After watching Man with the Movie Camera I had a sudden epiphany of the incredibly abstract and strange experience it is to sit in a cinema and view the lives and experiences of complete strangers. We have completely naturalised this experience into something that feels absolutely natural and acceptable. We are able to intrude into the lives of someone we have never met or heard of, we are able to witness the most intimate moments with manipulated romanticism and affect. This all resulted from the invention of the camera, and this, I feel, is what is being explored and utilised in the film Man with the Movie Camera.
This film questions the notion and experience of watching a reel of film being rolled in a dark room. The strange feelings of intrusion as a group of people sit silently watching the public and private everyday lives of the people living in Odessa. This is the first thing that flashed in my mind as I watched Man with the Movie Camera: the camera acting as a human eye intruding on the lives of people. This was introduced to me in the very first scene of the film (past all the introductions of the actual cinema, orchestra and viewers, which seems almost a cliché technique of showing a film within a film), the scene of the young woman in her bedroom, getting up in the morning. Vertov used the camera as a tool to document a universal language of everyday life. This purpose also adds to the intrusive feeling as the secondary audience (as we were introduced as the audience watching another audience in the cinema); we are essentially watching someone being watched. The beginning montage of the sequential shots of the comparison between private and public life of the city seems intrusive and almost pornographic in the detail that it exposes about the everyday life of a city. The woman (who is revisited throughout the film) getting out of bed, the homeless sleeping on the streets, the small details of the city and its structures, the babies in the hospital, the mannequin, the shop displays, these all seem overexposed as we are forced into a detailed visual narrative of the objects and figures of everyday life. This is consistent throughout the rest of the film, we revisit some of these subjects, we are introduced to new ones, we see a woman giving birth, and we ride on a carriage with a laughing lady.
The camera allows the detail that is unnoticed and naturalised to the city’s inhabitants, these things are integral to the everyday city life but they are not what you see on big screens and photography. Through Vertov’s camera we are able to see the naked city, the parts which constitute this city and the public and private spheres of the city that is fascinatingly detailed and personal. These sequential collections of random parts of Odessa allow us as the viewer to interpret our own structural whole. We create a city as we engage with these objects and subjects.
Perhaps this is what Vertov was trying to do. In showing all the technicalities of camera and film (later in the film) he is allowing us the control of interpretation. By exposing the city and its inhabitants he allows the viewer to piece together our own view of this city. He does not attempt to narrate a story from dusk till dawn, nor does he manipulate our senses with dramatisations and aestheticization of these images made into film. The mood is set by the rhythmic music but he allows us to be distanced from its effect through his showing of the mechanical processes of film.
Ultimately, the camera becomes our eyes, Vertov aligns our subjective sight intimately with the sight of his ‘faithful’ camera. Vertov wants us to see the everyday life of Odessa with the naked eye of the camera, to see it like an observatory eye, allowing us to become the flanuers viewing the past from the future.
Sophia.
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