More Kinok Jackstraws: Vertov\'s Man With a Movie Camera and Contemporary Documentary

More Kinok Jackstraws: Man With a Movie Camera and the Contemporary Understanding of Documentary

Seth Feldman


I'd like to start by saying something about the title of this paper. It comes from Sergei Eisenstein's description of Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera as: "formalist jackstraws and unmotivated camera mischief." (Eisenstein, 43). Until recently I hadn't paid much attention to the word, "jackstraws," thinking it was some sort of arcane description of ridiculous behaviour. And indeed the OED tells us that since at least 1596, a jackstraw was the sort of worthless fellow who might well act like that. However, we also learn that since at least 1801"jackstraws" has been a name for the children's game we know as "Pick-up Sticks".

So while Eisenstein (or Jay Leyda's translation of Eisenstein) might well have been accusing Vertov of being a jackstraw (or worse, a formalist), he unintentionally provided an interesting simile for Man With a Movie Camera. We are invited to imagine the film as an exercise in which parts are subtracted from a complex mass, without disturbing the nature of a rapidly decreasing whole. Those parts, I would like to think, are aspects of the illusionism that underlie more conventional works. When we see the cameraman filming what we are watching, the editor editing it, the projectionist projecting it and the onscreen audience watching the film within the film, we are, every step of the way, challenged to understand what we saw, what we are seeing and what will be left.

Man With a Movie Camera, I am going argue here, is a unique object in cinema history because of the proclivity it has to attract these sorts of metaphors and uses. Beyond cinéma vérité and the Groupe Dziga Vertov, we've seen Lev Manovich use Man With a Movie Camera to define new media aesthetics and, more recently, (along with Vertov's film, The Eleventh Year) as demonstrations of data visualization. The artist, Perry Bard has, in significant ways, continued Vertov's work in her Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake.

Today, I'd like to talk about two other twenty-first century ponderings of Vertov and Man With a Movie Camera. Both cases shed some light on Vertov's work and on where we stand today in our understanding of what Phillip Rosen calls the "arena of meaning centering on the authority of the real founded in the indexical trace,"(Rosen, 37) i.e. documentary – or, to put it in a Chris Markerian sense: "how much cat do we need behind the smile?"

The first item is the Sight and Sound poll that declared Man With a Movie Camera number one on the list of "the greatest documentaries ever made."

This result was not entirely unexpected. The idea for the poll came about in 2012, when Vertov's film came in at number #8 among critics in the journal's long-standing poll of greatest films ever made. It was the first time any non-fiction film had cracked the top ten and it inspired Sight and Sound to initiate a separate poll of documentaries.

The results of that poll appeared in the September, 2014 issue and continue to be available in some detail online. Two hundred and forty invited critics and one hundred invited non-fiction filmmakers responded with lists of ten best documentaries. "Critics" included academics, curators and festival programmers as well as actual critics. "Filmmakers" included individuals who also served in one of the "critics" roles.

Vertov, of course, made his mark as both a "critic" and filmmaker – perhaps one reason why Man With a Movie Camera appeared on 125 of the 340 top ten lists. Shoah, number two, was on 84 lists. From there, consensus quickly diminished. Number six, Chronicle of a Summer, was on only 41 lists and by the time we reach number 10, Grey Gardens, we are at 34 mentions. Well before we get to number 50 on the list of 50 best docs, we are into ties in single digits.

From this exercise, we learn then that it really pays to be born French or American as are nine of the top ten documentary directors. It also helps to be known for only one film. The poor Maysles Brothers saw their votes split between Grey Gardens, Salesman and Gimme Shelter.

But even if votes for different docs by the same author were combined, Man With a Movie Camera would still come out on top. After all, 37% of those responding to the survey put it on their ten-best list - 30% more votes than #2. And when you look at the respondents who ranked their ten best choices, almost two thirds put the film among their top three.

But why? And why now?

As it happened, Sight and Sound invited those it polled to write short commentaries on the films they selected. Sixty of the respondents who voted for Man with a Movie Camera did so. Many of them gave more than one reason for their choice, producing a total of ninety-three comments. (I have a chart, by the way, if anyone wants to see it). The comments broke down something like this:

About a third of the comments were descriptions of the film's form, phrases like:

"a celebration of strength of images and rhythm in a purely cinematic vision. "

"a kaleidoscopic mix of cinematic devices"

"An investigation into the material of film as anti-illusionistic"


Another third of the comments were about the influence of Man With a Movie Camera:

"it paved the way for everyone else."

