Man With A Movie Camera Essay

An Essay Towards Man with a Movie Camera*
Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Cankaya University on March 3, 2014

Stephen Crofts and Olivia Rose
I Introduction
Vertov's career, writings and achievements have already been

described in Screen by Masha Enzensberger.1 We shall begin here
with a brief reading of Vertov's 1920's writings as constituting
proposals for a materialist theory of film. His initial premise,
echoed later by Godard-Gorin in Vent d'Est. is that the film
camera was appropriated by the bourgeoisie for its own ideological
purposes:
' The camera was adjusted so as to penetrate more deeply into the
visible world, to explore and record visual facts, to prevent
forgetting what is happening and what it is therefore necessary to
bear in mind. But the camera has had no luck. It was invented
when there existed no country where capital did not reign. The
bourgeoisie had the diabolical idea of using this new toy to
entertain the working masses or, more accurately, to distract
workers' attention from their fundamental objective, the struggle
against their masters.'2
Such cinema took the form of ' acted cinema', the costumed
fictional film which dominated Soviet screens and against which
Vertov waged a life-long battle, describing it variously as the new
This article originates from postgraduate work by Stephen Crofts at

the Royal College of Art. The authors would like to acknowledge
the considerable material help received from Jeremy Bolton and
the staff of the National Film Archive and from Nicky North and
Erich Sargent of the Educational Advisory Service of the BFI. They
would also like "to thank Nik Rose for his advice, and Masha
Enzensberger for invaluable assistance with translations from the
film and information on Soviet culture.
io ' opium of the people ', as working like a ' mawkish spider's web ',
like drunkenness, religion or hypnosis ' t o stuff such and such
ideas, such and such conceptions into the subconscious '.* Well
aware of the precarious political base of proletarian rule in Soviet
Russia - ' Our revolution has not yet [1926] had the time or the
chance to sweep out . . . the terrible heritage left us by the bour-
geois regime ' 4 - Vertov promotes the vital importance of ideo-
logical struggle in and through cinema. Hence the terms of his •j
virulent assault on all ' acted cinema' and particularly on such '
' cine-Mensheviks' as Eisenstein, whose Strike and Battleship !'.
Potemkin he denounced as ' acted films in documentary trousers '.5 r'
And hence his campaign for a ' Leninist film proportion' whereby ;

cinema programming priorities would be reversed so that 45 per ..
cent of the programmes would be documentary ' montages of 11
actualities \° The basic aim here, as outlined in 1924, was " to see I},
and to show the world in the name of the world proletarian \]
revolution '.7 i
Under the banner of Kino-Eye - which placed crucial emphasis }>
on the ' dislocation and concentration of visual phenomena'
through montage - this programme aimed ' to place at the centre
of attention the economic structure of society', ' to open the
working masses' eyes to the links (neither of the love story nor
the detective story) uniting visual phenomena') ' to expose to
workers the bourgeois structure of the world', ' to show the
worker that it is he/she who manufactures everything and that
therefore everything belongs to him/her '.* The Kino-Eye therefore
disputes the human eye's visual representation of the world and
thus engages in a struggle against the ideology of the visible,
I against the mystification that visual phenomena per se reveal the
truth of the world. Of the work of all Soviet 1920s montage
theorist-practitioners, Vertov's Kino-Eye ' montage of actualities '
most radically develops the anti-realist and anti-psychological
potential of montage. And this in the direct service of ideological
struggle for the proletariat. Vertov's theory was often elaborated
in terms of specific cultural intervention: theory as polemic.9 In
1929, the year of Eisenstein's major montage typologies,10 Vertov
notes the danger of publishing such a typology, because of the
' absurdities ' arising from its misapplication.11 Man with a Movie
Camera, released in the same year, is in a sense Vertov's alterna-
tive: it is less easily misapplied, and if it offers any model for
subsequent films, those films must be as carefully located within
their own historical conjuncture and be structured accordingly.
This article proposes a Marxist analysis of a film on the one hand

variously written off as incomprehensible, as a meaningless com-
pendium of trick effects or indeed as ' camera hooliganism' in
Eisenstein's phrase,12 or alternatively co-opted as sire of cinema-
verite or of the American avant-garde. The inadequacy of such
purely empirical misreadings and non-readings - to be outlined in 11
Part IV - stresses the need for a Marxist theoretical framework in
analysing Man with a Movie Camera in particular and, indeed, any
film. For only that theoretical appraisal is capable of understand- j
ing the ideological basis of cinema through its relationship to the
mode of production as located within social formations. This
enables theoretical explanation of a film's ideological operations
as well as of the ideological determinants of its material condi-
tions of existence. No other framework adequately explains the
subjects with which all films - with varying degrees of awareness
on the parts of those who produce them - necessarily engage:
the ideological determinations of social relations and of cinematic

forms, the dialectics of film as a process of construction and •
historical materialism with its relevance for the class division of
social formations. The explicitness of Vertov's engagement with
these subjects in his materialist theory of film underlines the signal
relevance of a Marxist conceptual apparatus for the analysis of
Mart with a Movie. Camera.
A starting point for this analysis can be found in the section \
on The Method of Political Economy in Marx's 1857 ' Introduction
to the Critique of Political Economy'. This text has been chosen
not only for its intrinsic interest but because of its remarkable
correspondence with positions assumed by Vertov both in his theo-
retical writings and (as we shall see) in his film-making practice.
In this text Marx counterposes his own theory and method to
that of previous economists. His crucial distinction is between
theorisation of a problem - itself a practice of production, a pro-
cess of transformation - and explanations which fail to provide a
foundation for their own abstractions. Marx's method proposes a
double movement from concrete to abstract and back into the
"concrete. In this way, it advances beyond considering its object
as a given aggregate or abstract. Instead of merely reflecting
phenomenal reality, it deconstructs that reality and reconstructs
it through its own conceptualisation. It allows, in other words,
for the process of transformation. The explanations of classical
economists, on the other hand, are rooted in abstractions having
little substantive correspondence with any reality. Such abstrac-
tions are meaningless because they deny any understanding of the
process by which they themselves have acquired meaning in the
first instance. They proceed from an evolutionary model of history
and are reified unless located within dialectical and historical
materialism: ' Even the most abstract categories . . . are . . . them-
selves . . . the product of historic relations, and possess their full
validity only for and within those relations.'13 Marx counterposes
to this static model the conception of a complex unity founded in
the material forces of history: ' The concrete is concrete because
it is a concentration of many determinations, hence a unity of the
diverse.'14 Whereas in untheorised, ideological thinking, this com-
12 plexity evaporates to leave only a set of abstract determinations
which appears to constitute its essence, Marx's postulate proceeds
through abstract determinations to reproduce the concrete by way
of thought conceptualising the way the object can be thought:
' The method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only
the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproducing
it as the concrete in the mind.'15
Thus for Man with a Movie Camera this necessitates the exposi-
tion and grounding of the film's problematics within the instability
and uncertainty of the reigning political economy. (Agriculture will
not be considered here because of the film's concentration on the

