netwallah

A beautiful testimony to the exploratory and visionary work of the Soviet cameraman. There are countless little narrative threads—trains rushing by as the cameraman works the angles, the cameraman climbs a factory chimney, haircutting and shaving and the application of making, people at the beach, people working making cigarettes and machines, people editing film, the cranking of the camera, people sleeping, and many more—to which the camera returns over and over. Even without the rhythm of the film and the visual beauty of the shots, this would be a treasure if only as a record of daily life in the early part of the 20th-century, the romance of industrialization, the dignity of labour, the fascinating faces of every-day people. There's very little overtly Soviet propaganda beyond lending dignity to these things. Vertov says (in the prefatory titles) that this film is not theatrical or literary in intent or influence; rather, it sets out to establish a purely cinematic vocabulary. This endeavour is to a great extent quite successful: not only are there hundreds of eloquent shots and scenes, but they are edited, spliced, interwoven so they speak to each other. And throughout Vertov reminds the viewer of what the camera is—toward the end the camera walks and moves its "head" with stop-frame animation. He also reminds us what the camera can do. Like a musical motif, the image of the cameraman keeps returning: up on the roof photographing traffic, walking through the crowded city streets, wearing a bathing costume walking across the beach or floating in an inner-tube, and standing in an open car photographing the passengers in a horse-drawn carriage, both going at quite a clip. Of course, so is the vehicle carrying the cameraman photographing the cameraman photographing the passengers. And for a brief, brilliant moment, a pretty woman in the carriage turns, smiling, to the cameraman. Laughing, she winds her hand in mimicry of his constant cranking.