The Man That’s a Movie Camera: Vertov and the birth of auteur celebrity

Alexander Graf holds that Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera represents the maturity of the city-symphony ‘genre’ with its emphasis on ‘rhythmic and associative montage as a formal device’. In contrast to Ruttman’s Berlin and Strand & Sheeler’s Manhatta, however, Vertov’s subject is not the city at all. As the title makes clear, his subject is himself.

Vertov’s era was seeing the invention of the auteur: Griffith, Eisenstein, Jean Vigo. Filmmakers were transitioning from tradesmen to celebrity artists. Vertov fancied some of that action I think. He borrows many of the city-symphony elements – the dawn-to-dusk format, the austere compositions of industrial landscapes, the suggestion of ‘social comment’ (a stooping street woman intercut with a giggling bourgeoise getting her hair done) – but his real preoccupation is the business of collecting the images, and the opportunities for madcap hi jinks and apparent heroism this collecting provides.

Vertov shows his true colours early on. A steam train approaches, promising Ruttman-esque opportunities for flying sequences of flashing windows (a seductive metaphor for film itself), thundering machinery, striding patterns of reflected light, and so on. But Vertov’s subject is the crouching daredevil hurriedly positioning his camera in the monster’s path. We see him leap out of the way at the last minute; we see his delighted assistants haul him to safety. We hear the first intimations of the auteurist cult, the prototype of the Peckinpahs and the Scorseses: the filmmaker as boundary-rider and thrilling outlaw.

Later, the tripod-toting hero rides insouciantly in an open-topped car through the teeming streets, his hair blowing in the wind, his face lifted to the sun. A Soviet-Constructivist version of the conquering Aryan ubermensch. He clambers up the side of a perilous tower while onlookers point and gasp. A rhythmic sequence of workers flying up and down in elevator shafts (strongly reminiscent of Metropolis) is interrupted by Vertov who appears on a landing, grinning and waving the action on like Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now. I wildly expected an intertitle to appear: Vertov shouting at his actors, ‘Keep going! Don’t look at the camera!’ Channelling Coppola down the decades.

The swirling, surging crowd-vortices of Griffith – one of the ‘herd of junkmen doing rather well peddling their rags’ as described in Vertov’s outrageously disingenuous polemic, ‘Kino’ – are massively apparent in MWAMC. Meanwhile, he condemns the theatrical tendency in film as ‘leprous’ and ‘mortally dangerous’ but is unable to escape its influence: as soon as the sweating flesh of workers is seen in proximity to spinning machines and pitiless metal, the human drama of personal effort and individual survival asserts itself. Eisenstein similarly tried to escape the tyranny of the particular in Strike, and failed for the same reasons. To the eternal frustration of the idealogue, film unswervingly reinforces the same truth: the political is the personal. ‘We temporarily exclude Man as a subject for Film,’ Vertov declares loftily. But guess what: you just can’t.

Vertov evolves the Constructivist dream into a Futurist nightmare. He channels Marinetti: ‘Our path leads through the poetry of machines to the perfect electric man.’ And further: ‘We compose… epics of electric power plants and flame.’ The Italian vision immolated in its own orgasmic coming-true: the inferno of World War 1. The Soviet vision ground on for another generation or two. But just like Eisenstein’s, Vertov’s leaden agenda cannot extinguish the life that film always eagerly, hungrily seizes and holds fast to: the vital universe of the human. Vertov’s straining labourers, his frowning clerks, his leaping gymnasts and wide eyed children, the chattering classes in the street with their faces catching the sun – these are the life of the film and the reason to watch it, to feel that 20^th century moment of excitement and uncertainty, to notice the universality of human experience that film wonderfully captures, and to ignore the cringeworthy ideology that tries and fails to ‘contextualize,’ hobble and delimit it.

Especially during the ‘gymnasts on the beach’ sequence - all that gleeful speeding up and slowing down intercut with the wondering and delighted faces of onlookers – I felt Vertov had film students in mind for his ultimate audience. The film could be subtitled Cool Stuff you can do with a Movie Camera. Watch this, he seems to say: I can stop this guy then make him go backwards. In explicit analogy he intercuts optical trick sequences with a fairground magician; all flair and flourish. He toys with stop-motion animation, making his trusty tripod dance and bow while a theatre-bound audience claps in delight. Vertov rifles through the cinema’s gleaming new box of tricks and brandishes his discoveries. Watch this, he cries. And this!

To 21^st century eyes it looks a little juvenile. But no-one had ever manipulated time like that before. Our sheer familiarity with the movies obscures their fundamental miracle: we are revisiting the past, replaying it at our convenience. Films make a loop out of life itself. Nothing else does that.