"the taproot of everything that was to come"

"The mummy and daddy of all documentaries"


A bit more than a third of the comments about Man with a Movie Camera's influence specify its continuing relevance in today's documentary world.

"the disclaimer at the beginning could have been written today"

"not so much a film of its time as a vision of the future"

"the Vertovian template offers documentary one of two ways forward in the digital age [thank you, Brian Winston]


What I found to be a little unexpected is that mention of the film's subject matter is found in only 15 percent of the comments.

works as an ode to the heroic Soviet worker

he serves his Bolshevik ideals.

It bears witness to a Soviet utopianism on the verge of collapse

A small number of people also mentioned the film in the context of city films and futurism.


The remaining comments, less than ten percent, had to do with the film's affect

"thrilling cinematic experience"

"as exhilarating as ever"

"innovative and playful, pure pleasure"

What the Sight and Sound poll suggests is that Man with a Movie Camera is indeed a film of our times in the sense that we are particularly aware of experiments with form and concerned about the possible influence of those experiments will have on documentary practice.

On one hand we have a broadly accepted set of conventions in contemporary documentary and the hybrid forms that individual films may take. Reconstruction sits comfortably amid observational footage; no one seems to be bothered by non-diegetic music or voice-over narration (in third or first person). The credibility of animated or semi-animated documentaries no longer seems to be in doubt. We live in a golden age of polymorphous form. In other words, a system that works.

Looking ahead, though, it is still far from certain what role, if any, new forms such as the cell phone documentary, 3D documentary, Interactive Documentary, immersive documentary and documentary installation will have in cinema's continuing adventures with reality – not to mention the faith we now place in so many conventions and mixtures thereof.

I don't know if Man With a Movie Camera will, as Brian Winston assures us, provides a guide to the digital future. But I would go so far as to say that Sight and Sound's appreciation of the film is evidence we are looking for guidance.

This observation will have to serve as the segue to my second item of Vertov news:
David Tomas's 2013 book, Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Post-Human.

In the Vertov section of his book, Tomas, like Manovich, puts Man With a Movie Camera to work in the service of a 21st century idea: in this case, post-humanism. His thesis is that the film can be read as "a rite of passage" to a post-human state. An artist and scholar with a background in anthropology, Tomas means "rite of passage" in a quite literal anthropological sense: a three-part structure that includes a departure from a previous state, a transformative movement, and a formalized re-entry into the culture as a new entity.

In Man With a Movie Camera, Tomas sees the first step as Vertov's announcement in the film's opening titles that we are leaving the world of conventional cinema. I would add that this is a progressive movement. In the first title, the film is given the rather pedestrian subtitle: "an excerpt from the diary of a film cameraman." (This was Vertov's original idea for the work and a continuation of the cinematically enhanced diary conceit he had used five years earlier in Kinoglaz). But as the introductory titles continue the film becomes much more than its subtitle. In the last title before the credits, it has become nothing less than the creation of "a truly international, absolute cinema language based on its separation from the languages of theatre and cinema."

The film's first visual, the split screen image of the cameraman and his camera setting up atop a giant camera echoes the progression of the titles – we will follow the daily life of a film cameraman but will do so within the world of the medium itself.

A few shots thereafter, the cameraman takes his camera behind the curtain located within what we then discover to be a film theatre. As Tomas would have it, the theatre is the ritual space in which "the rite of passage" will take place. It is a space with its unique paraphernalia and even a little bit of magic as the seats open by themselves to receive those who are about to be initiated.

The second stage of the rite of passage, the film's liminal movement, can be found in the body of the work as we see the melding of the on-screen film's production with the activities of urban life, particularly the idealized urban life of the new Soviet State. Tomas refers to this as the "intimate relationship between these systems," something we see illustrated by the intercutting of the cameraman's work with, among many, many other examples, the work of miners, factory workers, first responders, registry clerks, a traffic cop, and workers operating sundry means of transportation.

In the third, reintegration stage in this rite of passage we return to the movie theatre we entered at the beginning of the film. There, Vertov presents a kind of coda into which the onscreen audience is now incorporated into the filmmaking process. Within the frenetic editing of the film's final movement, the cameraman is replaced by the apparatus. The camera takes the final bow and in Tomas's words, "claims its authorial place" in the film as a new "intelligence." (Tomas, 37).

