Man with a Movie Cam­era (1929)

Check out that bra clasp! As a young woman pre­pares her­self for the day, she hooks togeth­er the most dec­o­ra­tive­ly embroi­dered fas­ten­ers, bring­ing that extra bit of beau­ty to every­day func­tion­al­i­ty. Even in 1929, Russ­ian avant-gardist Denis Arkadievitch Kauf­man knew that when you point­ed a cam­era at some­thing, peo­ple regard­ed the sub­ject with height­ened inter­est and concentration.

So his hand-cranked equip­ment goes every­where – on top of build­ings, attached to trams and motor­bikes, in the fac­to­ries and pubs, on the beach – ask­ing us to look afresh at every human face, mov­ing pis­ton, and throng­ing street scene. The day-in-the-life ​‘city-sym­pho­ny’ was already a famil­iar sub-genre by the end of the ​’20s, but what was fresh then and holds up even now is the film’s insis­tence on not only know­ing that you’re look­ing, but inves­ti­gat­ing what it means when the machin­ery of cin­e­ma changes our rela­tion­ship with the world.

Of course, now we’re enveloped by mov­ing images from myr­i­ad devices, we hard­ly give such ques­tions a sec­ond thought. It’s easy to treat a Sovi­et-era silent clas­sic like this as some sort of set-text duty, not some­thing you’d watch for your own plea­sure. Yet the keynote here is just how invig­o­rat­ing it is to return to the first prin­ci­ples of visu­al lan­guage in this foun­da­tion stone for mod­ern cin­e­ma. No coin­ci­dence that the old­est of three Kauf­man broth­ers took the name Dzi­ga Ver­tov – mean­ing ​‘spin­ning top’ – and buoyed by the exper­i­men­tal­ism of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary late-’20s (Rodchenko’s dynam­i­cal­ly mod­ernist pho­tog­ra­phy and graph­ics work offer a key ref­er­ence point), he was deter­mined to be more than an observ­er, deliv­er­ing a cin­e­ma whose kinet­ic con­struc­tion was ener­get­i­cal­ly self-evident.

Ver­tov shows us every­thing you can do with a cam­era, cre­at­ing dou­ble and triple expo­sures, split screen, freeze frames and slow motion. Yet he’s inter­est­ed in more than for­mal pos­si­bil­i­ties, sug­gest­ing cinema’s capac­i­ty for social com­men­tary (cut­ting from abject beg­gars to the frol­ick­ing bour­geoisie), edu­ca­tion (see how these machines work) and indeed voyeurism (from boudoir jol­lies to sea­side body count).

Above all, he’s super-excit­ed by the pow­er of edit­ing, out doing Sergei Eisen­stein for punch and dri­ve in motoric rhythms which almost seem to pre­fig­ure mod­ern house music in their dri­ving build-up through trancey rep­e­ti­tion towards ecsta­t­ic quadru­ple-time release. A release in which every­one has their part to play, as laid out in the cli­mac­tic sequence incor­po­rat­ing an audi­ence watch­ing this very film in a cin­e­ma, the edi­tor piec­ing the sequence togeth­er and the eye of the cam­era lens which shot the footage. Not only does this rapid-fire mon­tage sug­gest – for 1929 at least – the view­ers’ new­ly devel­op­ing sen­so­ry con­scious­ness, but it’s also a tremen­dous­ly upbeat vision of cin­e­ma as a shared enter­prise, a demo­c­ra­t­ic medi­um where we’re all in it together.

Too naïve, in ret­ro­spect? Maybe, but as you enjoy this new­ly mint­ed dig­i­tal restora­tion, replete with Alloy Orchestra’s appro­pri­ate­ly head-bang­ing, met­al-bash­ing score, it’s still enrich­ing to be treat­ed as an equal, rather than just anoth­er con­sumer open­ing wide for anoth­er spoon­ful of product.