urban rather than the rural.) Adopted by Lenin in 1921 following
the ravages of World War, Civil War, blockades and famine, the
Soviet Union's NEP (New Economic Policy) was a necessary com-
promise. The pressing needs for industrial and technological
expansion and for full employment and education programmes
accentuated the need for State-owned capital. While the State
retained control of most heavy industry, it also endorsed projects
designed to attract foreign investment capital - unsuccessfully —
and internally placed major responsibility for increased production
and trade in the hands of private enterprise. Such enterprises
easily found ways around the registration etc requirements designed
to control them. If they did help consolidate' the economy, they
soon also expanded into a considerable private sector command-
ing some 42.5 per cent of internal trade at its peak in 1924-25,16
at a time when such entrepreneurial concerns should have been
eradicated. Private enterprise sought to maximise profit and per-
sonal wealth. In turn a consumer market was created which could
absorb - indeed demanded — inessential, luxury commodities. This
vicious circle of capital fast spawned a new bourgeoisie of NEP
people. In the late 1920's, a new bureaucracy with its meritocratic
career structure equally contributed to the newly competitive con-
sumer market. The proportion of internal consumer trade in private
hands declined during the second half of the 1920's, particularly
as a result of increasingly stringent measures against it from 1927
on, 1928-9 marking its last fling. However, the differentials arising
from the development of separate labouring and consuming sectors
had already been instituted. From 1926 on, plans were being laid
for the first Five-Year Plan (1929-34) which effectively, though not
officially, displaced NEP and which further complicated the
economic situation. There was a fundamental contradiction between
the Plan's stated aims - to ensure collectivisation, full employment
and a more egalitarian society - and the needs of the capital-
intensive industrial programme it sought to implement. The
resultant high rate of unemployment was just one of the politically
undesirable consequences of this programme.
Confusions and hardships arising from this economic situation
were compounded — indeed, complemented - by an increasing poli-
' tical repression of which the 1928 Shakhty trial and the banish- 13
ment of Trotsky were symptomatic. The same repression was also
responsible for the censorship of information on this period of
Soviet history. This facilitated the glossing over of discrepancies
between Party line and political practice, and is, for instance, one
reason why Carr chose to stop his monumental History 0} Soviet
Russia at 1929. By 1931 the political climate was such that- open
discussion of dialectical materialism was officially banned. Clearly
enough, in such a situation, few could count on the security or
permanence of the bases on which their daily lives rested:
There was a concomitant hardening in cultural policy. In litera-

ture — debates about which gave the lead for debates about other
artistic practices - indirect political pressures led to the hegemony
of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) with its pro-
motion of a proletarian realism and to the demise of Novy Lef,
organ of the politicised Futurists. In film journals open discussion
of aesthetic issues disappeared as from 1927. The first-ever All-
Union Party Congress on Film Matters, held in 1928, marked a
similar narrowing of outlook, charges of' formalism ', for instance,
being invoked against Vertov for The Eleventh Year and against
Eisenstein for October. In 1928 too, Narkompros (Commissariat
of Education) for the first time intervened to review the year's
production schedule and banned 36 per cent of previously author-
ised scenarios. The film industry had been moving towards central-
isation since the establishment of Sovkino's effective hegemony
in 1925. ft was fully centralised into Soyuzkino in 1930 under the
industrial administrator, Shumyatsky. Censorship denies us access
to many of Vertov's writings of the period. The 1966 Moscow
edition of these describes many of his public statements and
articles, few of which were published until this edition, as being
' abridged', while his diaries contain not a single entry for the
years 1928-32 inclusive except for an account of a week abroad.17
Similarly, Dovzhenko's notebooks, published at the same time,
begin only in 1941,18 while Eisenstein's ' Notes for a Film of
Capital' emerged only in 1973.1E>
If montage cinema peaked in the late 1920's with such films as
Man with a Movie Camera, October, Zvenigora and The New
Babylon, this was against the context of official harassment out-
lined above. In 1965 Kozintsev himself aptly described the period
as one in which ' many things were attempted for the first time,
and many things were attempted for the last time '. Eisenstein's
contemporary analysis is more acute: ' The tragedy of today's
" leftists " [ = LEFists?] consists in the fact that the still incom-
plete analytic process finds itself in a situation in which synthesis
is demanded.'20
Throughout the 1920's montage cinema had in any case been
the exception rather" than the rule, which was perhaps epitomised
by Aelita's romantic extravaganza about converting the Martians
14 to Socialism, culminating in happy inter-planetary marriage. While
montage was relatively acceptable to the cinema industry in its
anthropocentric, narrative-oriented forms, as in the films of Kule-
shov and Pudovkin, film-makers such as Eisenstein and Dovzhenko,
exploiting more disjunctive, often non-anthropocentric forms of
montage in fictional cinema, encountered greater problems. Vertov
had greater difficulties still, since documentary was an area which
officialdom deemed necessarily transparent and utilitarian and
certainly not susceptible to disjunctive Kino-Eye montage treatment.
Thus Vertov was able to secure only one major project, A Sixth
of the World, between 1924 and 1927. Sovkino sacked him on
January 4, 1927 and ordered him to leave Moscow.21 He lost

support from Pravda at the same time. His last article published
there seems to be July 24, 1926, and letters by Editorial Board
members of the paper calling for his reinstatement at Sovkino
were denied publication. Vertov left for the Ukraine with Svilova,
his editor and wife, and Mikhail Kaufman, his cameraman and
brother: Kino-Eye's ' Council of Three' since April 3, 1922. Be-
tween 1926 and 1928 Vufku (Pan-Ukrainian Committee of Cinema
and Photography) were engaged in a blockade of Sovkino-
distributed films. The company took over the film which Vertov
was to have made for Sovkino to celebrate the tenth anniversary
of the Revolution - The Eleventh Year - and made it the condition
for his making Man with a Movie Camera.22 Vertov's account of
the prejudices of the Kiev and Kharkov studios of Vufku suggests
that he had considerable difficulty gaining their backing for the
film.23 And his letters to Fevralski evince great anxiety about its
ever being seen. Completed by Vertov by December 1928, the film
was released on January 8, 1929. Fevralski assures us that Pravda
both published Vertov's notes on the film - albeit heavily edited -
and reviewed the film favourably. However, just in the light of
the apparently very restricted exhibition of Vertov's earlier films
and of Three Songs for Lenin, Lullaby and Three Heroines, it seems
improbable that Man with a Movie Camera was seen by many
Soviet viewers on its release.24
The dichotomy mentioned above between stated political aims
and actual social practices was fundamental through the late 1920s
and beyond. The materialist dialectic demands the identification
of the ideological determinants of this dichotomy and enables them
to be re-integrated into a theoretical synthesis of everyday activi-
ties. It exposes the falsity of the dichotomy, and reveals its mask-
ing as an ideological operation with repercussions such that the
wage-labourer is allowed - indeed, encouraged - to collude in
his/her own oppression, hence perpetuating labourer/consumer
differentials. Such collusion was fostered by the artistic practices
which developed into the idealising, closed fictional models of
Soviet socialist realism. Vertov's materialist theory of cinema,
grounded in a concept of ideological struggle, countered such mis-
-X. -
cognitions by arguing for a recognition of the relation of labour 15
to production and the appropriation of the product.25 The essential
concomitant of this was Vertov's struggle against the forms of
realist fiction as irredeemable vectors of the dominant ideology.
Man with a Movie Camera accordingly treats in parallel the prob-
lematics of cinematic form and of labourer/consumer (rarely
identifiable as separate individuals). The film aims to take the
spectator from.a position of unreflective consumption of cinema
to one of actively participating in producing the film's meanings,
and from a position of economic exploitation to one of recognising \
that situation and its means of operation. Such a recognition of i