Tomas argues that the off-screen audience watching the film also undergoes this rite of passage and in so doing finds its place in the post-human vision of the Soviet Union circa 1929. It is a Marxist/materialist vision and is, to be sure, impeded by a clunky analogue technology. For Tomas, that is less important than the film's contribution to the larger project of post-humanism, a broad concept that he focuses for the purpose of his analysis:

The post-human will be defined as a function of how a film or video installation has eclipsed or processually rearticulated the human body, its identity and subjectivity in terms of their machine-based visions (and models) of the world. (Tomas, 10)

Using this definition, Tomas also finds a post-humanist sensibility in the framing concept of the "cinema-eye." He refers to the kinoks, the practitioners of Vertov's cinema eye theory as "units," part machine, part human (as the title "Cinema-Eye" would imply).

For the purpose of studying Vertov, such a reading is tempting in that it might offer insight into the essential question of how much agency Vertov credited to the machine. Unlike contemporary post-humanism we are not talking about thinking machines, so much as machines providing self and social affirmation. The machine takes on the power of an icon, certainly made – collectively - by human hands but then reflective of a force far greater than any individual creator. Vertov's films are full of the building and use of the great machine, the symbol of collective success heading into the future, a metaphor for the great machine of society itself.

This, of course, is entirely in keeping with the ethos of the 1920s Soviet avant garde. While the machine does not necessarily supplant human consciousness, it exists in distinction to individual agency and portents an invented social milieu dependent on a new sense of importance for technological beings. The Soviet propagandists of the day declared: "Communism equals Soviet Power plus Electrification." Those same propagandists re-named the electric light bulb, the "Illich Lamp," – very literally the combination of a human (Lenin) and the new, iconic technology.

That the artist could imagine these combinations beyond the realm of physical possibility is evidenced by Tatlin's personalized flying machines – Leonardo-like wing structures that could never actually lift the new Soviet man off the ground. Tatlin called these machines, "Letatlins," a play on his own name and the Russian verb "to fly."

In this context, Vertov's goal was to create for the new Soviet man a sensorium enhanced by technological means. That goal had its roots in his education at the Pavlovian Psycho-Neurological Institute and his association with the Russian and Soviet Formalists, Structuralists, Futurists and Constructivists – all of whom framed human experience in mechanical metaphors.

In Man With a Movie Camera we find this sensibility right at the beginning of the film, in the credits that come immediately after the previously mentioned intertitles at the beginning of the film. The only humans mentioned in the credits are Vertov, "the author-supervisor of the experiment;" Yelizaveta Svilova the editing assistant (presumably to Vertov), and Mikhail Kaufman, the on-screen cameraman. Obviously, there was at least one other human involved, the cameraman who shot the images of Mikhail. This omission points to the conceit that the apparatus itself provided these images – and hence deserves the bow it takes at the end of the film.

Vertov, I believe, also provides us with a timeline this new sensorium. The shots taken off the editors' shelves – which come to life both before her (and our) eyes and within other contexts of the film resemble the tiny bits of undifferentiated attraction from cinema's earliest days. What's more, that timeline continues into the future, promising a continuity in the growth of technological agency. The on-screen audience in Man With a Movie Camera that undergoes Tomas's right of passage serves as a 1929 baseline against which the off-screen audiences of the last 87 years may compare themselves. Asking the question: "How does our initiation into a media based sensorium compare with theirs?" contributes to keeping the film current.

Tomas suggests this as well, albeit somewhat indirectly. He writes that Man With a Movie Camera "…should be treated as the product of a reflexively based feedback loop between stages of production and minds…" (Tomas, 58)

Now, it would seem to me that a feedback loop has two somewhat contradictory properties.

On one hand it is hermetic, feeding entirely on itself, keeping other entities out of the loop. As much as any film ever made, Man with a Movie Camera operates in this capacity as a film entirely about its own construction. As such, it would seem to be the opposite of a documentary – a form whose content must be corroborated in the extra-cinematic world. Man With a Movie Camera is not even about a composite day in a composite city. Instead the film's on-screen construction seems to focus on the impossibility of seeing it as anything other than the 35mm nitrate strip running through the projector – and ultimately light itself projected on the screen. To quote Laurie Anderson's definition of heaven and television, it offers "a perfect little world that doesn't really need you."

I should also say that by the end of his Vertov section, Tomas is putting the word "documentary" in quotation marks. (Wouldn't Sight and Sound be surprised?)

