Distorted Reality in Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film “A Man with a Movie Camera” was a collaboration of “experimental events”. But already from the beginning of the film, Vertov’s theater scene has a central message about the changing relationship between humans and machines.

The scene starts out in an empty theater with empty seats, with a man upstairs in the process of loading film. Ironically, the camera– a machine– is lit and full of life, while the theater– a place usually full of people– is dead. Slowly, the music builds up and a musical production is underway. The theater components begin to come to life as people begin flooding in. The strangest part is when the seats begin to liven up. They are being put down before people even got to sit down. In this situation, the machine-to-human dependency and restriction is eliminated. In real life, those types of seats would go down only under human weight. But now, machines had a life that is uncontrolled by humans. It has switched, demonstrating machine’s control over human space. Humans are immersed in a distorted reality created by machines, and Vertov demonstrates that perfectly in the beginning of this scene.

In the next part of the scene, once everyone is seated, the music is cut as silence fills the theater. The spectators are waiting for the show to begin, and the orchestra is on stand-by, awaiting the camera’s cue. Each orchestra player is frozen in time, waiting for the camera to turn on with life and essentially rejuvenate their own lives. Once the light from the camera turns on, the show starts. The orchestra begins playing, the music starts up again, and the audience becomes engaged in the production. I was intrigued by this scene mainly because of the orchestra players. Here, Vertov is again depicting humanity’s dependence on machine temporally, instead of spatially like the beginning part with the seats. The orchestra players are waiting on the camera’s cue, essentially running on machine time. Humans subject themselves to their control, and once again, the machine-to-human dependency and restriction that was previously present has completely changed.

Another interesting thing I discovered while watching the scene was the theater itself. The style of that theater, with its massive drapes and seating, is usually used for plays or operas. It has now been turned into a movie theater, where humans are now spending more and more time with machines. They are now allocating their time for machine-produced entertainment. Like the orchestra players, this act demonstrates technology’s control over people’s time. The fact that people are donating their time to sit in this theater and watch this film, rather than human-produced plays or operas, demonstrates the lack of resistance to machine control. They are acknowledging what technology can bring to them, and relishing in it. It has reached the point where the machine control over humans is prevalent, and humans are making no effort to change that.

Through the three components of this beginning scene, the machine control over human space and time has become so prevalent that there is a dependency. The seats are already down by themselves before the spectators sit, the orchestra does not start until they get the light cue from the camera, and people donate their time for machine-produced entertainment. Vertov uses this film to ultimately depict a distorted reality that humans are increasingly subjecting themselves to through their growing dependence on machines.