the spectator's situation within the social relations of an increas- j
ingly capitalist mode of production can be seen as the essential !
pre-condition of class struggle. i
Most markedly from 1927 through the 1930s, the censorship
of Vertov's writings deprives us of empirical support for this
account of the film's project (the foregoing summary of his theory
of cinema draws almost exclusively on material written before
1927-28). The political censorship of the period of Man with a
Movie Camera would in part explain the film's inexplicitness -
indeed, ambiguity — about its project, an ambiguity enabling it to
be presented as politically acceptable.
II The Film
Man with a Movie Camera is easiest approached in terms of a

widespread 1920s genre, the city documentary, exemplified by
Mikhail Kaufman's Moscow and by Men que les Heures, Berlin,
Rain and A Propos de Nice. The most consistent thread in the
film's syntagmatic organisation is that of a Day in the Life of a
Soviet City. Coupled with the Film Construction Process, which
often cuts across, rather than parallels the Day in the Life structure,
this authorises a breakdown of the film into seven sections:
1 A Credo, or, in Barthes' analysis of classical rhetoric,26 an
. Egressio, designed to show off the orator's, or in this case the
film's capacities (shots 1-4).*
2 Induction: The Audience for the Film (shots 5-67).
3 Section One: Waking. This comprises the whole series beginning
and ending with the Waking Woman (shots 68-207).
4 Section Two: The Day and Work Begin. This concludes with
the introduction of the first editing segment (shots 208-341).
* Shot numbers are given to indicate the placing of segments etc

within the film. A shot-by-shot breakdown of Man with a Movie
Camera has yetto be published. The breakdown used here is based
on a conflation of the National Film Archive 35 mm print and the
16 mm British distribution prints.
5 Section Three: The Day's Work (shots 342-955).
6 Section Four: Work Stops, Leisure Begins (shots 956-1399).
7 Coda: The Audience for the Film (shots 1400-1716).
However, in accordance with Vertov's Kino-Eye theory, Man with
a Movie Camera, perhaps more than any other film ever made,
refuses any empiricist construction of given phenomenal reality.
As Vertov noted in a posthumously published article from 1928:
' This complex experiment brutally contrasts " life as it is " seen
by the eye armed with a camera (" Kino-Eye ") with " life as it
is " seen by the imperfect look of the human eye.'27 Much of
dominant cinema is content to concentrate on only the latter of

these two, to abstract from phenomenal reality and in so doing
to assign an assumed coherence to it, that is, to treat the social
totality as a given aggregate. Its operation corresponds, therefore,
to the untheorised operation of abstraction attacked by Marx in
the 1857 Introduction. Beyond this, Marx proposes the further
movement from the unexplicated nature of the abstraction, through
theoretical conceptualisation of the components of this abstraction,
back into concrete reality. Vertov suggests the necessity for a
similar double movement: ' The analysis (from the unknown to
the known) and the synthesis (from the known to the unknown)
were not . . . in contradiction but on the contrary were found to
be indissolubly linked to each other.'28 Whereas dominant forms
of cinema tend to proffer the construction of a false coherence out
of the chaos of phenomenal reality - a descriptive process - Man
with a Movie Camera engages in a process of synthesis - a
theoretical practice of explication. It does so by reconstructing its
objects in terms of theory (there are two objects here: more
accessible to us now, cinematic forms, and less accessible to us
now, the social formation obtaining in Soviet cities in the late
1920's). This is the process of the dialectic mentioned above based
on the opposition of Kino-Eye and human eye. The synthesis of
this dialectic is the terminate object, the film in the can. In its ,'
turn, this object presupposes an addressee, the notionally ideal
spectator/reader. The dialectic of discourse based on these two
finds its synthesis in the potentiality of an ideal reading situation.
Reading thus becomes the final part of the film's process of trans-
formation. In order to make the film intelligible - not in the com-
monsense terms of a dominant ideology - the reader is forced to
read meaning back into the text of the film precisely because of j
its own theoretical practice. As Vertov proclaims, ' not Kino-Eye f
for the sake of Kino-Eye, but for the truth \ 2 9 truth here being ,
envisaged neither as immanent nor as transcendent, but as some-
thing discovered only in process. Crucially, this politicises the act
of reading. The formal determinant of this is the film's montage
' intervals ', the gaps, the discontinuities between the individual
shots, its disjunction of its representations of phenomenal reality:
' Everything depends on this or that juxtapositioning of visual
I features. Everything lies in the intervals.' Montage is thus conceived 17
' as ' the organisation of the visible world' and not ' the collage
of separately filmed scenes ' and hence as a means of dispersal of
meaning through and across the film.30 This de-familiarisation
generates a kind of ostranenie (making-strange) working through-
out the film. More specifically, what is activated here is an invoca-
tion of the paradigmatic. This entails theorising the gaps, of an
' inadequate', ' incomplete' series of shots, thus becoming cog-
nisant of the ideologically determined constructions of reality and
of our perceptions of it. This work is activated by the multi-
dimensional framework of ideas constituting the paradigmatic. The

spectator is then able to choose which meanings to confer upon
specific combinations of images, whilst recognising that both
framework and choice are ideologically informed. This activity
differs radically from that engendered by films giving primacy to
the syntagmatic, which occludes the choices already made and
their ideological determinations. This distinction corresponds
closely to Lenin's 1901 distinction, cited by Vertov himself, be-
tween the ' popular' and the ' vulgar' writer. Whereas the
' popular writer . . . teaches [the reader] to go forward independ-
ently '. the ' vulgar writer . . . hands out "ready-made" all the con-
clusions of a known theory, so that the reader does not even have
to chew, but merely to swallow what he is given \ 3 1 Man with a
Movie Camera effects the transformation proposed by Stephen
Heath, who adopts Vertov's term, ' intervals ': 'The relations of
the subject set by film - its vision, its address - would be radically
transformed if the intervals of its production were opened in their
negativity, if the fictions of the closure of these intervals were dis-
continued, found in all the contradictions of their activity.'32 The
' intervals' of Man with a Movie Camera reintroduce, in Heath's
terms, heterogeneity, contradiction-and history. Since the processes
of signification determine any apprehension of signifieds, the film's
theoretical reconstruction of cinematic forms will be examined
before its theoretical reconstruction of the contemporary social
formation.
IIA The Film's Theoretical Reconstruction of Cinematic Forms
Vertov's publicity for Man with a Movie Camera's premiere

