Stuff that will help you get ready to watch Man with a Movie Camera on Tuesday. Please read before coming to class.

From Wikipedia entry on Vertov

Working mainly during the 1920s , Vertov promoted the concept of kino-pravda , or film-truth , through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized together, showed a deeper truth which could not be seen with the naked eye. In the "Kino-Pravda" series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences,. . . filming marketplaces, bars, and schools . . .sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first.

Vertov says in his essay on "The Man with a Movie Camera" that he was fighting "for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature." By the later segments of "Kino-Pravda," Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés (and receiving criticism for it); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of Man with the Movie Camera . Some have criticized the obvious stagings in Man With the Movie Camera as being at odds with Vertov's credos "life as it is" and "life caught unawares": The scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot which films Mikhail Kaufman riding in a car filming a third car.

However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera. (16:04 on the commentary track). This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera." All of these shots might conform to Vertov's credo "caught unawares."

From http://www.25hrs.org/vertov.htm

Over 75 years ago, Vertov argued that the narrative coherence of Western cinema needed to be supplanted by a new language that directly represented lived reality and believed that the film maker's essential tool was the use of actuality footage. However, this was at best a disingenuous attack on the popular movies of his day and pretended to deny that film always tells a story that goes beyond whatever the camera captures. I argue that the very title of the film, The Man with a Movie Camera, is misleading: the film itself demonstrates that cinema is not about capturing truth but creating a mediated reality that is not least made in the generative processes of editing and viewing. The Man with a Movie Camera is a film that is radically about film making in so far as it tackles head on the processes that constitute filmic representation. Its extreme accelerations and decelerations of the image flow and the presence on screen of the editor at work attempt to show the gap between recording and viewing, or between the (innocent) speed of vision and the (anything but innocent) speed of truth. Mediated images do not represent the truth of external reality, they create truths.

From Manovich on Vertova and multimedia (highlights from the Coursepack reading)

Look for the following ideas illustrated as you watch the film. Taking a few notes on the film might be a good idea too.

The New Vision movement of the 1920’s “foregrounded the new mobility of the photo and film camera, and made unconventional points of view a key part of it’s poetics” (xvi).

“As theorized by Vertov, film can overcome it indexical nature through montage, by presenting a viewer with objects that never existed in reality” (xviii).

“Although digital compositing is usually used to create a seamless virtual space, this does not have to be its only goal. Borders between different worlds do not have to be erased; different spaces do not have to be matched in perspective, scale, and lighting; individual layers can retain their separate identities rather than being merged into a single space; different worlds can clash semantically rather than form a single universe” (xix).

“Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality” (xxiii).

“ . . . Dzigo Vertov can be though of as a major ‘database filmmaker’ of the twentieth century. Man with a Movie Camera is perhaps the most important example of a database imagination in modern media art” (xxiv).

“. . .Vertov’s film contains at least three levels. One is the story of a camera-man shooting material for the film. The second level consists of shots of the audience watching the finished film in a movie theater. The third lever is the film itself, which consist of footage recorded on Moscow, Kiev, and Riga, arranged according to the progression of a single day—waking up—work—leisure activities. If this third level is a text, the other two can be though of as its metatexts” (xxv).

Ericsson note—I would argue that Man is a polysemic text (meaning that there are a variety of different interpretations). Manovich notes this by claiming that there are “at least” three levels on which it can be watched. We can see more—and scholars of this movie have written about many, many more levels on which it can be watched and interpreted.

In Vertov’s films, the “effects” are “motivated by a particular argument, which is that the new techniques of obtaining images and manipulating them, summed up by Vertov in his term ‘kino-eye,’ can be used to decode the world. As the film progresses, straight footage gives way to manipulated footage; newer techniques appear one after another, reaching a roller-coaster intensity by the film’s end—a true orgy of cinematography. It is as though Vertov restages his discovery of the kino-eye for us, and along with him, we gradually realize the full range of possibilities offered by the camera. Vertov’s goal is to seduce is into his way of seeing and thinking, to make us share his excitement, as he discovers a new language for film. This gradual process of discovery is the film’s main narrative, and it is told through a catalog of discoveries. Thus, in the hands of Vertov, the database, this normally static and ‘objective’ form, becomes dynamic and subjective. More important, Vertov is able to achieve something that new media designers and artists still have to learn—how to merge database and narrative into a new form” (xxviii).

The Loop and spatial montage may end up being vital concepts for us in this course. So the information on pp. xxxiii and xxxiv will be important to understand.