“We affirm the future of cinema art by denying its present,” Dziga Vertov proclaims in his manifesto. “The ‘psychological’ prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch; it interferes with his desire for kinship with the machine.” It is this “kinship” which Vertov places front and center in Man With A Movie Camera. It is in many respects a 68-minute visual/kinetic love poem to “the machine”, which, oddly enough, was not entirely uncommon in early Soviet cinema–see: the tractor/seduction sequence in Eisenstein’s The Old and the New (1929). But there is more going on here than simply a celebration of industry and the proletariat; it is also a profound meditation on time and space, document, testimony, transience, permanence, and loss. None of those things can be said to comprise the content of the film–rather, it is only in the form, through manipulation and technique of the filmmaking craft, that those issues even arise–which I feel may be what Vertov was talking about all along with his kino-eye: an eye that sees reality even more “real-ly” than we can.

While Eisenstein chose to view communism through the lens of history, tell its story as the story of its great figures, its massive battles, and dramatic struggles; in the hands of Vertov, however, communism comes across as something more or less innate, embodied in the everyman’s very being. All one has to do is step back to see that the modern Soviet metropolis is in fact one massive organism (or machine, as it were), with innumerable moving parts, every part essential to the whole, but none so important that it cannot be replaced. Vertov’s city, like any person, sleeps, wakes, works, plays, and rests over the course of a day. A kind of precursor to the modern computer, Vertov’s city chugs along, powered by a dizzying series of binary oppositions: aerial shots and close-ups, stills and sped-up film, microcosm and macrocosm, weddings, divorces, births and funerals–all are essential to the working of the whole, all equally sacred, equally mundane. A night out drinking with friends, a wake, a carriage ride, an ambulance ride all take on a homogenous character when an entire city is compressed into the space of a frame, an entire day condensed into just over an hour. As he’d initially set out to do, Vertov’s work disarms us–that is, it disabuses us of any preconceptions of narrative we’ve inherited from so-called “psychological literature”, from the past. His socialist lens–in which the individual is subordinated to the whole–wreaks havoc on how we perceive the scope and significance of individual events, people, etc.

But the film is not nearly so dogmatic as I’ve made it sound thus far. There is an amount of playfulness, warmth, and humanity that no amount of ideological superstructure can quite blot out. In one scene, Vertov shows an editor editing the film as we are watching it–echoing the proto-postmodern gamesmanship of Kierkegaard, Unamuno, et al. Vertov never lets us forget that what we’re watching has been manipulated, exposes the stage structure, so to speak. This is not an “objective” documentary, but kinopravda, a truth that has been played with, teased out of real life. In the track-and-field sequence of the film, a discus thrower spins in slow motion and the frame freezes in mid-throw, in virtually the exact same position as the Greek Discobulus. The difference, of course being that Discobulus is frozen in an idealized time which never was or will be; but with Vertov’s discus-thrower, we know that there is always a frame preceding this one, as well as a frame to come. Whether this is art imitating life imitating art, etc., I can’t say, but it is effective nonetheless.

In another sequence, a long aerial shot looks down on a crowded beach. The innumerable white naked bodies wriggling and scattering resemble nothing so much as maggots devouring some rotting slab of meat. But Vertov intercuts this with extreme close-ups of the body parts of individual beachgoers–a knee here, the curve of an elbow there, the back of a thigh, etc.–all artfully composed and arranged, glistening sun and sweat. This arrangement of shots, I feel, undermines, inverts the film’s socialist thesis. Its message is namely this: that humanity, no matter how gross and senseless its operations seem as a whole, are considerably less so when we take a closer look. These “maggots” are all beautiful in their own way, all have their own story to tell, no matter how grotesque they may seem taken en masse.

Perhaps it was images such as these that contributed to Vertov’s work being received by the government with something less than enthusiasm, but that’s not for me to say. What is painfully clear, however, is how Vertov’s kino-eye, which could indeed pierce through reality to see something much deeper, failed to see what was happening right under his nose. He achieved a “kinship with the machine” closer than he probably bargained for, as the massive beauracratization of the Party under Stalin rendered Vertov obsolete, a footnote, like so many manifesto writers, he wrote himself into history as he wrote himself out of existence. As all those who deny the present in the name of the future come to realize, the past is just around the corner. Few have realized this truth more painfully, more “real-ly” than Dziga Vertov.