A Half-Human Camera Man Trapped in Time and Space

Dziga Vertov creates A Man With A Movie Camera to demonstrate the life a camera man, thus he describes it as an experimental film without a script. This film is very confusing because it has so many images, little sounds, and no bluntly obvious sequence.

What it lacked in clarity, the film supplemented in recurring themes and images. For example, the theme of having multiple audiences or witnesses to an event in different times and spaces seeing the same thing yet still reacting in their own way. The camera man witnesses an even through the Kino-Eye, the editor sees the same scene frame by frame in a slower or faster time, the audience in the film’s theater sees the film in their own time, and we watch the audience watching the camera man watching the scene. It is in this forum that time and spaces elapse. We are the ultimate audience witnessing the reactions of another audience, the actions of the camera man, and the original scene. Our eye can witness the bigger picture, reminding us that we are also a part of a bigger picture.

A Man With A Movie Camera demonstrates the human aspect of the Kino-Eye, the camera man. This human-machine breed, the Kino-Eye, was created to record nature and its daily life; thus the recurring images of hands, feet, necks, and all types of body parts. Weddings, birth, death, washing, grooming, a day at the railroad station, working with industry, walking on the street are all part of the city daily life. These occur every day and more than once in the film. The images are short clips but are pieces that in we can connect to a previous experience. Although the film uses few real-life sounds, the ones used also remind us of the importance of noise in our routine and what those sounds represent in our minds.

A sub-theme of daily-life is images of cleaning and grooming. Many images are of people washing up, of cleaning streets, of combing and cutting hair, of polishing nails. Their significance is important and recurring but it is difficult to decipher.

Recurring themes of machinery and industry remind us of the fast-paced place we live in. The factories remind us that machine and man are becoming one. Even the Kino-Eye is a part of this breed. Dziga Vertov reminds us that things can slow down and that humans can have their day at the beach, or in the ocean, or on a carousel, or sports.The audience is shown images of leisure to encourage us to pass through space and into those moments; to remind us that they exist and separate us from machine time.