of the cyborg: arms and legs filmed in isolation in the frame to disembody and mechanise them; people using machinery in factories; a man perpetually attached to his camera so that it might as well be his eye; the camera doing its cute little imitation of a human. In Blade Runner, however, human beings are so technologically skillful that they now can replicate themselves.
It seems to me that this has great implications for cinematic representation of "visible events"[8] and the trustworthiness of the camera. Vertov represents machines harnessed by humans. The machine that is his camera commands everything in the city. In one scene in fact, a giant Vertov (plus camera) stands atop a miniaturised city, seeing all, conquering all - trains, cars, buildings. He frames the trains and trams he shoots lovingly, but with control: the bigness of the train is no obstacle - he gets right underneath and placidly shoots from there. The people in the film are represented as the most superior machines of all: they jump, fling themselves in the air, command the tools of their work. It is a very honest account of "visible events", even the personified camera scene, which pretends to be nothing other than special effects. Vertov tells us not to read into this film and he means it: the visible and invisible are the same and the camera is on our side.
In Blade Runner, however, the camera cannot be trusted to represent visible events that correlate with invisible events. The replicants cannot be distinguished from the human. Machines have revolted against human beings; the Vertovian desire for a so-called "perfect electric man", has backfired. And the camera becomes party to this betrayal, confronting us with the cold fact of cinema's inability to discover what is a replicant human and what is real, thus showing us the limits of our own eyes, and the refusal of the camera to help. In fact, at the end of Blade Runner we are left in doubt as to whether Deckard, the protagonist played by Harrison Ford, is in fact a replicant himself. This epitomises postmodernity's deep anxiety about humanness, about the future of our cities, and its concern that we have lost our sense of reality and temporality. This applies to the future Los Angeles represented in Blade Runner: "there, the machinery of imitations, reproductions and seriality, in other words, 'replicants', affirms the fiction of the real." [9] Machines have overcome humans in this dystopian vision of the future, so that even the camera seems to be its own agent. One cannot imagine a human being behind it - rather it seems coldly impartial to the angst it causes.
Perhaps this is the reason for my nostalgia upon watching The Man With A Movie Camera. This is cinema that has a deep sense of its past: it remembers, and moves forward. It's sense of time is rooted between the two stable markers of past and future, which now can't always be trusted. It is innocently proud of its technological achievements. Somehow the people represented in this film seem all the more comprised of human flesh in their coupling with machines. The camera is warmly flooded with the humanity of Vertov, rather than vice-versa.
What we come to see is that film can represent flesh and bone and that's all - the nature of film is that it is "at once surface and symbol" to apply the words of Wilde. In Vertov, that's all we need to see, that's all the film strives for. Now, we need more - the surface is frightening and strange, and we want the comfort of definition of the real and unreal, the human and inhuman - but the movie camera does not yield.
Works cited:
[1]Annette Michelson (Ed), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,1984, p.8.
[2] Ibid, p.9.
[3] Ibid, p.d.
[4] Morley, David, 'Postmodernism: the Rough Guide', in Curran, James, Morley, David and Walkerdine, Valerie (Eds.) Cultural Studies and Communication, London, Arnold, p. 56.
[5] Ibid, 59.
[6] Bruno, Giuliana, '
[7] Ibid, 189.
[8] Introductory words, Vertov, Man With The Movie Camera (1929), available here.
[9] Bruno, Giuliana, '
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