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Dziga Vertov

City Symphony - Berlin Symphony of a Metropolis
CommentaryFilm

The Double Nostalgia of the City Symphony

by Lark
written by Lark

The city symphony, as a “genre” (can something so short-lived be a genre?), has the misfortune of being mostly associated with a particularly unrepresentative entry: Dziga Vertov’s justly famous The Man with the Movie Camera.

Vertov’s movie is still incredible, and deserves its place in every film history class’ syllabus. But it is far more interested in its own editing and creative potential than the city itself.

And Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis is unlikely to replace Movie Camera in syllabi anytime soon. Compared to Vertov’s film, it is remarkably uncreative, and it tries its best to communicate its action through tiny vignettes of lives.

That being said, it is still a fascinating movie — even more so now than when it was filmed.

City Symphony - Berlin Symphony of a Metropolis posterOne of the strange things about watching a city symphony film now is the double position we must take. To follow the film, we have to place ourselves in the position of the film’s ideal viewer: someone of the time who is shocked by the newness of the images and the speed of the world.

But we are also in our real position, knowing that their clothes are old-fashioned, that their cars are slow, that their factories are ancient. And even beyond that: that this city, filmed so energetically in 1927, was about to head towards a historical calamity they couldn’t imagine.

It is hard to hold on to both positions at once, especially when the narrative style has been so widely copied. Period films often attempt, in their establishing shots, exactly the maneuver that the city symphony does: to try to capture, in a handful of shots, the zeitgeist of the time, usually by associating the very rich and the very poor (as if this justifies the Merchant Ivories of the world their fascination with the former).

City Symphony - Man With A Movie CameraWith that common language, it is easy to slip entirely into the mindset of someone watching a narrative film, waiting for the real story to start now that we have a sense of the time and space. But there is no real story to come.

The real story is the story of the filmmakers, trying to speak the essence of their time to a nebulous future. It is like a World’s Fair preserved in amber, with all its optimism and all of its cynicism.

There have been a number of attempts at a resurrection of the genre — Mark Cousins, in particular, seems to be attempting to bring it back single-handedly. But we no longer have the sense that our cities are a thing, a phrase, a sentence that we can communicate to the wider world. If an honest example was made today, it could be nothing but a collection of CCTV cameras, cut together at random. That is why even the more boring examples of the genre are worth holding on to: to explore the idea of cohesion, no matter how unreal it is.

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FilmGreat Movie Project

The revolutionary, colliding images of Man With A Movie Camera

by rick
written by rick

It’s relatively rare for a film to begin with a mission statement, but Man With A Movie Camera — Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Constructivist ode to man, machine, and revolution — is not an ordinary film.

Before Vertov presents a dizzying, self-reflexive montage of a day in the life of post-Revolutionary Russia, he informs the viewer:

THIS FILM PRESENTS AN EXPERIMENT IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION OF VISIBLE EVENTS
WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES

 

WITHOUT THE AID OF A SCENARIO

 

WITHOUT THE AID OF THEATER

 

THE EXPERIMENTAL WORK AIMS AT CREATING A TRULY INTERNATIONAL ABSOLUTE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA BASED ON ITS TOTAL SEPARATION FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THEATER AND LITERATURE.

It’s hard to imagine a more succinct statement of principle (though that’s not enough to stop one YouTube commenter from complaining, “Honestly, I don’t get the point of this film. Yes, you can look at its history of advancing editing, but right now, it’s just a bunch of images to me. There’s no storytelling going on.” Oh well.)

man-with-the-movie-camera5

Vertov is true to his word. Drawing on Eisenstein’s theory and practice of montage and advancing some of the techniques he himself developed in the earlier Enthusiasm, Man With A Movie Camera dispenses entirely with story and character, attempting to elicit ideas and emotion from image and contrast alone. So we witness work, leisure, a couple getting divorced, a baby being born, a woman washing her face and getting dressed, sport, trains arriving and departing, the industrial swirl of a modern city. Vertov’s wife and creative partner Elisaveta Svilova edits Man With A Movie Camera at a fever pitch, with an average shot length of “2.3 seconds, which is four times faster than most films of that time and the speed of the average action film made today.”

