Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Newly Minted as the Greatest Documentary Ever Made (Review)

Newly enthroned by Sight & Sound as the greatest documentary ever made, Man With a Movie Camera is an easy film to enjoy.  Partly this is because of its ripping pace – 67 minutes long, utterly relentless and married here with a Michael Nyman score which matches it gallop for gallop.  Partly this is because its much-heralded innovations still feel fresh today.  Arguably the first truly metafictional film, it begins with a can of film marked with the picture’s title and ends with a woman’s head superimposed onto the spinning carousel of an editing reel.  After an hour of immersion in the restless imagination and stroboscopic editing of Dziga Vertov (real name Denis Arkadievitch – the pseudonym aptly translates as “spinning top”), the viewer knows how she feels.

Another reason why it’s so easy to appreciate is that it is possible to appreciate apolitically.  Unlike other ideologically questionable films of its era – Birth of a Nation, say, or Triumph of the Will – the viewer rarely feels bothered by Vertov’s ardent service to the Soviet government.  No less a giant of early documentary than Paul Rotha (Land of Promise, Shipyard) dismissed it as a mere novelty, and though he’s wrong about the work’s triviality, he’s surely right about its real-world relevance.  Aside from the odd bust of Marx and the sight of a cartoon Nazi being used for target practice, Man With a Movie Camera is an apolitical work about cinema.  Right?

Dead wrong, as it turns out.  The BFI’s new Blu-Ray attempts to repoliticise Man With a Movie Camera, firstly through Russian film historian Yuri Tsivian’s excellent audio commentary.  The politics of Man With a Movie Camera are rooted in cinema, in Trotsky’s opposition – which Vertov shared – to lightweight narrative fiction, which he considered an almost narcotic duller of the population’s wits.  The bourgeois woman asleep at the film’s start lies underneath a poster of Fred Sauer’s 1927 German melodrama The Awakening of Woman, and dreams of that stock situation of silent cinema, a person trapped on a train track.  Yet, as the title of Sauer’s film implies, she must wake up – and, Vertov says, so should we.

And yet Man With a Movie Camera is a film of surprising artifice.  The train scene is rendered with a thunderous power that shames most contemporary Hollywood directors, and despite the opening titles claiming that nothing has been staged, it includes several stop-frame animated sequences, including a charming one of a tripod going to pick up its camera.  Vertov seems fascinated by the paradox of using artifice to capture reality, expressing this most famously when the film stops to take the viewer inside the editing room, but also through the continual juxtaposition of the camera eye with living eyes.  (One sequence, where street scenes are intercut with the unmoving faces of shop window dummies, seems to be an affectionate parody of Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing experiments)

That said, a lot of the film is clearly not faked – scenes involving births and road accidents are joltingly real.  When cinematographer and title character (a unique double duty?) Mikhail Kaufman suggested to Vertov that their subjects may be distracted by the camera, Vertov jokes that they should wait until every street corner was covered in movie cameras and society had learned to ignore them – a future Vertov considered inevitable.  And it was.  The only aspect of our modern, CCTV-riddled, selfie-stick society Vertov doesn’t anticipate is the sexuality of voyeurism, which is almost totally absent from his film.  Perhaps sexless voyeurism should be properly termed “surveillance”.

This brings us back in the USSR.  The Blu-Ray also includes three other films by Vertov – Kino-Pravda no. 21, Three Songs of Lenin and One-Sixth of the Globe, the latter of which is longer than the main feature.  All of them are straightforward propaganda films about the triumphs of Communism, and as such are less fun than the more covertly political main feature, though all of them are worth watching and provide testament to Vertov’s incredible craft.

Kino-Pravda no. 21 is a newsreel feature from early in Vertov’s career, which shows him beginning to discover the mastery of editing and pacing he shows off in Man With a Movie Camera.  Some material from it is reworked into the hour-long Three Songs of Lenin, which comes with an unusually exciting subtitle track – a recently rediscovered translation by WH Auden.  One-Sixth of the Globe – its title referring to the size of the Soviet Union in 1926, when the film was made – attempts a massively ambitious survey of the whole planet, comparing the greedy, racist, decadent West with the unity of spirit and purpose Vertov found in his home country.  Its sheer scale makes it very nearly as impressive as the title feature.

There are also two short extras relating to the Auden discovery, as well as an essay by Auden scholar David Collard.  One of them features Simon Callow giving a stirring reading of the Auden text.  The other is a brief speech Collard gave explaining the history of Auden’s involvement with Three Songs of Lenin.  In an extraordinarily funny aside, he tells the audience what the poet’s favourite film was.  I won’t spoil it for you, but it seems unlikely to trouble any future Sight & Sound polls.

Thanks for reading our review of Man with a Movie Camera

For more Movie talk, check out our podcast CINEMA ECLECTICA Man with a Movie Camera also featured on Episode 32