The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. This is a different list than the 100 Greatest English-Language Films one, although a few entries overlap. — Dennis
Cinema began as a documentary enterprise, with the camera a purely objective recording device; but documentaries have also been subjective and personal. Chelovek s kino-apparatom, by Dziga Vertov, born Denis Arkadievich Kaufman, employs a framing device: preparation for the screening, followed by the ceremonious screening, of the film itself. On the agile move, it follows the cameraman, the director’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman, from dawn to darkness, here, there and everywhere, including bustling city streets in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, as he tries taking in “life as it is being lived” from numerous perspectives while photographing the film we’re watching. Two audiences complete this self-reflexivity: those attending the screening in the film; Vertov’s audience—now, us. Both “half-create” what they see, as in life.
What’s on screen is life then? Not so fast! What appears is full of camera tricks. In Vertov’s earlier Kino-Eye (1924) the Chinese street magician’s magic seems the result of his own sleight of hand. Now, however, the magic of life and the magic of cinema so continuously translate into one another that we cannot be certain whose “tricks” we witness: the magician’s or Vertov’s. The “factuality” that Vertov is after, then, isn’t the sort that omits or discards the myriad ambiguities of human experience; his eclectic film displays various tones and moods, with beauteous lyrical inserts recalling poet William Wordsworth’s visionary “spots of time,” amidst highly descriptive passages, such as of people at work. The result places the adventure in the graciousness of eternity—although the film never quite loses hold of the here and now, even when, in a burst of ingenious animation, Kaufman’s camera, onstage, comes to robotic life to confront its audience: a sci-fi image predicting a delightful Soviet future that wasn’t to be.
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THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (Dziga Vertov, 1928)
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. This is a different list than the 100 Greatest English-Language Films one, although a few entries overlap. — Dennis
Cinema began as a documentary enterprise, with the camera a purely objective recording device; but documentaries have also been subjective and personal.
Chelovek s kino-apparatom, by Dziga Vertov, born Denis Arkadievich Kaufman, employs a framing device: preparation for the screening, followed by the ceremonious screening, of the film itself. On the agile move, it follows the cameraman, the director’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman, from dawn to darkness, here, there and everywhere, including bustling city streets in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, as he tries taking in “life as it is being lived” from numerous perspectives while photographing the film we’re watching. Two audiences complete this self-reflexivity: those attending the screening in the film; Vertov’s audience—now, us. Both “half-create” what they see, as in life.
What’s on screen is life then? Not so fast! What appears is full of camera tricks. In Vertov’s earlier Kino-Eye (1924) the Chinese street magician’s magic seems the result of his own sleight of hand. Now, however, the magic of life and the magic of cinema so continuously translate into one another that we cannot be certain whose “tricks” we witness: the magician’s or Vertov’s. The “factuality” that Vertov is after, then, isn’t the sort that omits or discards the myriad ambiguities of human experience; his eclectic film displays various tones and moods, with beauteous lyrical inserts recalling poet William Wordsworth’s visionary “spots of time,” amidst highly descriptive passages, such as of people at work. The result places the adventure in the graciousness of eternity—although the film never quite loses hold of the here and now, even when, in a burst of ingenious animation, Kaufman’s camera, onstage, comes to robotic life to confront its audience: a sci-fi image predicting a delightful Soviet future that wasn’t to be.
This entry was posted on September 24, 2007 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.