announces the film's primary concern as the theoretical investiga-
tion of film language:
' Man with a Movie Camera, recording in six reels. Spectators are
advised that this film is an experiment in the cinematic trans-
position of visible phenomena, without titles, without sets, without
studio. This experimental work aims to create an absolutely
18 cinematic language, authentically international, based on a total
departure from the languages of theatre and literature.'33
Crucially, this ' theoretical and practical operation on the front
of cinematic documentary '34 does not expel signified and referent
to concentrate exclusively on the material substrate of film.35
Man with a Movie Camera confronts the problematics of significa-
tion from which the bulk of' structural' film retreats. This differen-
tiates Vertov's project at the outset from that of the ' structural *
film branch of the avant-garde. And as indicated in Part IV, it makes
highly suspect any attempt to read back into Vertov the concerns
of current avant-garde practices. At the same time, clearly, Man

with a Movie Camera distinguishes itself even more radically from
the dominant cinematic modes, both documentary and fictional,
of ' realist representation', with their disavowal of the processes
of signification in favour of transparency.
The film's theoretical reconstruction of cinematic form is prin-
cipally realised in its elaboration of an indeterminate structure with
few parallels in the history of cinema. Cahiers du Cinima's remarks
about the structure of Vertov's films in general apply with par-
ticular aptness to Man with a Movie Camera. The film is thought
of not ' as an expressive totality composed of indiscriminately
permutatable parts ', but, as in Althusser's concept of complex
unity:
' as a differential and contradictory structuration such that each
shot, without ever having value as a part for the whole, stands
as a disaligned [decale] and provisional representative of all the
others, each shot of the film taking on this role of active reflection.
. . . Each " view " comprises all the rest, but without totalising
them: it is the card in play in an interminable game, the
provisional effect of a discontinuous process.'36
The key determinant here is the film's invocation of the para-
digmatic. This is most clearly evidenced - many other examples
will emerge throughout this article - in the film's editing segments.
I For editing is the most obviously paradigmatic stage of film-mak-
ing, the point at which shots are included or discarded (contrast
Vertov's stress on the selections determining every stage of film-
making: ' Every " Kino-Eye " film is in montage from the moment
one chooses a subject until the final appearance of the celluloid>37).
Even in films ostensibly dealing with making films, it is the part
of the overall process which is invariably omitted - an act of
editing itself, of ideological self-censorship. Gimme Shelter stands
as one of the few exceptions, though its investigation of the work
really involved in editing is cut short by its obsession with film
as evidence and by its narrative context celebrating the Rolling
Stones. F for Fake entraps itself differently: in Welles's self-
conscious auteurism. Of paramount importance here is the fact
that such films never posit the question of the editing of the 19
films they themselves constitute. Man with a Movie Camera, to
the contrary, makes fully explicit through its own practice the
paradigmatic nature of editing. The clearest instance is its first
editing segment (shots 336-74). This comprises three kinds of
image apart from those of Svilova, the actual editor of Man with
a Movie Camera, herself: filmstrip images, still images filling the
screen and moving images filling the screen. In terms of their use
or otherwise elsewhere in the film, these images fall into five
groups:
1 Images on filmstrip or filmstrip and stills which are activated

in the editing segment and incorporated later in the film.
2 Images from earlier in the film which are frozen to stills and
reactivated later.
3 Images on filmstrip or stills which may or may not be activated
but are incorporated earlier or later.
4 Images on filmstrip and/or stills which are merely activated
within the segment but not used elsewhere in the film.
5 Images on filmstrip or stills which are neither activated within
the segment nor appear elsewhere in the film.
The last two categories are the most fascinating. The fourth raises
questions — examined more fully later — of what constitutes the
film's diegesis; mere activation or incorporation into a defined
series of shots? and if the latter, defined by action, continuity
or what? And the final category enables the film to include shots
which it edits out. This paradox is neither flippant nor incon-
sequential. For in a vital sense the editing of the film - indeed, of
any film — is incomplete within it; it is ' completed' only by the
spectator's reading of it. Significant here is the reintroduction of
Svilova into the Coda's final crescendo (shots 1580-1669),
especially in the segments whose montage complements her eyes
with the projector beam in the auditorium. The editor, as it were,
oversees the film's presentation of fragments of the phenomenal
world to the spectator, while refusing to dictate any reading of
these montage fragments.
In such ways, Man with a Movie Camera virtually defines the
closure of dominant cinematic forms as a disavowal of the para-
digmatic. The film reduces the syntagmatic to a minimum: there
is little possibility of fantasising about what happened before its
beginning or after its ending — only of thinking through the para-
digms of its construction. To this end, the film refuses closure and
continually dislocates any conventional syntagmatic patterns. Apart
from the Man with the Camera, played by Mikhail Kaufman, none
of the figures shown in the Waking Section, for instance, is ever
seen again in the film. The Coda refuses to gather up any sub-
stantial reprise of.the film's preceding images. Even in its.final
segment (shots 1701-15) the film introduces two new objects, the
more remarkable being a car driven along railway tracks.
20 Committed to investigating, not relaying ideological construc-
tions, Man with a Movie Camera implacably bars the wholesale
importation of any such constructions into it. Right from its open-
ing shots - the exact function of its Egressio - it proclaims its
own capacity for the production of meaning. This process of mean-
ing-production diffuses ideological constructions so that they can
be read as such. Meanings are read from the film not through any
simple re-presentation of an anterior reality in the form of a closed
history, but through the film's placing of shots within itself. It is
in this sense - and no other — that Vertov refers to the film as an
' indissoluble organic whole \ 3S One index of this organicism is

