The Books of My Life: The Man With the Movie Camera

By the time I first saw Dziga Vertov's, Yelizaveta Svilova's, and Mikhail Kaufman's The Man with the [a] Movie Camera at Indiana University for the first time, probably in one of James Naremore's film classes, the film and its author-supervisor, editor, and cameraman, were already feted and celebrated particularly by those who wanted to make films that not only described the world, if not in a Hollywood kind of way, but that also changed the world they described.

Graham Robert's The Man with the Movie Camera: The Film Companion (London: Tauris, Kinofiles series, 2000) nicely explores Vertov's film on a variety of different levels. Roberts nicely puts Vertov's "experiment" in its historical, political, economic, cultural, and biographical contexts. Robert's provides an intriguing and enlightening structural and textual analysis of Man's shots, scenes, montage, and mise-en-scene, untangling the argument of the film in the process. Finally, Roberts's book explores the afterlife of the film in both the USSR and the West.

For Roberts The Man with the Movie Camera has to be set against the backdrop of constructivist, futurist, and what Roberts calls productivist, cultural and artistic contexts. Man, Roberts notes, was an experiment doomed to failure in the USSR of the late 1920s and 1930s, just as the dogma of socialist realism with its heroes, villains, and uplifting plots and its emphasis on the need for a literature, film, and theatre, that could be readily understood by the masses. Man, with its montage is the message structure and its message of Soviet power bringing about the triumph of socialism in one country, the USSR, and inevitably globally, was, or so Soviet leaders thought, simply not amenable to easy interpretation by the masses. As a result, Vertov's career languished.

As Roberts notes, the powers that be in the USSR and the Soviet masses may not have been ready for Vertov's, Svilova's, and Kaufman's Man with the Movie Camera, but avant garde artists and filmmakers in the West in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were and many film makers and film students impacted by the countercultural 1960s in the West, such as Jean-Luc Godard, and even in the Iron Curtain East, such as Dusan Makavejev and his wonderful and wonderfully Vertovian collage film WR: Mystersies of the Organism, were. It was the counterculture sixties with its celebration of the experiment film and of the need to change the world that provided the context in which I first say Man With the Movie Camera.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the avant-garde, Soviet film, Soviet experimental film, ahd the artistic straitjacket that was state mandated socialist realism.