Action.
Dziga Vertov's 1929 film Man With a Movie Camera is about precisely that.
A man, a camera.
We watch a nameless man walk through a nameless city in the Ukraine,
and capture what happens there with his camera.
He sees people at work, people at play; cars, trams, horses - the city in motion.
What's more, we see the camera capturing it. He perches the camera above the city.
It turns, and we see a couple signing marriage papers.
The camera swivels, and we see another couple, signing their divorce papers.
In another scene, he intercuts a funeral procession with a live birth.
The beginnings and endings of love, the beginnings and endings of life.
And above it all is the camera. It's a documentary about the making of a documentary.
But that's oversimplifying it. For one, Dziga Vertov never would have called it a documentary.
The contemporary term in the Soviet Union was 'Nettie Grovia Filmer',
literally, 'The Unplayed Film.'
Vertov thought this was the only true way to make a film, a stance which made him an outsider among his peers.
After the Revolution of 1917,
the new communist regime considered film to be the most effective way to ideologically unite the nation.
The Bolsheviks' newly-formed Cinema Commission founded one of the world's first film schools:
The All-Soviet State University of Cinematography.
It was there that filmmakers started to explore how film can be used to advance ideas,
to convey ideology through cinema.
It was the place where Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Eisenstein, not only made films,
but drafted film theories that would guide filmmaking as an art form
in every nation on the planet for the next century.
Vertov never attended these workshops. In fact, he once sneeringly dismissed their work as
"the same old crap tinted red."
Not that Vertov wasn't a Marxist. No, Vertov's issue with Soviet cinema wasn't ideological - it was aesthetic.
Pudovkin and Eisenstein's films were fictions.
They had actors, not people; and scenarios, not life.
They were, by design, experiments in audience manipulation.
Vertov instead wanted to capture what he called "life unaware".
Dziga Vertov started in newsreels.
Running a series that he called Kino Pravda - 'Movie Truth'.
He didn't think he was conveying ideology, but absolute truth.
This early in film history, the notion of the documentary had yet be solidified.
Now the first films, by today's standards, might be called documentaries.
They were simply slices of everyday life - things that filmmakers found interesting to watch.
But the contemporary term for them became 'actualities'.
And these actualities soon gave way to experimenting in fiction films.
And even the first films that we might call "documentaries" today
were often staged recreations of life or history, as in the works of Robert J. Flaherty or Benjamin Christensen.
But in the mid 1920's, there was already a budding genre of documentary -
a sort of a travelogue: 'The City Symphony',
an extended montage capturing a day in the life of a city, from morning to night.
They documented cities in motion from Manhattan, to Paris, to Berlin.
They operated on this modernist revelry. They responded to over crowded urban blight
by singing the praises of the modern interconnected metropolis.
It was an idea that would resonate throughout fiction in the 20th century:
the love letter to the city.
[clip] There are eight million stories in the naked city.
But Dziga Vertov didn't think it went far enough. His city symphony doesn't start with the city -
it starts with the camera.
And he doesn't start on the streets - he starts in a movie theater.
Audiences seeing this film for the first time would have seen their own actions reenacted for them.
Seats go down, audience enters, orchestra prepares, projection starts.
And then, the city symphony begins.
People awaken as they go to work, trams start running, the action builds and builds and builds.
But about a third of the way through, the film stops.
Freezes.
The city in motion suddenly becomes a still life,
and we're taken into the editing room.
And we see the film's editor, Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov's wife, cutting the film,
creating the motion that we now see.
Before this, editors were simply hired hands, anonymous laborers.
Vertov made the editor into a key creative voice.
And he did that not only by making the editor a main character,
but he created a catalog of camera and editing tricks.
Those which he didn't invent, he expands.
And all of them are still in use today.
Jump cuts, Dutch angles, handheld, tracking shots, dissolves, overlays, double exposure,
fast motion, slow motion, reverse motion, stop motion.
And with many of these shots, Vertov makes sure we see how the shot was achieved.
No special effects wizardry, no "how did they do that" sense of wonder.
Vertov shows us exactly how he did it.
Vertov makes us aware of the very stuff of moviemaking: camera and film.
Later directors would use film material itself to disorient.
This held over even in an age when people are more likely to see movies on DVD than on film.
[clip] You're the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world.
But for Vertov, it's not disorientation. It's revelation.
Showing us a world more true than anything our eyes could conceive.
In the year of the founding of the first film school, Dziga Vertov published his manifesto,
where he declared himself not a cinematographer, but a Kinok - a "Movie-Eye".
Vertov saw the camera as a purer form of the human eye.
From his writings, you get the sense that
Vertov's dream project would be a film done without a cameraman entirely.
It's this mechanical performance that Vertov's interested in.
In his manifesto he wrote of the emancipation of the camera: the camera frees us from human perception.
Vertov even removed his own identity, and replaced it with the camera.
His real name was Denis Kaufman. Dziga Vertov is a pseudonym, meaning, roughly, "spinning top".
Just as the camera spins, so spins the cameraman.
While reality is imperfect, the Kino-Eye could perceive perfection in a way no human eye could.
I am Kino-Eye. I make a man more perfect than Adam.
I am Kino-Eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.
Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility. I am in constant motion.
I draw near, then away from objects. I crawl under. I climb onto them.
I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse.
I plunge full-speed into a crowd. I outstrip running soldiers.
I fall on my back as I ascend with an airplane. I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies.
My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world.
I decipher in new way a world unknown to you.
Worth noting that Vertov wrote poetry as well. Big fan of Walt Whitman. It shows.
Now Vertov believed that he was telling the absolute truth; but,
how true is this truth?
I have no clue if Vertov was aware of Belgian surrealist René Magritte,
but Man with a Movie Camera came out the same year as Magritte's "Treachery of Images".
The famous "This is not a pipe."
And of course. It's a painting of a pipe.
Actually, it's a web video showing a PNG file of a painting of a pipe, repeated at 23.976 frames per second.
Likewise, this is not a city. It's a photograph of a city.
And it's not A city. It's three cities.
It's Odessa, it's Kharkiv, it's Kiev; all stitched together to create this idea of a city.
And though Vertov tries to bring his camera to life, he's still the one controlling it.
Magritte might question the truth of Vertov's Kino-Eye.
Does beauty still only lie in the eye of the beholder, even if that eye is a Movie-Eye?
Today we live by the mantra of "pics or it didn't happen". The image is supreme.
It's a simple act of everyday world-building.
We document the moments that we want to remember, while deleting the ones that we don't.
To the point where sharing something unaesthetic, unflattering,
something outside our narrow standards of beauty and truth,
becomes a radical act.
We routinely question the standards of beauty, of family, of race and sexuality,
captured by the no longer objective Kino-Eye, and we fight the tyranny of the Kino-Eye,
using the Kino-Eye itself as our weapon.
We are caught in a war of dueling truths.
Man with a Movie Camera is just one battle in that war.
I like to think that part of the reason Vertov made his camera so prominent, is to justify itself;
to make the mechanism of creation as important as the creation.
His treatment of the Ukrainian cities where he filmed
are pretty in-tune with the Leninist orthodoxy he worked under;
but, by showing us the creation of that ideal, is he unintentionally subverting it?
Does an artist show truth, or create it?
Maybe, Dziga Vertov is trying to tell us the only truth an artist can tell you:
"I Am Lying."
So, where does truth start? When the camera starts rolling?
Or when it stops?
Cut.