Man with a Movie Camera

Judged on structure, the frame is required. The cinema at the start and the close, with an audience watching what the camera has gathered, is what turns a city symphony into a film about how a city becomes a film. The cameraman is required as the figure who makes the seeing visible in every reel; Svilova at the bench is required, since her freeze frames are the one place the film halts to show its own material. The day is required for the rhythm it carries. The give is in the catalogue: beach, slow-motion sport, the magician, the shooting gallery and the beer hall accumulate, and any one could go. The method is additive by programme, and the subtractive test finds slack exactly where the method invites it.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: seeing in cinema is made, by labour, by a machine and by cutting, and the made image shows life truly only if it shows its making. Kaufman is caught filming, below a passing train, on a motorcycle, from a car racing beside another; Svilova holds strips of the shots just seen; a frozen child’s face becomes celluloid and moves again. This disclosure through the image counts in full. A second claim rides with it: the camera as one worker among miners, weavers and switchboard operators, its work rhymed with theirs by cutting. What holds the axis short of the gate is that the social picture is a programme: a city of 1928 and 1929 without want, queues or coercion, a surface chosen to agree with the film.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation recurs, and it is mostly the elevation of speed and of seeing itself. The seats of the empty cinema fold down as if for ghosts; the cameraman, superimposed as a giant, sets up his tripod above a crowd; the Bolshoi Theatre splits down the middle and folds in on itself; the camera walks off its tripod, bows and leaves; the last reel’s cuts shorten until the city, the audience and the machinery race together into the eye in the lens. The birth, shown plainly and cut against a funeral, gives the one grave note. Held from the top by register: the film is high often but seldom deep in its height, and its comic passages, the magician and the woman blinking awake with the blinds, are deliberately light.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Myth is built in two shapes. The first is the day: a city waking, working, resting and coming to the evening’s spectacle, which is also a life, birth, marriage, divorce and death within one passage. The day is load-bearing and orders the whole. The second is the eye: the machine eye that goes everywhere, under the train, above the crowd, into the mine, and the human eye inside the lens at the close, with Kaufman made a type, the new man fused with his apparatus. Held below the gate because the archetypes are built as a programme rather than found in the particulars. The people are particular for a few seconds each and then are rhythm; the machine-man is an argument of its decade, and the day is borrowed in kind from the city symphony.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance in 1929 was the fiction feature with intertitles and, within documentary, the newsreel and the newer city symphony, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) among it. The departure was radical and declared in the opening titles: no intertitles, no scenario, no actors, no theatre, and a film whose subject is its own making. Superimposition, split screen, slow and reverse motion, the freeze, stop motion and the jump in scale are all used and all shown being used. The stake was paid: Vertov had argued against the fiction film for a decade, this was the wager in full, and it was attacked on release as formalist trickery. Held from the top by precedent, Ruttmann and Vertov’s own Kino-Eye and Kino-Pravda among it, gathered and driven further rather than invented whole.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Change the form and the film knows nothing. Its knowledge is that seeing is made, and only a form that shows the camera, the editor, the projection and the audience in the course of showing a city can know it. Given intertitles and a narrator it becomes a newsreel of Soviet cities; given a story it becomes a fiction set among them. The editing is the instrument. When Svilova freezes a carriage in the street and the film cuts to her bench, the halted frame is image and strip at once, and the audience learns what motion on film is made of while watching it. The frame closes the form: the film is shown to an audience inside it. Held a step from the top because the middle catalogue could be ordered otherwise without loss.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence over promise, and there is close to a century of it, with an interruption. The film was neglected in the Soviet Union for decades and returned to wide attention in the 1960s, when Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin rendered kino-pravda as cinéma vérité and Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin took Vertov’s name for their group. Since then it has carried a literature: Annette Michelson’s editions and essays, Gilles Deleuze on Vertov’s perception in Cinema 1, Lev Manovich’s reading of it as a database film in The Language of New Media (2001), and studies of Svilova’s authorship. It yields on form at each return, in the rhymes of eyelid, blind and shutter and the speed changes of the last reel. The semantic return is narrower: the argument is stated at once.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Released in 1929, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1920s. The force is very large: the film reorganised what a documentary could be, a self-reflexive essay on its own perception, and what montage could do without words or story. On release it was attacked, little followed it in Soviet cinema, where the turn to socialist realism closed the road, and sound overtook its silent rhetoric within a few years. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach came a generation late, in the cinéma vérité of the 1960s, the Dziga Vertov Group, the essay film and the reflexive documentary, the abstract city film from Koyaanisqatsi (1982) on, the montage of the music video, and the theory of new media that took it as a model. Delay discounts it, and it runs more through filmmakers and theorists than through the general form of cinema.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Close to a century has elapsed. The film as released survives whole; restorations are repair, and the spread of running times is projection speed, not loss. The absence of a fixed score is not a loss, since none was fixed, but it leaves the film without a settled sound, and each showing supplies one. Presence is charged in part: decades of neglect in its own country from the early 1930s, and a revival that began only in the 1960s. Since then presence has been continuous among filmmakers, critics and teachers, though its audience is narrow, which counts as presence and not as proof. The industrial utopia is fixed to its year, and now reads as period. The figure sits between the usual mark for its age and the charged one, and clears the bar by a tenth.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the medium is load-bearing throughout; invention is credited elsewhere. Kaufman’s camera holds steady under extreme conditions, from the rail bed beneath a passing train, from moving cars, rooftops and the mine, and returns composed images from each. The matching of eyelids, blinds and shutters across cuts is exact. Svilova’s cutting carries the work: the rhythmic acceleration of the last reel, the intercutting of the birth and the funeral, the freeze-and-strip passage that joins image and material without a seam. The composites, the split Bolshoi and the giant cameraman, are clean for their date. The costs: some trick shots are demonstration more than necessity, the slow-motion sport runs long, and a few images, the woman waking among them, are plainly arranged, against the film’s own claim to catch life unawares.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: a woman giving birth, filmed plainly, and the camera on its tripod walking off by itself in stop motion. One law governs both: whatever happens, happens to and through the camera, and the film’s truth is the truth of the camera’s work. The birth is life caught by the camera; the walking tripod is the camera’s own life, the apparatus as actor. Mine, loom, telephone exchange, beach and beer hall obey the same law, and so does the frame of the cinema, which makes the whole film an event watched inside it. The strain lies between the two claims the law joins, life caught unawares and life shown as made. The film holds them by showing the making openly, but the staged waking and the tricks pull toward play.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Many orders are present and joined by the cutting: labour, in mine, mill and switchboard; the city, as transport, streets and crowds; the family, at birth, marriage, divorce and death; the body, in sport and the beauty parlour; technology, in every machine and above all the camera; leisure and its institutions, the workers’ club and the beer hall; and cinema itself as an order of reality. They are integrated in a single day and a single rhythm, which is more than a list. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is depth and absence. No consciousness is entered, and no person is known from within. The state is everywhere implied and nowhere seen. History is a present tense without a past. Much is held at the speed of a shot, and little is held long.

Score: 7.8 / 10