Mechanisation and Movement-Image: The Cinematic Manifesto

As the Kino-Eye shut before me, mine couldn’t help but take queue and close as well. Slumping in my chair, I felt overwhelmed, exhausted, and completely drained by the not-so-passive act of viewing. The final minute of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is nothing less than an all-out physiological assault on the senses. In “We: Variant of a Manifesto” (1922), Vertov claims “necessity, precision, and speed are the three Components of movement worth filming and screening,” and that the “geometrical extract of movement through an exciting succession of images is what’s required of montage,” (p. 8). This is what had just hit me: Vertov’s montage.

In “We”, Vertov poses the following question:

The machine makes us ashamed of man's inability to control himself, but what are we to do if electricity’s unerring ways are more exciting to us than the disorderly haste of active men and the corrupting inertia of passive ones? (p. 7)

However, Vertov does not simply exclude all human flesh from his film; instead, The Man with a Movie Camera’s path leads “through the poetry of machines... to the perfect electric man” who “will have the light, precise movements of machines, and he will be the gratifying subject of our films,” (p. 8). So, instead of focusing the Kino-Gaze on just machinery while excluding man altogether, Vertov synthesises the two in cyborgian fashion.

Such logic becomes evident when a series of bodies are depicted, whilst engaged in exercise, as becoming mechanical. In this scene, every movement is as stilted and unnatural as the accompanying music. And further to this evolutionary turn, the bodies on display are simultaneously sexualised – to put it bluntly, several of the women most certainly thrust their way through the scene. As a result of this, Vertov’s ‘new’ humans are both organic and mechanical.

Yet the power of Vertov’s cinematic manifesto is not strongest in what it can display; the power of cinema, for Vertov, is strongest in the technique by which its puts these things on display. Here, the power of Vertov’s kinochestvo is best described as the Deleuzian movement-image, the purely optical and sound situation. This image

can have two poles – objective and subjective, real and imaginary, physical and mental. But they give rise to opsigns and sonsigns, which bring the poles into continual contact, and which, in one direction or the other, guarantee passages and conversions, tending towards a point of indiscerniblility (and not of confusion). (p. 267)

In The Man with a Movie Camera these two poles are, quite obviously, man and machine. And by uniting the two, the Deleuzian movement-image forces its viewer to grasp “something intolerable and unbearable... something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities,” (p. 267).

And at this point it is nigh imperative to turn back to where I began this entry – slumped in my chair, utterly exhausted – in attempt to explain this cinematic phenomenon. Quite simply, The Man with a Movie Camera outstripped my sensory-motor capacities. Vertov shows us the poetry of machines; new man, the machine-man; and then he shows us our evolutionary weakness: we are not machines; we are just organic matter whose senses cannot keep up with the technology of kinochestvo.

Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera concludes with an act of violence committed against our senses. However, this act is utopian; it is the physiologically forced realisation of the ideals Vertov set out in “We”. And upon this moment of realisation, “[o]ur eyes, spinning like propellers, take off into the future on the wings of hypothesis,” (p. 9). And what does the future hold? To quote another, more contemporaneous, film: Long live the new flesh!

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. “Beyond the Movement-Image”. In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Baudry and Marshall Cohey. New York: Oxford University Press: 250-69.

Vertov, Dziga. 1922. “We: Variant of a Manifesto”. Translated by Kevin O’Brien. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, edited by Annette Michelson. Berkley: University of California Press: 5-9.