It's slightly sinister how the films of Nazi propagandist Leni
Riefenstahl are absolutely verboten in all-time top tens and
general critical approval, while Soviet films of the 20s, similarly
sanctioned by brutal tyrants, are widely loved and praised, their
influence allowed to disseminate. It is true that in spite of her
remarkable visual and compositional sense, Riefenstahl's films are
relentless and plodding dinosaurs compared to the verve, invention and
excitement of Russian films. Both, however, are conceived for the same
ends - to convince the audience of a certain unassailable worldview -
which makes for an increasingly unpleasant feeling of being
manipulated.
THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA is a troubling case in point. First
exposure to this film is one of the most exhilarating experiences the
cinema has to offer. CAMERA is nominally a documentary, one of those
'day-in-the-life-of-a-city' type films popular in the late 1920s/early
1930s, of which the most famous examples are Walter Ruttman's tedious
BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (1927), and Jean Vigo's astonishing,
Vertov-inspired A PROPOS DE NICE (1930, also shot by a Vertov (Kaufman)
brother)
CAMERA follows the genre's conventions, recording a day of a Russian
city, from dawn to dusk. We see people awaking, getting dressed, working,
playing. We see the infrastructure of the great city, the buildings,
streets, tramlines, trains, vehicles, crowds. One scene of a packed
roundabout wittily foreshadows Tati's masterpiece PLAYTIME. We see deep
down in the mines, or in cigarette factories. We see gyms, beaches, chess
games.
This would probably become unbearably dull if it wasn't for the film's
formal presentation. CAMERA doesn't stop to breathe, offering a CITIZEN
KANE-like précis of the complete (at that time) cinematic tool-kit
- dizzy, montage, split-screens, dissolves, freeze-frames, stills,
animation, trick effects, breaking stuntwork more usually seen in Buster
Keaton rather than glum old Soviet cinema. The film, called THE MAN WITH A
MOVIE CAMERA, foregrounds the cinematic creation. It is here that the
film, for me, becomes problematic.
From the start we are shown that far from being an unmediated depiction
of everyday life - the aim of a documentary - the film is nothing but
flagrant artifice, organised by someone we can't see. The first image is
of the cameraman, mounting the camera, like a mountaineer climbing
Everest, and the film is certainly an example of film's malleability and
flexibility. We first see a movie theatre with the seats opening by
themselves - film is a rite, cinema is a God with supernatural powers. The
cameraman himself is a kind of god - at one point straddling the city like
a colossus, at others in the heat of the action like a curious fly. He is
ubiquitous - sprawled on the city streets, on dams, up huge towers. He
sees all of society, public/private, work/leisure. His gaze is definitely
masculine and shaping - there are surprising, homoerotic moments,
but these bronzed men are denied the amused leer inflicted on women. If
the intention is to show the cinema as just another apparatus of the
Socialist Utopia, than the film has failed - the cameraman has a freedom
and detachment the miner, say, doesn't.
When you first see this film, you are bombarded with a confusing
arsenal of imagery and trickery, but you feel liberated, excited that that
the cinema doesn't have to be weighed down by convention, plot or genre.
The film seems fleet and free, bursting with possibilities. The third time
you see the patterns that shape the film. Everything is connected - e.g.
the camera shutters, the blinking human eyes, the flapping blinds of a
window. The film's formal aim is to make opposites (e.g. public/private,
subject/object) cohere and unify. There is no place for the private in
this film (or society); people's only freedom from the camera is when they
are asleep, but it is always there when you are awake.
The mechanisation of the individual is recurrently shown - there are
very few shots of people without some kind of machine. The film is filmed
with geometric shapes - lines, curves, especially circles, dividing up and
yet
ordering the city. The circle is an important part of a mechanism - be
it the cameraman turning his tool, or society's movement of repetition.
The film's seeming chaos is repeatedly ordered. The hero is not actually
the cameraman, who must submit to trauma and tension (in one brilliant
scene he is attacked by light and montage). Although he sees, and we often
sees what he sees, the gaze does not belong to him - the directing
intelligence, the editor, who chops up what he sees, puts it into new
order.
It is possible to see this as a critique. Humanity no longer exists -
every response is mechanical, the same as everybody else's. We are shown
how true Lenin's propagandist dreams for cinema were, how it has become
the new religion. It is possible that Vertov is giving us the tools with
which to critique cinema (as repressive propaganda) and the society that
produces it. I see Stalin, the panopticon unseen by cameraman and citizen
alike, peering godlike at his people, ordering life as he sees proper,
disposing of anything that doesn't fit, ripping up buildings just because
he can.
I certainly hope I'm wrong. Pauline Kael called KANE the most fun
classic - this is certainly the most fun silent film. Its daring and
dynamism is infectious, its influence on the likes of Godard revelatory.
There are images of exquisite, tender beauty amid the chaos, moments of
grace away from robotised life. But unlike Vigo's film, which moved from
order to chaos, destruction and subversion, the impulse here is the
ordering of chaos. One really wants to jump up and applause the bowing
camera at the end - it puts on such a good show - but one remembers the
death camps, ordinary people's terror of the nocturnal knocking that the
camera refuses to show. It only sees what it's told to see.
From www.imagesjournal.com
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