Chelovek s kinoapparatom / Man With a Movie Camera (GCM Sacile 2004)

Dziga Vertov: Chelovek s kinoapparatom / Man With a Movie Camera (1929). Poster design by the Stenberg brothers (Vladimir Stenberg, Georgi Stenberg), signature "2 Stenberg 2". Photo from IMDb.

DZIGA VERTOV XIV
Grand piano: John Sweeney
Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 14 Oct 2004

Prog. 14 (82’)

Dziga Vertov: Goskinokalendar 47. Photo: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Collection Dziga Vertov.

GOSKINOKALENDAR 47 / [CINECALENDARIO DI STATO N. 47 / STATE KINO-CALENDAR NO. 47] (Goskino, USSR 1925)
Dir: Dziga Vertov; rel: 2.1925; 35 mm, 160 m, 6’ (24 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
    AA: Duration of the screening: 5'59".

CHELOVEK S KINOAPPARATOM / L’UOMO CON LA MACCHINA DA PRESA / MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (VUFKU, USSR 1929)
A Film Feuilleton.
Author/Leader: Dziga Vertov; chief ph: Mikhail Kaufman; asst. dir: Elizaveta Svilova; rel: 9.4.1929; lunghezza originale / orig. length: 1839 m; 35 mm, 1785 m, 65’ (24 fps), Nederlands Filmmuseum.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
    AA: A good print. Duration of the screening: 1:06'+ = 67 min.

CHELOVEK S KINOAPPARATOM / L’UOMO CON LA MACCHINA DA PRESA / MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (VUFKU, USSR 1929)
Rullo / Reel 3, 35 mm, 300 m, 11’ (24 fps), RGAKFD.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.
    AA: Lower and weaker definition than in the previous print. 10'39"12.

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Much in agreement with the Productionist movement in art (of which more later), L’uomo con la macchina da presa is a film about film production: it shows a movie being made. But this alone does not make Man with a Movie Camera unique. What does is that the film which Man with a Movie Camera shows being made is Man with a Movie Camera itself. It is as if Man with a Movie Camera had two, even three, identities at once: the film that we are watching, the film which we see being made, and the film that we are shown being shown somewhere else. There are no clear boundaries between the three — or, to be more exact, the boundaries are clear; it is Vertov who keeps teasing us by constantly shifting these boundaries."

"Take the beginning of the film. Man with a Movie Camera begins with a prologue set in a movie theatre. We see what takes place in the projection booth and in the orchestra pit before a movie show, and see people filling the theatre, just as we have filled ours only minutes before. What film have they come to watch? When the projectionist opens a can and prepares to put the film in the projector, we can read the film’s title on the can: "Liudina z aparatem, Ch. 1," [Ukrainian for Man with a Movie Camera, Reel One] — the very reel of the very film we are now watching — but of course, the onscreen Man with a Movie Camera is only going to be shown. Note the fascinating sensation of being "in" and "out" at the same time — it will be key throughout the entire film. We see how the conductor’s baton requests the orchestra’s attention, how the projectionist adjusts the knob of the carbon-arc lamp, how inside the projector two carbon needles come closer together — and as a bright spot of light is formed between the two, the two films — the one we are watching, and the one shown to the onscreen audience — become one. The prologue is over; we are now part of the prologue audience."

"Evidence survives that this illusion — the fusion of two movies and of two movie theatres into one — may have been particularly strong when Man with a Movie Camera was screened on its opening night on 9 April 1929. From Vertov’s instructions for the orchestra, we know that he wanted no music to be heard throughout the prologue — nothing apart from the percussion imitating the "tick-tock of a clock" — the pulse of silence. Only when the conductor on the screen waves his baton and the screen musicians start playing is live music from a real orchestra supposed to join in. If there can be such a thing as musical trompe-l’oeil, this is it."

"Those who have followed our Kino-Pravda shows will have noticed that that self-reflexive quality, that in-or-out ambiguity is not something peculiar to Man with a Movie Camera alone. Recall issues 6 and 9, which begin in a projection booth, showing how a projectionist threads Kino-Pravda 6 and 9 into his projector, or a more recent issue, 18, with its recurring shadow of a man with a movie camera recording what we see. Is this just a Baroque idiosyncrasy, or there is something about Vertov’s time and culture that can help us explain his tendency to expose the "backstage" story behind film images and films?"

