Man with a Movie Camera (Vseukrainske Foto Kino Upravlinnia, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Missing on June 22 my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for Jacqueline Stewart’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” of a film that we watched together early on in our relationship and has long been one of our favorites. The film was Man with a Movie Camera, a Russian/Ukrainian production made in 1929 by director Dziga Vertov (though actually shot over a seven-year period and incorporating footage from a series of newsreel shorts called Kino-Pravda – literally “cinema truth” – Vertov had been producing since 1922). Vertov was one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in the history of filmmaking; born David Abelevich Kaufman in Bialystok, Poland on January 2, 1896 at a time when Poland had been successively partitioned between Russia, Prussia (now a state in Germany) and Austria. Vertov was born into the Russian zone and at first he “Russified” his first two names to “Denis Arkadievich” before taking “Dziga Vertov,” Ukrainian for “spinning top,” as his name. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917 Vertov got a job editing newsreels for the Moscow Cinema Committee and soon worked his way into producing and editing his own newsreels. He also met fellow film editor Elisaveta Svilova, whom he would later marry and make his collaborator. Vertov argued for a whole new form of cinema that would owe nothing to literature, theatre, or the conventional modes of storytelling that most moviemakers had copied from those media.

Man with a Movie Camera is a largely abstract film made by Vertov, his wife and his brother Mikhail Kaufman, who is seen in the film operating the movie camera that is clearly visible in several scenes. (A third brother, Boris Kaufman, left the Soviet Union, settled in France, directed Jean Vigo’s classics Zero for Conduct and L’Atalante in the early 1930’s, ultimately settled in the U.S. and won an Academy Award for photographing On the Waterfront.) It’s a magnificent study in the art of montage, which literally just means “editing” but in film theory means the particular type of editing that many Soviet filmmakers indulged in during the 1920’s, between the Bolshevik takeover and the rise of Joseph Stalin to power in 1929. It meant rapid cutting, often between two disparate scenes to establish a subliminal connection between them in the audience members’ minds. One particularly famous experiment with film conducted in the Soviet Union worked from a totally impassive close-up from a pre-Soviet Russian film with the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin (who, ironically, had been condemned to death by the Soviet government and had fled to exile in France). Soviet filmmakers took a totally expressionless closeup of Mozzhukhin from one of his films and intercut it with a bowl of soup, a baby, and a tombstone. Audiences seeing the experimental reel praised the power of Mozzhukhin’s performance, his registering hunger at the sight of the soup, joy at seeing the baby, and grief at seeing the tombstone.

Though almost all the Soviet directors of the 1920’s used this technique, Vertov used it far more than anyone else. Man with a Movie Camera is full of quick cuts between seemingly disparate scenes, and instead of having a plot – even the carefully constructed plot lines of most reality-based films – it’s a series of stunning images presented one after the other in rapid-fire fashion. Vertov also stipulated that the film be divided into six episodes, each the length of a single reel of film (between 10 and 15 minutes at silent projection speed), and each episode would end with its number flashing on the screen while the next one would begin with the next number in sequence. This was actually a fairly common practice in the silent era – Fritz Lang’s two-part series Die Nibelungen was similarly divided into so-called “cantos,” each one the length of a reel – though when sound came in filmmakers became increasingly artful about concealing the discontinuities between the reels of a film instead of emphasizing them. One particularly famous scene in Man with a Movie Camera shows Mikhail Kaufman standing on top of a streetcar filming as the world goes by him, and this time around I thought he bore a striking resemblance to Buster Keaton. Indeed, it’s occurred to me that Keaton was unwittingly reproducing the Mozzhukhin experiment in some of his films, intercutting various images in between his “Great Stone Face” close-ups so audience members would read into his performance and experience emotions his face wasn’t registering.

Vertov’s legacy is a long and rather convoluted one; not surprisingly, he ran afoul of Stalin after his 1934 film Three Songs About Lenin (the film ends with a series of choruses with the message, “If only Lenin were alive today!,” and it’s not surprising that Stalin heard that as an attack on his legitimacy; he had the film withdrawn and in 1938 had an epilogue added proclaiming Stalin as Lenin’s rightful heir). Vertov made only one film after that, Lullaby (1937), and died in obscurity in 1954. More recently his films have been restored and made available again, and many filmmakers have copied his style since. After watching the footage of athletes that begins reel five of Man with a Movie Camera, including long stretches of slow-motion, I became convinced that Leni Riefenstahl had seen this film and copied it for her own documentary on the Berlin Olympics seven years later. More recently D. A. Pennebaker and other British and American documentarians took over the name of Vertov’s newsreel, Kino Pravda, and translated it into French as cinema verité – though the films made under that banner were usually tightly plotted tellings of a single real-life event (a primary election, a boxing match, an auto race, a music festival or tour) and the editorial intervention of the filmmakers lay in their selection and their abandonment of the voice-of-God narration that had become standard in most sound documentaries.

When Jean-Luc Godard briefly decided in 1969 that he would from then on make only documentaries (a resolution that lasted just four years), he and his associates formed a company and called it the Dziga Vertov Group. (It only made a handful of movies before disbanding in 1972, including Pravda, a film about the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that was widely criticized for taking a pox-on-both-your-houses attitude; and Vladimir and Rosa, a quite effective non-documentary film à clef about the 1969-1970 Chicago conspiracy trial in which two of the defendants are also filmmakers). But Vertov’s most obvious recent successor is Godfrey Reggio (b. 1940), whose films Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988), and Naqoyqatsi (2002) are by far the closest anyone has come to duplicating Vertov’s style in the modern era – and the fact that Koyaanisqatsi became a major box-office hit on the independent circuit and got playing time in mainstream theatres is an ironic testament to the power and vitality of Vertov’s approach even though almost nobody would want all films to look like Man with a Movie Camera or Koyaanisqatsi.