Here is the idea that Dziga Vertov offers us with Man with a Movie Camera. This 1929 film explores the modernity of cinema by assembling in patchwork different scales of life - the city, social classes, the crowd, the individual - into a single work thanks to the thread that is the operator's gaze and the needle that is the camera. The lights come on, the chairs unfold, the crowd enters, the projection begins. The first sensation that Man with a Movie Camera provokes is that of a documentary mise en abyme on the process of cinematic creation.
A narrative line weaves itself by following the operator, his camera, and their union through the gaze. Through this film, we discover the shooting by following an operator who never leaves his camera and keeps cranking it frantically. But, in the middle of the film, the moving images become frames again. The viewer then discovers the editor who cuts and glues the film: she brings life to the images that animate before our eyes. And the spectators of the time are themselves filmed. Dziga Vertov films their reactions to the images already shown to the current viewer. The two projection rooms (one where the viewer of the time is and the one where the new viewer is) become one, we all look at the same screen where the same images are projected and the depth of field encourages this illusion of sharing the same space. But, beyond its dimension as a testimony of an era, Man with a Movie Camera also reveals itself to be a vector of communist propaganda.
This propaganda takes the form of a highlighting of the industrial modernity of the USSR. Cinema itself embodies this modernity through its mechanical nature. One can observe numerous shots of automata in showcases as well as a strong emphasis on the modernism of transportation means with shots of trains, trams, and airplanes. The factory is also a recurring figure in the film, allied with that of the worker who starts the machine. Like the machine, the enormous gears of the USSR move thanks to the effort of the worker. Subsequently, a true play of rhythm on the speed of the machine is set in motion. There is a feeling of a loss of control in the editing that becomes frantic like the euphoria of mechanics: the images repeat and overlap, the machine, the man, and the woman form no more than a single body and all end their effervescence at the same time. The union of bodies is also found with the city, which is filmed as a living entity whose movement embodies modernity. The architecture itself is highlighted: the buildings, the fountains, the squares. But it is thanks to the editing that the city comes to life. Dziga Vertov associates through the editing the awakening of a woman and the awakening of the city. The woman opens her eyes and washes, the shutters of the homes open and the streets are cleaned.
Through this same editing, we observe a discourse of classes: while some women work, others are being treated, some wash the sheets, shine shoes, and edit films, while others have their hair washed and nails polished. But, as the film progresses, the camera formats individuality and shapes the city as a unit. In the shots filmed from a high angle, the city lives: the crowd is its blood that beats in the veins and arteries that are the streets and boulevards, propelled from the large square that forms its heart. The only individuality promoted by Dziga Vertov is that of a superman: the man-machine. Indeed, the man and the machine are constantly represented as functioning together.
Thus, the operator merges with the camera, it extends his natural abilities and their gaze forms only one. The operator never separates from his camera, even taking it with him on a motorcycle or swimming with it at the beach, which gives him, with the retrospective gaze now possible, an aspect of Charlie Chaplin who would have swapped his cane for a camera. However, Dziga Vertov seems to show us that the machine is even superior by representing a camera made completely autonomous by the use of stop-motion: it positions itself and then moves on its own. The machine seems here to surpass man. The superman is also staged through sports. It can be noted that the athletes filmed by Dziga Vertov are both men and women and form a single idealized body with performances amplified by slow motion.
This singular way of filming athletes recalls Greek statuary like The Discobolus, a symbol of the cult of the body. The represented sports also embody a form of modernity: we find not only traditional Olympic sports but also weightlifting thanks to machines, basketball, soccer, and motorcycling. Dziga Vertov shows us that, thanks to technology, man has become the master of the forces of nature: whether it is the elements used as resources (fire is dominated by the forge, water by the dam, and land by the mine), animals like horses used for racing, or the human body to achieve physical performances. Nature is dominated by man who is himself surpassed by the machine. The film is composed like a visual stroll from metaphor to metaphor, guided by the camera's gaze and parallel editing. This stroll begins with the awakening of the woman mounted in parallel to that of the city, as analyzed earlier.
The very awakening of the woman is due to parallel editing that creates a Kuleshov effect: the shot of a train speeding past the camera is connected to a shot of the woman waking up suddenly, the viewer makes the connection between the two shots and it seems to them that the woman had a nightmare. Subsequently, Dziga Vertov will depict the very cycle of life by parallel editing a wedding, a funeral, and a childbirth. These different metaphors are arranged by the operator's eye connections to what is shown to us as what he films. Thus, we have the impression that things do not exist, do not animate, and cannot be seen except through the camera, which thus becomes animistic. The camera gives life to things and is omniscient: it sees everything and shows everything. The operator physically dominates the space he films and gives life to it with his camera through overlays and enlargements of his image. He strides over the crowd in the square, films a building, then distorts reality by dividing the image into a split-screen and flipping the frame 180 degrees.
The modernity of Man with a Movie Camera is also found in its experimental dimension, particularly through an exploration of editing. In the waking sequence, the cut in the motif is developed for parallel editing purposes: shutters open and close, a woman's eyelids flutter, the camera lens opens and closes. One can also find numerous uses of post-production techniques such as split-screen, layering, acceleration, slow motion and stop-motion that emphasize the modern character of cinema, a mechanical device by its essence, and the effervescence of this mechanical modernity. But, like Georges Méliès, Dziga Vertov also experiments with editing as a magical tool by making people and objects appear. He makes the operator emerge from a freshly filled glass of beer with the foam rising thanks to layering and fading. He sets up a chessboard by reversing the reading direction of the images. The modernity of the codes used by Dziga Vertov is also very visible when he films a soccer match: variation between close-ups on the ball and wider shots to see the action as a whole, shots from inside the goals in low angle and slow motion to show the trajectory of the shots and maintain the suspense of the goal, the repetition of actions…
These are the same codes that are used to film soccer matches today. But, beyond visual experimentation, Dziga Vertov also develops a sound experimentation. Although the film is a silent film, the filmmaker visually appeals to the viewer's hearing. During the sequence in the cinema hall at the beginning of the film, Dziga Vertov confronts us with a first sound atmosphere by visually evoking sounds: the "clack" of the seats unfolding, the buzz of the crowd, and the musicians of the orchestra tuning their instruments. Although the viewer cannot hear these sounds, the image appeals to the imagination that almost automatically recreates the sound atmosphere in the viewer's mind.
This process is all the more striking later in the film when musical instruments appear superimposed in a round mirror, followed by a shot of a ear. Dziga Vertov directly calls the viewer's attention to sound, which is paradoxical since sound is absent from the film. This is followed by shots of people talking and laughing, spoons striking objects, tap dancing… The viewer thus creates an imaginary symphony from all these sounds that are shown to them. This symphony is provoked and guided by the editing, the assembly of images stimulates our hearing. But the editing of the sequence accelerates, the rhythm intensifies, and the harmony of images and sounds transforms into a visual and auditory cacophony.
The Man with a Movie Camera is therefore an ode to modernity that forms around the mise en abyme of a cinematic gaze, that of Dziga Vertov and that of the filmed operator, both being enhanced by the camera's lens. This gaze forms a leitmotif: the superimposition of the eye and the lens, united in a single gaze. And thus the film concludes: the camera's lens closes like the eyelids of the operator.