the film's explicit phasing-in of fnonciation in the form of transi-
tional shots or segments used as punctuation - or rather, articula-
tions - between segments. Vital in all of these is their refusal of
the. straight cut, dissolve or whatever device is conventionally
used to switch us directly from one segment to the next and thus
to spirit away the processes of construction of the film before us.
Most notable here are the iris in and out, the static filmstrips on
the editing table, the lowering of the camera lens and the intro-
duction of the self-demonstrating camera which separate off the
main sections of the film. Shots of the camera filming itself (eg
shots 598 and 615, stills 22 and 24) - long before Godard's dream
of it — similarly break up segments of the film. 'The film's internal
generation of meaning is again pointed up through the recurrent
motif of filming as activation (much as in those parts of Tout Va
Men's factory segment where characters begin to move only as
the camera tracks past them): the Egressio activating the whole
film, the cinema orchestra poised ready to play in the Induction
and activated only when the projector's carbon arcs ignite (shots
50-4), the camera waking the homeless (eg shots 167-74 and
221-2), the fountain in front of the Bolshoi Theatre which spouts
only as it begins to be filmed (shot 284), the generation of light
only as the Man with the Camera starts to film in the mine (shot
730) and so on. And beyond these instances are the insistent
irruptions through the film of the Film Construction Process: the
processes of shooting, editing and viewing of the film.
Man with a Movie Camera therefore builds up its own memories
in and through itself. This is why, in a critical sense, it is an
eminently forgettable film. It defines its signifiers only by means
of its own syntagmatic - and far more, its paradigmatic - chains.
As will be amplified later, these paradigmatic chains frequently
rework and redefine the film's signifiers. This operation parallels
twinned emphases in Lacan's work: his noting that meaning is
fixed only at the last term of a sentence39 and his concomitant
use of wordplay and intentional obscurity to indicate an unease
even with that fixing of signifiers. The film's radical play with
signifiers demonstrates ad absurdum the fallibility of trying to
\ impose on it any system of signification which denies heterogeneity
r and contradiction. Almost as soon as the film establishes a recog- 21
nisable ' system ' for its ordering of shots, another ' system ' under-
cuts that categorisation. Vertov's 1937 remarks on his editing
procedure are pertinent to Man with a Movie Camera: ' All the
images find themselves in a state of continuous transferment right
through to the end of the montage process.'40 This ceaseless dis-
placement of one pattern by the next is the film's overriding
structural principle (the mechanics of this process are better seen
in diachronic rather than in synchronic analysis, as in Part III).
The film's theoretical reconstruction of cinematic forms neces-
sitates the exposure and reworking of dominant cinema's denial
of its own processes of transformation, or in other terms, its

soldering of enonciation onto enonce. The film's reworking of the
formal assumptions underlying such cinematic modes can be
ranged in a spectrum from absolute rejection (eg of notions of
character) to qualified acceptance (eg in the Day in the Life
structure). The purpose of the former will be clear from the pre-
ceding paragraphs. The latter end of the spectrum principally
serves the interests of structural coherence. Without such sup-
ports the film would in all probability be totally unwatchable. To
include them, obviously, is neither a cop-out nor an instant recipe
for recuperation. The current analysis will examine first the film's
refusal of the assumptions underlying certain forma.1 components j
of dominant cinema. Of these, the central assumption is that of
diegetic coherence, which the film rejects but which it also radically
- in the word's fullest sense — reworks. Three other components |
the film has no or very little truck with: character and humanist i
identification, narrative structures and consistent motivation of '
actions. The second group includes elements used as syntagmatic
props — even if in a highly irregular and disrupted manner - most
of which serve to focus the film's critique of the contemporary
social formation: the Day in the Life structure, thematisation and
the use of certain figures as syntagmatic threads. The last group
again supplies structural coherence but comprises components of
dominant cinema which are inflected so as to focus on signifiers
instead of on character or plot, and as such are mostly used con-
sistently throughout the film: climactic rhythm, rhythmic balances,
marking and anchor shots. These terms will be explicated in the
ensuing analysis of their operations. The reworking they effect
provides the foundation for the film's generation of forms of
signification very different from those of dominant cinematic
modes. Examples will emerge throughout both this part of the
article and in Part IIB.
As already implicit, Man with a Movie Camera does not simply
expel diegesis, as do many ' structural' films. Nor does it sheer
off from it into a painterly abstractionism, as does Berlin with its
whirling circles, spirals and diagonal patterns. Nor, moreover, does
it limit itself to the occasional departures from a dominant diegesis
22 characterising more politically pointed 1920s city films than
Berlin such as Rien que les Henres and A Propos de Nice. Man
with a Movie Camera on the contrary retains diegetic elements,
but reworks them in such a way as to expose their means of
functioning as well as to open up forms of signification capable
of raising an enormous range of questions both about the con-
ventions of cinematic forms and about the contemporary social
formation.
The construction of diegetic space and time is perhaps the
principal cinematic means of fixing representations of the pheno-
menal world as some inviolable reality. It is a construction which

/ coherently organises, but rarely challenges, our ways of seeing
' the world. In an unpublished note on Man with a Movie Camera,
Vertov writes: ' The conflict between the space and time of ordinary
vision and the space and time cf cinematic vision constitute the
motor force of the documentary Man with a Movie Camera.'" As
early as 1923. and in contradistinction to the fictionally-oriented
homogenisations of Kuleshov's ' creative geography', he asserts
space and time in cinema to be purely cinematic constructions:
' I . . . the Kino-Eye . . . have set you down in a most amazing
room, which did not exist until now. . . . In this room are twelve
walls filmed by me in various parts of the world. . . . The
mechanical eye experiments by stretching time, breaking up its
motions, or vice versa, absorbing time into itself, swallowing up
the years.'42 Man with a Movie Camera's ' montage in time and
space' constructs such dissociations of ' normal' perception of
reality so as to demolish any notion of the film having a single,
multiple or even dominant diegesis.
To this end, the film eschews all forms of diegetic spatial
organisation used in contemporary documentary films. First, its
1 refusal of intertitles entails a rejection of any verbal ' explanation '
' and homogenisation of groups of shots, such as the moving water/
bobbins montage of Turksib. Second, its montage ' intervals '
entail its ousting of continuity between shots within any specific-
ally defined scene in favour of its predominant, but still irregu-
larised, principle of alternating montage. Hence also its refusal
of such rhythmic/lyrical continuity as is found in La Tour, which
elegantly matches its movements, or in Rain, constructed almost
entirely on matches of movement and texture. Further, this in-
volves a refusal of the master shot, the most common means of
the spatial fixing of shots within specifically defined scenes. Thus
the film includes no more than a dozen master shots, and then
.1 invariably for the purpose of subverting'the 'authority' with
^ which dominant cinematic modes invest them.
What occurs, then, in Man with a Movie Camera is a structured
intersection of differing forms of spatial construction which re-
works and progressively undermines the notion of coherent diegetic
. space. In this respect the overall process of the film can be
described as a movement from the diegetic coherence of the 23
auditorium of the Induction - a coherence implying a relatively ',
inactive, non-reflexive form of cinematic consumption - through
the processes of labour, particularly those of filming and editing,
back to a viewing situation in the auditorium of the Coda which
is informed by these and promotes far more active reflection on
the processes of cinematic construction. Given the film's promotion
of the Film Construction Process, it is no accident that most of
its very few coherent diegetic spaces, defined here as those in-
cluding a master shot, expose to us the processes of production
of the film before us: filming, editing and viewing. The Film Con-
struction Process, in other words, is the absolute precondition of

