Waking Up Cinema with a Man and a Movie Camera

(Even though I've checked it beforehand, I apologize for any spelling errors this may have. My laptop is in the shop and the loaner doesn't have Word, AKA spellcheck.)

I don't normally watch artistic or experimental films, so Man With a Movie Camera was a refreshing change from the same humdrum summer action blockbuster or romantic comedy. Because of this, I initially tried to derive a somewhat concrete plot, but then realized that the surface of the movie, or the visual itself, was the point of the film. The film, I found, was self-referential, as the "cameraman" would be sometimes shown on the top of an enormous camera or overlooking a cityscape on a rooftop, setting up his own camera. Sometimes the subjects of his film would notice the camera, such as the boy sleeping on the streets, and become more playful or embarrassed. One scene seemed to hint at the theme of the film, showing a camera coming out of its case by itself, setting itself up and filming without a human behind it - thus removing the man from the movie camera.

One scene I felt to be particularly jarring was the scene with a man kneeling on the tracks before an incoming train. The scenes before it were sleepy, slow, and showed many of the same things again and again. Many of those scenes showed no movement at all, as if time stood still and nothing could change. As the train approached nearer and nearer I felt a sense of impending doom for both the man and the film, but surprisingly the scenes after the train showed new life - such as the woman giving birth - and of people waking up and starting their busy lives. Though I am not sure what exactly the man is supposed to be representing, I surmise that he is the old, outdated form of using the camera, and once the train of "revolution," to use Dziga Vertov's word, takes him out, the tired art of cinema can finally have a rebirth.

Some of the other scenes I found to be meaningful were the cigarette factory segment, the salon/everyday task juxtaposition, and the blinking woman. The girls making and filling the cigarette boxes work slowly at first, then speed up faster and faster until they reach a dizzying machine-like pace. I interpreted this scene in two ways - one, that the camera (or rather, editing) can make humans seem like they are working at unnatural speeds, and two, that the machine is slowly taking over human labor in a more industrial era. The salon scene was simply interesting to me as Vertov used the film medium to relate the beautification of the human body with the advancement of Russia. Lastly, the blinking woman alludes back to Vertov's "Kino-Eye" manifesto, showing, albeit in a more exaggerated way, that to film exactly as the human eye sees would make movies an incomprehensible blur of images.