"To address this question we would need to connect Man with a Movie Camera to the Left Front [LEF] doctrine known as Productionism [proizvodstevennichestvo], according to which (to summarize this rather sketchy set of ideas), in the future society where everyone works, the work itself — not its end results — will become the aesthetic value. The process will prevail over the object, the production over the product. The future belongs to the art of work, not to works of art.
This was a rather vague theory indeed, but maybe it was exactly due to this vagueness that Productionist ideas became productive for Left-wing cinema and art. It was up to the artist to translate these ideas into practice. Was it not an interesting and challenging task — to make a picture or write a book that would be less concerned with its end value — the book as such, a picture as such — than with the process of their coming into being? Suddenly, such marginal genres as do-it-yourself books for children came into focus. One of these — a 1926 collection of poems under the tell-tale title Samozveri [Self-Animals] by the Productionist writer and theorist Sergei Tretiakov — is so much like Man with a Movie Camera in miniature that it is worth mentioning here. The poems the book includes describe various adventures of people and animals cut out of paper; there are also photographic illustrations which show these adventures enacted by cut-out people and animals (designed, staged, and photographed by the Constructivist artists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova). A book as a book — but the reason why its title is "self-animals" is that, in addition to the poems and photographed paper figures, it includes cutting charts, guided by which the little reader can take the scissors, cut out his/her own paper animals, and involve them in new adventures. A model Productionist book: in it, reading and making are treated as one."

"Two major film directors, Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, tried to apply the Productionist principle in their works. The way Eisenstein interpreted it was to say that his aim was not to produce films, but to produce film spectators. His films, he wrote, were what the hammer was for the factory worker: their aim was to process the mind of the spectator through a series of pre-calculated shocks. Distinct from Eisenstein’s, Vertov’s approach to production art was more of a Constructivist variety — somewhat similar to the Constructivist cut-it-yourself book mentioned above. Truly Constructivist artworks — from Tatlin’s tower to a book for children — are transparent as to their own making, its "construction". This transparency is best described through an architectural metaphor. Normally, after a building has been erected, the builder removes the scaffolding. The Constructivist artists would rather remove the building, but leave the scaffolding intact. Vertov’s movie is of a similar kind — the building of thebuilding is more important than the building built. That Man with a Movie Camera lays bare the process of its own production — from the cameraman and the editor to the projectionist and the orchestra — was consistent both with the principle of Constructivist transparency and with the Productionist doctrine. A true do-it-yourself movie, Man with a Movie Camera puts the making above the made. Each time Man with a Movie Camera is shown, it is made anew. While other movies are made to exist, this one exists to be made."

"You will not easily find a Soviet silent more often shown in the West than Man with a Movie Camera. This film has also been shown before at the Giornate — this film, but not this print. All 35 mm prints of Man with a Movie Camera available in the West have the same defect — they have been printed sound aperture, without adjusting the aspect ratio, which means that a soundtrack-wide area on the left has been lost — and with it, Mikhail Kaufman’s painstakingly achieved frame compositions. The Nederlands Filmmuseum print we are showing is a good full-frame print, whose provenance goes back to the time when Man with a Movie Camera was first shown in The Netherlands. The only trouble with this print is that one shot is missing — the one that shows, point-blank, the moment a baby is being delivered, the most direct manifestation of Vertov’s direct cinema, which may be the reason why it has been censored from the Dutch print. In order to make up for this loss, Reel 3 from the full (and full-frame) print of Man with a Movie Camera preserved at RGAKFD will be shown after the Dutch version."

"It was Aleksandr Deriabin’s idea to show the 1925 State Kino-Calendar No. 47 before the 1929 Man with a Movie Camera. It helps to situate that famous trick shot from the last reel of Man with a Movie Camera which makes the Bolshoi Theatre collapse. A more or less similar thing happens to the Bolshoi in the 47th issue of State Kino-Calendar. For a variety of reasons (detailed in my introductory essay in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties), Left-wing writers and filmmakers alike perceived the Bolshoi (former Imperial) Theatre as an emblem of dated, portentous, etc., art. Vertov, who was, as we know, always on the Left, took the existence of the Bolshoi Theatre almost personally — as the theatre which the authorities refused to demolish or convert into something useful, as the Left Front of the Arts [LEF] group demanded, or at least closed (as Lenin wanted to, back in 1921), and which was instead turned into an official showcase for official art. Ironically, in February 1925, when the 100th anniversary of the Bolshoi was pompously celebrated (meetings, speakers, banners, demonstrations), Vertov was assigned to record the event for State Kino-Calendar. But then, he could use the movie camera — the filmmaker’s weapon — to knock out symbolically what could not be physically knocked down." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)