diegetic coherence or incoherence. The auditorium of the Induction
(shots 6-67) even opens with a master shot, albeit printed in
reverse so that the seat numbers read the wrong way round. The
first editing segment (shots 336-74) is also spatially coherent.
But even this soon in the film the master shot is much delayed
and the segment placed so as to interrupt the Man with the
Camera filming the new-bourgeois groups leaving the station.
The process of Man with a Movie Camera's undermining of >
notions of coherent diegetic space is clearly best illustrated by \
diachronic analysis. This can be seen on a small scale in the
1 analysis of six segments from the film in Part III. For* the purposes
j of the present analysis of the whole film, however, the means of
such undermining can be seen at four levels: within shots, between
consecutive or dispersed shots, within segments and between
segments.
Even within the shots, then, the film often works against any 1
simple recognition of objects within the phenomenal world. Four
processes can be discerned here. First, many shots of the tram
junction by the Moscow Trades Union Building (seen in stills 2
and 11) alternate three-dimensional depth of field with a two-
dimensional flatness as trams cross the field of vision and obliter-
ate the view. As Michelson notes, this pulls the spectator back
to a constant awareness of the screen's two-dimensionality:43 a
concern examined far more thoroughly in, say, the more abstract
Ballet Mecanique. Second, dissolves are used in one segment to
conjure up successively a swimming lesson from a bare yard, a
magician from a hedge, swimmers from empty water and carousel
horses from behind their tarpaulins (shots 990-3). Split screen
and superimposition shots are employed in a variety of ways: to
' collapse' streets and the Bolshoi (shot 1511, still 1), to slice off
the tops of trams (eg shot 1440, still 2), or in differing scales so
that the Man with the Camera appears like Gulliver in Lilliput or
Brobdignag, towering over a miniature city or clambering out of
a beer glass (eg shots 1203 and 1206). Lastly here, the film
exploits ostranenie on the local level in shots of unrecognisable
objects: most spectacularly, the whirling patterns of light on the
24 screen in the Coda (shots 1421-3) and the superimposition of
spindle-like objects and something resembling a sewing-machine
flywheel (shot 1451, still 3).
Man with 0 Movie Camera exploits ostranenie similarly between
consecutive or ciispersea snocs. Such osi'^r.snle cuts include that
from tne j-ncrior, with a sanner acv2r::s:.-.g the Jubilee Suidon of
Gorky's \^orks - a snot including a trafnc signal wnich is in nc
way composition:!.,)' hlghlig^vec - to sr. extreme lcvz-ang^e shcr

of the signal, framed obliquely to the general shot so that the 25
signal is silhouetted against the sky (shots 127-8, stills 4-5).
Another example is the giant bottle, presumably a bar, which
strangely appears and disappears with slightly dillerent reframings
of a caf6 terrace (eg shots 76 and 78, stills 6 and 7). Such
reframing can operate on a larger scale across the film: the re-
currence of the same bannered junction in seemingly -different
guises through the film, or the reframings of the machine glueing
seals onto cigarette packets such that it is barely recognisable as
the same machine. A second means by which diegetic spatial co-
herence is called into question between shots is the ' oscillations '
in the Coda whereby a spatially defined audience is seated watch-

ing a film - our film, Man with a Movie Camera — in which we are
sometimes fully involved — their screen is our screen — and from
which we are repeatedly pulled back into — again — our film, Man
with a Movie Camera. Similarly, there is an insistent ' oscillation '
between our seeing the Man with the Camera filming the new-
{ bourgeois groups leaving the station and our seeing the groups
! he is filming (shots 307-30). Third, jokes are based on directional
y matches between consecutive shots in different diegetic spaces:
the ambulance and the fire engines (seemingly) speeding into each
I other (shots 557-69), the goal-keeper who leaps up (to appear) to
i be speared by a javelin (shots 1133-4). Jokes are. alternatively
: constructed on visual rhymes: the Waking Woman's early morning
blinking paralleled with the opening and closing of Venetian blinds
and the alternating blurriness and clarity of her view of some
blossom which is intercut with focus-pulls of the camera lens
(shots 187-203).
Assumptions of coherent diegetic space and continuous action ^
are broken down in two principal ways within segments. On a
modest scale, for instance, the coherence of the netball segment
(shots 1115-31), complete with master shot and consistent matches
on movement, is undercut by slow-motion shots of the ball being
netted. More important, however, are the segments constructed
on principles similar to, but subversive of those of Kuleshov's
' creative geography'. According to Kuleshov, successive shots
linked by eyeline matches etc can be read as coherent diegetic
spaces even if they were actually filmed 1,000 miles and ten years
apart. In many of its alternating montage segments between seer
and seen — themselves foregrounding the film's central opposition
between human eye and camera eye — Man with a Movie Camera
exposes such Kuleshovian readings for exactly what they are:
fictional homogenisations, fabrications assuming continuity across
shot/reverse-shot. Thus in the athletics and horse-track segments
(shots 1003-41) spectators react at normal shooting speed to par-
ticipants who are put through a range of slow and normal shooting
speeds, as well as being freeze-framed and then set in motion once
more. Again, differently, alternating montage interweaves shots
26 of a girl looking out from a spinning carousel with shots of the
crowd which she could be read as looking at but for the fact that
the crowd is spinning in the same direction as the carousel (shots
1180-7). Some of the film's alternating montage crescendos have a
similar effect. In the ' eye-vertigo' segment (shots 457-532), for
instance, each of the eye's movements cue the camera movements
in the following shot. When the segment climaxes with single-
frame editing, persistence of vision enables the spectator to ' see '
both seer and seen ' simultaneously': a precursor of Numero
Deux's video fade-ins of full-face shots of both brother and sister
as they converse from opposite ends of a table.
Such assumptions - which evidently extend beyond Kuleshov

and his contemporaries - are also criticised between segments.
The shooting gallery segment (shots 1224-51), for example, has a
long delayed master shot whose ' authority ' as such is fast under-
mined by the construction of the following segment on the basis
of alternating montage between another woman, shooting in the
same gallery, and a crate of beer bottles which she appears to be
shooting away (similarly to the comic segment in Zvenigora where
the Ukrainians shoot blind over their shoulders to topple more
and more Poles from the tree in which they have all — somehow —
been hiding). Assumptions of diegetic spatial coherence are under-
cut differently in relation to the segments of the. children watching
the magician (shots 1080-96) or of the various people watching
someone making music with bottles, spoons and washboard (shots
1287-1386), neither of which segments has any master shot. The
first recontextualises some of its spectators from filmstrips earlier
seen in Svilova's editing room, and the second carries over one
woman from its audience into a new alternating montage series
based on the same shot of her looking, but looking this time at
multiple superimpositions which could be seen only in a cinema.
Enough has already been said to indicate the film's construction
of geographically ' impossible' diegetic spaces. Outstanding
examples would be the interpolation of stock shots of Moscow into
series of shots filmed in Ukrainian locations some 1,000 miles
away.44 One of the most striking examples is the intercutting of
two shots taken from the Bolshoi with two of revolving doors at
a hall in the Ukraine advertising —fittingly— a concert (shots 378-
81). Another remarkable example is the series'of shots interleaved
in alternating montage with shots of a car speeding across the
screen (shots 934-40, stills 8-11 of shots 934, 936, 938 and 940).
The first shows the Man with the Camera filming at a street junc-
tion in the Ukraine, the second his camera filming alone at the
junction, the third him filming (in different clothes) at the Petrovka
Street junction in Moscow and the last him filming at the junction
by the Moscow Trades Union Building.
This last example points up how the film makes manifest non-
I sense of any linear time scale which might be assumed to govern
a film adopting a Day to Night structure (contrast here the clocks