As Noel Murray writes, the two “cut together images sometimes due to their thematic connections, but just as often because they liked the emotional effect of the juxtapositions.” The splashes of water to the woman’s face as she starts her day cut immediately to power washers cleaning off shop storefronts at dawn, perhaps implying the unity of the individual and social processes.

Images of bourgeois grooming in hair salons collide with washer-women, hands immersed in soapy water. The trains that serve as a recurring motif are intercut with divers and swimmers and shop-floor workers. Bureaucratic terminations of marriages fold into delivery room footage of a baby being born. There is no pedantic reading to be had, aided by the guiding hand of a storyteller; we’re immersed in each image, and in the relations that seem to arise between them. Man With A Movie Camera is intoxicated by the images themselves, the resonances between them, and the lives they depict.

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At the same time, Vertov undercuts this notion of directorial absence with frequent self-referentiality, from the title on down. The man with a movie camera is the closest thing we have to an on-screen protagonist. He is everywhere: through superimposition, he is on top of buildings and vanishes into a glass of beer at a pub; he’s riding alongside the action in a speeding car; he’s climbing a railroad trellis, and later positioning himself on the track itself to get a shot of a train’s undercarriage.

In fact, he’s the first person we meet, threading his film into a projector, as an audience takes their seats to watch the film of their lives. There is an emphasis on capturing these images, the work that it entails, and the connection between the machinery of city life and the machinery of representation.

Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera

Vertov’s revolutionary affiliation consumes the film he has made about it — we even see Svilova snipping away at the film, as the frame rate slows to a series of stills. At the end of Man With A Movie Camera, double exposure allows the captured city to fold in on itself, as demonstrative a portrait of creative destruction as the medium allowed.

Watching the film today, the paradox is striking. In Man With A Movie Camera, we have a directorless cinema “the true purpose [of which] was just to capture scenes of daily life, as naturally as possible,” but also one in which the politics and presence of the director are inextricable from the sequence of images and their impact. This conflict would animate documentary experiments like Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (released the following year) to Riefenstahl, not to mention present day debates over the very possibility of apoliticism of the image. Particularly in the current political climate, these are not debates that are going away.

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The far-reaching influence of Man With A Movie Camera is hard to overstate. Ben Nicholson emphasizes Vertov’s (literally) revolutionary use of five specific techniques — the dissolve, slow motion, stop motion, split screen, and double exposure — and examples of their later deployment in everything from Doctor Zhivago to Charlie’s Angels, Carrie to The Matrix, Star Wars to Inception. None of the techniques originated with Man With A Movie Camera, but their combined weight in Vertov’s experiment made a lasting impression.

The film itself is an aesthetic wonder. As an interrogation of the politics of representation, it continues to raise more questions than it answers.

Favorite Ebert quote:

By filming in three cities and not naming any of them, Vertov had a wider focus: His film was about The City, and The Cinema, and The Man With a Movie Camera. It was about the act of seeing, being seen, preparing to see, processing what had been seen, and finally seeing it. It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it. Godard once said “The cinema is life at 24 frames per second.” Wrong. That’s what life is. The Cinema only starts with the 24 frames — and besides, in the silent era it was closer to 18 fps. It’s what you do after you have your frames that makes it Cinema.

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CommentaryFilmReviews

The Futures of Documentary Past

by rick
written by rick

Watching She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, director Mary Dore’s perfectly agreeable and accomplished 2014 documentary about the birth of the modern women’s movement in the U.S., it’s hard not to feel there’s something staid about the proceedings.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry documentaryThis is less the fault of the film itself than a reflection of how exciting the landscape of documentary film has become in recent years. There has been such a steady stream of formally daring and aesthetically interesting entries in the genre that good, old-fashioned expository docs can’t help but seem prosaic, with their array of talking heads in mid-shot, narrative-driving needle drops, and carefully curated archival footage.

That’s not to say She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is unnecessary or without important things to say – if anything, its discussions of concerted political attacks on women’s health, heroic examples of community self-help, the dangers of resistance movements replicating the power dynamics they assail, and the importance of intersectionality are more timely than ever. But the film’s aesthetic throws into sharp relief the innovations that have been taking place in the form.

