One thing that struck about Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera and the modus operandi of the kinoks' manifesto was the unflinching priveleging of machine above man. I found something dehumanising about it all to be honest, particularly with statements like the following: "In an art of movement with have no reason to devote our particular attention to contemporary man....The machine makes us ashamed of man's inability to control himself....For his inability to control his movements, WE temporarily exclude man as a subject for film." There just seems something odd with this "precise study of movement" Vertov seeks to achieve with his film. Particularly considering that the human figure is featured throughout the entirety of the film either on screen or implicitly behind the camera it seems to be a fruitless task to attempt to make some sort of robotic, perfectly precise form of movement. Maybe it's just that I find the repetitive labour of "saws dancing at a sawmill" aesthetically boring. I do think Vertov succeeds at one level however, mainly through his technique. The extreme manipulation of human figures, for example in the middle of the film when the camera is held on an image of an old woman, in an aesthetic sense transforms those figures into visual-machines manipulated and, in a sense, programmed by the film-maker. Or the images of the band at the beginning of Man With A Movie Camera frozen in time until the film-maker pushes a button. I think the angular style deployed by Vertov and the constant and quick juxtapositions of human figures and industrial machines blends the two, but it left me feeling disconcerted and, frankly, cold.
There was also something incongruous about the celebration of "the delight of mechanical labour" apparent throught Man With a Movie Camera. Vertov's use of Dutch angles and low-shots of various factories and machines gives them a sense of grandeur, elevating them literally and metaphorically. I think it's perhaps a class thing; it seems very easy and self-interested to aggrandize the repetitive toil of the factory worker from behind a camera lens at the top of a skyscraper. Vertov indeed was part of the agitation-propaganda arm of the Communist Party and this jingoistic sense of national pride which permeates the film, through the triumphant images of Soviet sportsmen and women and the slow zooms of Lenin and Marx towards the end, made me feel uneasy. However, the early 20th Century was a pinnacle for the idea of the nation-state, so I suppose context should be taken into account. Still, in my viewing of the film I couldn't help but notice that the subtle overtones of nationalism were incongruous with the opening images of beggars and children waking in the street; I suppose for a son of Jewish intellectuals Romanticizing the simple life of a street urchin, at least through the visual art of cinema, comes rather easily.
So I'll leave it there with a final question for anyone who happens to read this. Do you think that dehumanisation, on any level, is a symptom of modernity?
