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Chapter 2 “Peace between Man and Machine” Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera Seth Feldman In 1930, when Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom , 1929) was the first Soviet film he saw, the young critic Jay Leyda found himself “reeling” from a New York theater, “too stunned to sit through it again” (Leyda 251). This was, one could only surmise, the desired effect. Vertov’s film was, like the speeding cars, the intersecting trolleys, and spinning gears depicted in it, a high-speed machine meant to shock the viewer into empathy with the industrial age. It was a high point in early modernism’s desire to wed art and the machine. It was also the product of a time when there was still hope for a totally scientific understanding of human experience. And the film was still more. For what Vertov showed us in Man with a Movie Camera was not just anybody’s industrial age. Leyda, who was to become the English-speaking world’s preeminent historian and champion of the Soviet cinema, found in the film the dynamism of the Soviet revolution itself. This was the revolution not only at work but working within the precision of Vertov’s precisely edited montages. Vertov’s life had made him an embodiment of the film’s concerns, an all but perfect manifestation of the three decades that preceded Man with a Movie Camera. He was born Denis Abramovich Kaufman on January 2, 1896, the Thursday after the Lumière brothers held cinema’s first 20 S E T H F E L D M A N commercial screening in Paris. The Kaufman family resided in Bialystok, Poland, then part of the Russian empire. Young Denis Abramovich (he would later Russify his Jewish patronymic to “Arkadevich”) studied music, an interest that was to remain with him for the rest of his career. In 1915, Vertov’s family fled to Moscow and a year later to St. Petersburg. Vertov enrolled in the Psychoneurological Institute but soon gravitated toward the city’s avant-garde cafés. It was there that he made the acquaintance of the young Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and one of the founders of the Russian school of formalist critics, Viktor Shklovsky.1 It was during this period that Denis Arkadevich Kaufman took on the Futurist pseudonym “Dziga Vertov,” a term that may be roughly translated as “spinning top” or “spinning gypsy.” Vertov’s avant-gardism is, in itself, a significant aspect of his films and his career. Like the St. Petersburg avantgarde and the Italian Futurists who inspired them, he maintained a contempt for the classic arts. We might draw a straight line from the Italians’ condemnation of the Italian legacy to Mayakovsky’s call to destroy Russian museums to Vertov’s “sentence of death” passed on all previous film (Vertov, “Kinoki,” Kino-Eye 138).2 For Vertov, the rebirth of film studios in the Soviet Union—and the consequent Soviet “Golden Age”—was a betrayal of what the cinema could have been. Vertov’s avant-garde contempt for the classical expresses itself in Man with a Movie Camera in what was then seen as the film’s most scandalous image. Toward the end of the film, Vertov uses a split screen shot to make it appear as if the Bolshoi Theatre—that icon of traditional Russian performance—collapses in upon itself. But if one was to destroy all of classical art, what then would replace it? Inspired by the Italian Futurists and their Russian imitators, Vertov was determined to show the world seen by the movie camera as the entire cinematic apparatus sees it (i.e., including the editing as well as the filming process). In Man with a Movie Camera, images are taken from every conceivable camera angle and distance, and numerous types of camera movement are employed. We see the world in normal motion, slow motion, split frame, and freeze frame. And we see shots not only edited into seamlessly constructed sequences but also edited by theme (e.g., a shot of a movie poster for a film called A Woman Awakens is followed by a shot of a woman awakening ). The pace of the editing ranges from the leisurely to the frenetic, from unobtrusive to dazzling sequences of one and two shots. From the early 1920s, Vertov articulated the reasons for presenting the world this way in a series of manifestos that took his ideas well beyond those...

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