Of course, multiple modes and narrative traditions of documentary film have co-existed for most of film history. From the early actualities and Flaherty’s Nanook of the North through Dziga Vertov’s montages, from avant-garde juxtapositions and more poetic treatments to journalistic approaches, pure propaganda, cinéma vérité and direct cinema – just to scratch the surface – a diversity of forms is nothing new.

But the last few years have seen a remarkable resurgence of experimentation, or at least a renewed mainstream attention to it. For a while, it seemed that things like Michael Moore’s performative interrogations and Errol Morris’ self-reflexive films  (along with the more cult favorite status of someone like Ross McElwee) represented the only really viable alternative to what most of us probably think of as “the standard documentary.” Even a madman like Werner Herzog’s forays into documentaries, while consistently fascinating, have hewed pretty close to convention (though he’s been quick to deploy newer technical approaches and all are imbued with his characteristic weirdness).

act of killing documentaryMore recently, however, Joshua Oppenheimer’s remarkable masterpiece The Act of Killing, and more conventional but still bracingly participatory The Look of Silence, represented a sudden, dramatic shift. (In fairness, Herzog and Morris were both involved as producers of Oppenheimer’s projects. But as far as institutional appeal, it’s worth noting that the first lost out at the Oscars to the crowd-pleasing 20 Feet From Stardom and the second to the heart-breaking Amy, both entirely worthy but more conventional choices.) Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, which saw the doubt inherent in the approach of someone like Morris and raised it substantially, represents another offshoot into new areas. Elsewhere, on a wall somewhere, Frederick Wiseman is still out there, doing his Frederick Wiseman thing.

Romeo Is Bleeding documentaryAs it happens, my favorite films from the past two years at the San Francisco Film Festival were documentaries – Jason Zeldes’ Romeo Is Bleeding last year and Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s Notes On Blindness this time around. And, interestingly, both Zeldes and Middleton/Spinney have cited Oppenheimer and Polley as influences, in spirit if not necessarily in specific form. Romeo Is Bleeding blends numerous narrative and aesthetic strategies – in Zeldes’ words, “it’s vérité meets archival meets theater, dance, and poetry” – and Notes On Blindness seeks nothing less than the creation of an entirely new mode of filmic storytelling, one that grapples with the paradox of a cinema of blindness. Both are tremendously successful in different, unique ways.

Notes on Blindness documentaryAll of which makes me wonder if the traditional, expository form She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry takes is likely to become more the exception than the rule one day. There will always be a demand for well-told histories, and Dore’s film is certainly that: the interviews with 60s and 70s luminaries like Rita Mae Brown and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz are full of wisdom, the archival footage (some of it provided by local SF heroes Oddball Films) still thrills, and, with the exception of some painfully unnecessary staged readings (ironically, the film’s only real attempt at mixing things up aesthetically), all of the pieces fit. The film also deserves bonus points for its frank airing of internal grievances, its emphasis on its subjects’ reappraisals of tactics in hindsight, and how far it goes out of its way to complicate the overwhelming whiteness of the movement’s founders, giving plenty of space to the Black and Brown feminists who forced their way into a discussion that didn’t seem to realize it was shutting them out.

 

 

 

Or maybe this will remain the dominant approach. It may be that audiences will always prefer it to other, more challenging or jarring ones, and so, therefore, will those who bankroll documentary film. There’s something reassuring about its familiarity, as archival footage of a young person morphs into a contemporary interview, and name cards comfortingly locate us. We can’t get lost or lose our footing, even for a moment. We are in the capable hands of creative technicians with worthy stories to tell, in ways we recognize without hesitation.

Which is fine. None of this is to say that the archival approach is without merit, or that, somehow, archives themselves are of any diminished value. (Quite the opposite.) But the hopes for new insight in the documentary films to come lie more with the modes being explored by the Oppenheimers and Polleys – and the Zeldes’ , Middletons, and Spinneys – than they do in the discreet forms of the past we’ve come to know so well, which ably inform but fail to startle.

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