POP FILTER

VS.

THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

 

One of the most difficult things about watching, and attempting to review, a “classic” film, is trying to figure out what your responsibility is before and while you watch it. How much are you supposed to understand, or not take for granted, the year or era that it was filmed in. How much are you supposed to contextualize it with its time, or other films from its time. Some people will say that you shouldn’t have to at all, that the movie should stand on its own. This makes sense. It’s tough to be a classic if you can’t stand the test of time. Others will say that it is imperative. It would be unfair to do otherwise. The more old movies you watch, however, the less contextualizing you have to do. You can now do it from your own experience. Then you sit down to watch a movie like The Man With a Movie Camera, which, believe it or not, is currently streaming on Netflix.

 

The Man With a Movie Camera is, for all intents and purposes, a documentary kind of. There are no actors or sets or plot to speak of, and this is told to you in the first ten seconds of the movie, almost like a warning. Movie theaters that were screening Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life were forced to put up signs telling customers that they would not be receiving refunds for walking out on that film, and this one skips that step altogether. It’s “about”, and I use the word about very loosely, a day in the life of an unnamed city. It tells its “story”, also used loosely, with a series of shots detailing the mundane moments of many people’s lives. Going to work, walking the streets, using machinery and technology, both of which present themselves as close to major themes as this movie gets. It’s dark in moments, but so is city life, and the film is never is dark as it could be. Now, knowing all of that? Are you ready to watch it? Will you pretend to like it so you sound smart? Or will you bash it and laugh at it, because taking these classics down a peg is always fun? Hold on there, turbo. Let’s see what else we can find out.

 

What you won’t necessarily get from just watching the movie is how director Dziga Vertov felt about the world, and more specifically, the world of movie making. See, Mr. Vertov, which is Russian for artsy-fartsy, believed many things, not least of which was that in Russia, fartsy artsied you. He believed that the world of the narrative film, with all of its fake emotion and manipulation, was a dying art, and he was going to help murder it. He thought that nothing was better at telling the truth than the camera, and that’s exactly what he was going to do with this movie. And that’s where shit gets complicated.

 

First of all, the only way the camera is going to tell any sort of truth whatsoever is if the subject you are filming doesn’t know they are being filmed. Otherwise, they start lying immediately. So you have to film them unawares, which is hard to do today, much less in 1929, when cameras were the size of jumbo jets, and made roughly the same amount of noise as an orgasming T-Rex playing the drums. Sometimes, the director and his crew would distract the “actors” away from his camera by creating an even louder noise. Sometimes, the director and his crew couldn’t do that, so he would stage some of the scenes. Then, sometimes, he would get in a lot of trouble for staging a documentary, an oxymoron that many people take issue with.

 

But maybe you don’t. Maybe you say “Who gives a shit? A movie is a movie is a movie. As long as the director got across what he was trying to get across, then it doesn’t matter.” Great. But in addition to staging scenes, Vertov also used every trick in the book, and even invented a couple new ones. The movie uses, to brilliant effect, slow motion, fast motion, double exposure, freeze frames, tracking shots, and more, all of which seem old-fashioned, and maybe even hacky, by today’s standards, but back then were all just being discovered. Now we’ve come full circle. If you don’t contextualize it, then it’s impossible to be impressed by this AND we have a man using all of these tricks and more to somehow tell the truth. What the sam fuck are we supposed to make of this moving slide show of nothing, anyhow?

 

You don’t want a history lesson about making movies in 1929? Fine. You don’t give a shit about what it’s like to live in a Russian city? I get that, too. But Vertov’s greatest, and most compelling, decision regarding this film is that in this 68 minute montage with no story or characters, there is a main character staring us in the face the entire time, or, better yet, we are staring through his face. The character’s name is Dziga Vertov, the Man with a Movie Camera. The fucker puts himself into his own god damn movie, eliminating our ability to ever forget we are watching a movie, as opposed to the “truth of the city”, giving the film a story arc we’re not sure was ever intended, and showcasing the truth the director wanted the whole time: the process of making a movie. Occasionally we’ll see Vertov shooting the movie, as opposed to just seeing what he is shooting. But then we also get the editing process, and we know it’s the editing process of this particular film, because anytime we see the editor do something, like a freeze frame, or cut a shot short, it happens in the movie we are watching. It’s exactly like that scene in Spaceballs when Lord Helmet and Colonel Sanders are watching the Spaceballs VHS, and get to the point in the movie when they are watching the Spaceballs VHS, except it’s in black and white. This is 1929, people! Is none of this impressing you? Fine, the movie also has titties in it.

 

Knowing that this is a 68 minute mock documentary about a day in the life of a city, told in a series of unconnected shots, might prepare you when you sit down and watch it (which I’m sure will happen any minute), and being prepared is enough to being completely entranced, and dare I say, entertained, by it. Knowing just a little background information on the director, on the movies that came before it, and the movies that it influenced after it (which is essentially all of them,  most of which being every student art film to this day. Stupid The Man With a Movie Camera), removes any doubt that this movie deserves to be held in the regard that most film assholes hold it. You get to determine how and why you watch a movie, and if you don’t give a fuck about any of it, I understand and expect that. But just be careful when you immediately write off a movie that came out before you did just because, on the surface, it’s just a bunch of goofy, long dead people who move around real fast. They couldn’t help it back then. If it helps, the version on Netflix has a score that’s only ten years old, and it’s pretty rockin’. If, in the off chance, you do get bored, just start a dance party in your bedroom. You just have to dance at 18 frames a second.

 

-Ryan Haley