reminding us of the time of day in Berlin). Since in Man with a
Movie Camera the film itself, and not any diegesis, governs its
contents, the Man with the Camera is eminently capable of being
' everywhere ', ' simultaneously '. On one occasion he sets up his
camera low on the side of a train eleven shots before the shots of
the engine wheels presumably filmed from that set-up (shots 302
and 313-7). By the time the engine wheels are seen, he is already
aiming the new bourgeois groups leaving the station. Linear time
scale is subverted within single shots by the use of reverse-motion
;Vertov's ' negative of time "*5): chess and draughts pieces, which
are swept onto their boards (shots 1220 and 1222), street scenes
in which people, trams and horses and carts walk and run back-
wards (shots 1558 and 1672). Overlapping montage serves the
same function: consecutive shots from different angles of the
same footballer heading the ball (eg shots 1137-9), the train which
careers towards the camera for a few frames and then begins its
journey again (shots 1588-9). Linear time is again called into
28 question in the duplication in horizontal split screen of a shot of a
typing pool so that the two halves are out of sync (shot 1445,
Character in any psychological sense is clearly inimical to Man

with a Movie Camera's project. For it would impose on the film a
humanist ideology of the individual and cause-effect chains
seriously at odds with its theoretical investigation.both of cine-
matic forms and of the contemporary social formation. Neither
the Man with the Camera, nor, in her section of the film, the i
Waking Woman is in any way identified as a character, the Man f
with the Camera relating to others only through the camera from
which he is almost always inseparable. Such a conception of \

character marks off the film from even, say, Turksib and far more
from the individualist humanism of the Eskimo, Nanook of the '
North, or from the sundry stories of prostitute, newspaper-seller r
and sailor which are overlaid on Rien qite les Heures' impression-
istic account of Paris.
For the same reasons, Man with a Movie Camera meticulously '
forestalls any humanist identification with the figures it shows, '
particularly through its predominant alternating montage. The .,
pain of childbirth is thus diffused first by being intercut with shots '
of a wedding and of a funeral bier, and subsequently through inter- ;
cutting with the first and only occasion in the film when the Man <
with the Camera is seen filming still photographs (shots 426-38).
Quite clearly the film has nothing that could be called a plot. L
Its refusal of any elements of narrative structure is usefully ex- '
amined in terms of Barthes' hermeneutic and proairetic codes,
which Barthes in S/Z notes as founding the irreversibility of the -'
logico-temporal ordering of the classic text. Structured on a system
of ' intervals ' which demand that the spectator construct the film's i.
meanings, Man with a Movie Camera refuses the determinations I
of the hermeneutic code, that of the posing and resolution of j
enigmas. For the function of hermeneutics is — the word's original
meaning in Biblical exegesis - that of revelation. Hence Barthes'
labelling the code the ' Voice of truth'. The film's rejection of
character and plot elements clearly entails its rejection of any such
question as: Will the prostitute marry the sailor? Equally, the film
offers no ready-made answer to questions such as: What can be
done to eradicate these social injustices? Nor does its disjunctive
montage allow it to generate the kinds of hermeneutic of the
signifier variously informing such avant-garde films as Wavelength,
Zorns' Lemma or N:O:T:H:1:N:G. A straightforward example of the
film's rejection of any hermeneutic is the refusal of any view from
the top of the chimney which the Man with the Camera climbs
(shots 235-48).
Barthes' proairetic code, detailing the logic of ordinary actions j
and hence dubbed the ' Voice of empiricism', is obviously ana- !
thema to the film. Manifestly, the film has no equivalent to such ;
j
character-centred sequences of actions as: Nanook stalks the 29
seal . . . etc. Only exceptionally is a character-centred series of
actions rounded off: those of the Waking Woman, and of the Man
with the Camera returning across the railway tracks after filming
the train (shots 140-59). The vast majority of such sequences are
simply suspended, cut off after their first term. Even when dis-
joined from any human figure such sequences of actions in the film
rarely cohere into any proairetic pattern: the items of factory
machinery which are first seen still, later set in motion and finally
stopped for the day (shots 119-25, 236-57 and 956-64).
Man with a Movie Camera reverses conventional cinematic treat-

ment of motivation. Most cinema does its best to explain in terms
of psychological motivation all the actions which it presents within
its diegesis, but never its own signifying processes; in its constant
return to the Film Construction Process, Man with a Movie Camera
foregrounds its own processes to the maximum. Conventionally,
motivation is diegetic and usually ultimately guaranteed; in Man
with a Movie Camera even delayed non-diegetic motivation is far
from ensured, and largely reserved for the Film Construction Pro-
cess. A clear example is the shot showing the Man with the Camera
getting up from the ground after a number of coal barrows have
been trundled over the camera (shots 261-2). Again, the shot of
racks of film in the editing room is motivated only thirteen shots
later by a refraining showing Svilova looking at them (shots 339
and 352). Far more often, however, the film withholds any such
explanations. Occasionally, it plays elaborately on expectations of
motivation, as with the shots of the poster for the ' fictional
drama ' film, The Awakening of a Woman (shots 74, 132 and 226).
First shown only partially, with only an indecipherable part of its
title visible, it is interleaved with shots of the Waking Woman
asleep. At its next appearance it is similarly framed, but the writing
has been blocked out. The whole poster, with all its text visible,
is not shown until the next section of the film, and then revealed
in full only as the Man with the Camera passes it.
The film's Day in the Life structure and its use of thematisation
and of the Man with the Camera and the Waking Woman all
serve as structural props,'though in a highly fragmented and dis-
ruptive way. This latter notably distinguishes the Day in the Life
of a Soviet City — nevertheless the film's major syntagmatic strand
- from the Day in the Life structures of other 1920s city films.
Thematisation, the organisation of shots by theme, is again highly
irregular. Section Two of the film might be described as grouping
shots under the headings of the Man with the Camera travelling
around the city, trams and buses beginning to move, coal mines
fuelling factories, a market opening and so on. Clearly, however,
given the film's concern not simply to show the phenomenal world,
such a breakdown can only be partial and inadequate. It overlooks
the complex interaction, through overlaps, inserts and intercutting,
30 of the various forms of activity described as well as of the varied
meanings which can be read from them. Though in no sense
developed as characters, the Man with the Camera and, in her
section of the film, the Waking Woman do serve as threads through
the film. The Man with the Camera constantly refocusses the Film
Construction Process, while the Waking Woman focusses the film's
critique of the contemporary social formation, as do*the Day in the
Life structure and the film's use of thematisation.
The final group of elements also serves the interests of struc-
tural coherence. Most are used consistently through the film, but
only because they focus on signifiers rather than on character or