Then there is the other property of a feedback loop: its unstoppable expansion to something all-encompassing. If Man With a Movie Camera presents us with images that are only images, nevertheless those images can only be produced by a reality outside themselves. Because of this, watching and understanding the film's production of meaning comes in the context of understanding the organic-mechanical production of meaning per se. Man With a Movie Camera points to the perception of perception in a way that becomes more relevant as our tools increase our perceptual powers. Not only is Man With a Movie Camera the "mummy and daddy of documentary." It is the house that documentary lives in. Or, while it doesn't really need you, you cannot contain its relevance.

Does this re-instate Man With a Movie Camera into our understanding of a documentary? Is it indeed about something outside itself, i.e. the nature of technologically enhanced perception?

In a word, "no." Man With a Movie Camera isn't so much "about" anything as it is something. This is why I'd like to conclude by suggesting that Vertov's film works better beneath its experimental film hat. It belongs within a subset of experimental film exploring the aspect of cinema's nature that causes us to accept the medium's presentation of an extra-cinematic world.

We might also ask if we can say the same thing about documentary as a whole. To watch an experimental work or to see the extra-cinematic world through a documentary is to refute transparency in the act of seeing. The subject of documentary extends through the human to the apparatus. We are increasingly reminded of this during the collision between our well-oiled documentary machine and those new platforms knocking ever less politely at the gate.

Thank you.


Sources

Sergei Eisenstein. "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram" in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1949. Pp. 28-44.

Phillip Rosen. "Now and Then: Conceptual Problems in Historicizing Documentary Imaging," Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Études Cinématographiques 16:1 (Spring 2007): 25-38.

David Tomas. Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Post-Human. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.





There may be a lesson here about canon building – or the lack thereof. Slightly more than 1000 individual titles were offered by the 340 respondents. As the minimum number of possible titles was 10 and the maximum 3400, we could say we were two thirds of the way to consensus.

We could also say that the large number of titles skewed the voting in favour of directors who have one non-fiction work that is much better known than others (Man With A Movie Camera, Shoah, Sans Soliel, Night and Fog – to name the top four.) Conversely, had the poll been done by filmmaker rather than title, the Maysles could add the mentions of Salesman and Gimme Shelter to that of Grey Gardens, for a total of 71 votes - moving them up to fifth place.

Sight and Sound has its own takes on this question. In "Reloading the Canon," Mark Cousins celebrates the inclusion of a broad spectrum of global titles – documentary finally catching up with the globalization of art house feature films. The online introduction to the survey by Nick James is a bit less focused. Listen carefully and you'll hear the journal having it four ways in three sentences

What's remarkable about the Top 50 documentaries list is that it feels so fresh. One in five of the films chosen were made since the millennium, and to have a silent film from 1929 at the top of the list is an absolute joy. That allusive essay films feature so strongly throughout demonstrates that nonfiction cinema is not a narrow discipline but a wide open country full of explorers."

Despite this overabundance of self-praise, if you play with the information on Sight and Sound's survey website, there is still something to be learned from both quantitative and qualitative data. This is particularly true of Man With a Movie Camera.

**********
If we were to consolidate these categories, we get some clues as to what this diverse group of respondents values not just in this poll or in Man With a Movie Camera but in the ideal documentary:

Formal ingenuity (Form + Affect) is – 40 (43%)

Continuing Relevance (Influence + Modernity + Current + Beyond Film) (40%)

A document to be viewed in Historical Context (Soviet Film + City Film – 16 (17%)





Hence the title, Man With a Movie Camera. Russian has no articles, so the literal translation of chelovek s kinoappartom is Man With Movie Camera. The most popular translations have been The Man With the Movie Camera or The Man With a Movie Camera.

John McKay, a Slavicist writing what will be the definitive critical biography of Vertov, argues for the translation of Chelovek s kinoapparatom as Man With a Movie Camera. While the word "chelovek," usually means an individual man, McKay points out that it also can have the connotation of "Mankind." He contends on the basis of his study that Vertov did indeed see not only his brother the cameraman but all of "mankind" as simultaneous producers and consumers of this technologically enhanced vision. In that vein, Vertov was also in his writings preparing humanity for the Radio Ear, the illustration of which is his film, Enthusiasm.

[I should note in passing that the standardization of the English translation of Chelovek s kinoapparatom would mark a third important item of Vertov news. Sight and Sound seems to have adopted it, though Tomas did not.]



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