narrative elements: rhythmic climax and balances, and marking.
Anchor shots likewise focus on signifiers, though they find no
equivalent in dominant cinematic forms.
» Not unlike dominant cinematic forms - whether the tightly-
• scripted plots of classic Hollywood or direct cinema's ' crisis
[ structure ' — Man with a Movie Camera does have an overall cli-
mactic rhythm. But this cumulative rhythm in the film relates only
to signifiers46: the increasing complexity of split screen shots and
superimpositions especially of the tram junction by Moscow's
Trades Union Building (shots 940 and 1440, stills 11 and 2) and
the increasing frequency through the film of its montage crescendos, \
themselves mathematically structured towards 'their single-frame \
climaxes: the ' eye-vertigo' segment (shots 457-532), that based
on cigarette packeting and switchboard operators (shots 663-91), r
the ' work crescendo' segment (shots 790-927), the music-making
segment (shots 1287-1399) and the final crescendo, almost all of ,
whose shots are speeded up (shots 1509-1715). Significantly, several ,
of these crescendos are built on the two forms of vision the film I
seeks to counterpose — the human eye and the camera eye — just f
as many of the film's ' diegetic ' spaces mentioned above are struc- j
tured on alternations between seer and seen. \
Within this overall framework of increasing complexity, there j
are, moreover, rhythmic balances: the film's own equivalent of ;
the calm-before-the-storm patterning of most genres of adventure
film. All the film's montage crescendos except that of music-
making are prepared for by an accelerating rhythm in the pre-
ceding shots, for example the speeded-up and tilted shots anti-
cipating the ' eye-vertigo ' segment. Further, there is a rhythmic
balance between fast and slow-moving sets of images. Thus the
' eye-vertigo ' segment is followed by that showing the ambulance
and the fire engines being called out (shots 533-72). There is a
similar rhythmic balance between segments largely soldering
6nonciation onto enonce and segments exposing the friction be-
tween the two: the relative diegetic coherence of the marriage
and divorce segments followed by the interweaving of wedding,
death and birth, the last culminating in the shots of the Man with
the Camera filming stills (shots 389-433). This is in turn followed
by the complex transitional segment, based particularly on
the two Moscow junctions, which introduces the ' eye-vertigo '
segment. Lastly, longer shots in the Waking and Leisure Sections
of the film correspond to the stillness and relaxation they show,
while faster-moving shots occur largely in the Work Section and
Coda.
Man with a Movie Camera adopts a form of marking, which is,
however, invariably non-anthropocentric, for instance the reintro-
duction of the dappled horse only two shots before it is freeze-
framed (shots 328-330) and of the camera over the street prepara-
tory to its being zip-panned through 180° for a specific meta-

phorical reading between the marriage and the divorce segments
(shots 388-92 and 400). Vital qualifications here are that such
marking is never guaranteed and is far more often withheld than
offered. There is, however, one form of marking which is used
consistently throughout the film: marking preparatory to transi-
tions to a new segment or part of a segment. At the level of
minutiae, this can take the form of the lengthening or shortening
of a shot by a single frame in a montage crescendo where only
such a level of variation is possible: equivalent in fact to Eisen-
stein's ' metric montage'. On a larger scale, it usually entails
the disruption of an established pattern of shots by unexpected
shots, such as those of the high-jumper interpolated .towards the
end of the motorbike/carousel segment (shots 1188-99). Unlike
the interpenetrating montage fragments of October, these transi-
tion markers rarely specify the content of the subsequent segment,
Vertov's film focussing on signifiers rather than on any diegesis.
Finally, Man with a Movie Camera gives structural coherence to
its material by the use of anchor shots. The function of these is
clearest in some of the film's montage crescendos: the eye in the
• eye-vertigo ' segment (shots 457-532) or the Man with the Camera
recurring as a constant term through almost all of the ' work
crescendo' segment (shots 790-927). Anchor shots are used else-
where in segments of otherwise seemingly disparate shots: the
recurrence of one particular street junction (shots 225, 234 and
249) through a complexly interwoven series of shots including the
Man with the Camera climbing the factory chimney, a boilerman
stoking, factory machinery- set to work, a Moscow boulevard and
the poster of The Awakening of a Woman.
Man with a Movie Camera's structure, then, is indeterminate but
also highly organised. Its promotion of the paradigmatic over the
syntagmatic, especially through its refusal of the determinations
of diegetic coherence and of character and narrative elements,
facilitates what is probably the cinema's most extensive and
radical investigation of its own signifying processes.
Also released is an extraordinary range of signifying forms. A
clear index of this is the range based on the film's chief montage
principle, alternating montage. Metz's taxonomy of the syntagmatic
32 units of the classic narrative film, the ' Grande Syntagmatique \ 4 7
allows only two forms: the parallel syntagm and the alternating
syntagm. Even a provisional inventory of forms of alternating
montage in Man with a Movie Camera extends far beyond this.
Alternating montage can signify simultaneity of actions (Metz's
' alternating syntagm'): the Man with the Camera walking to the
Lenin Club/the proprietress of the alcohol store looking at him
(shots 1265-70). Very occasionally, it can indicate simultaneity of
actions building towards narrative climax (the ' alternating syn-
tagm ' again): the speeding ambulance/the injured man (shots
540-7). Conversely, it can make nonsense of assumptions of
simultaneity: the Man with the Camera filming train and traps

'simultaneously' (shots 313-20). Recurrently through the film, it
serves to contrast significant details: the intercutting of an abacus
and a cash register with machine work (shots 632-5), an example
to be examined in Part IIB. Another form is parellelism: the film's
frequent assimilation of the processes of filming and editing to
the labour process in general. Or again, antithesis (Metz's ' parallel
syntagm '): the new bourgeoisie being made up, shampooed, shaved
etc versus workers constructing walls and washing curtains in a tub
(shots 579-93). Lastly, one image series can be used to diffuse
involvement with the other: the childbirth/the Man with the
Camera filming stills (shots 426-38). These varjous forms of alter-
nating montage, of course, constantly intersect with relatively
continuously ordered segments or shot series, such as those of
wedding and divorce (shots 389-417), mining (shots 730-6) or
foundry work (shots 741-53).
The film's range of signifying forms can be further illustrated by
two specific examples, both adopting alternating montage, both
from the Coda and both acting as comments on cinematic forms.
The first example is the segment of the self-demonstrating camera
which opens the Coda (shots 1400-20). This begins with a shot of
the cinema auditorium. Alternating montage then interweaves
members of the audience with the camera and tripod which are
stop-framed so as to show off their technical range. On this level
the segment suggests the limitless capacities of the camera. But
camera and tripod are filmed from differing angles as if correspond-
ing to the differing angles of view on a theatrical presentation —
no screen is ever seen - and the segment is followed by the
whirling patterns of light mentioned above which can be read as
' erasure ' and which introduce the film's first series of' oscillation '
shots (shots 1421-3). This emphatic reassertion of the cinema is
given added force by a segment intercutting members of the
audience with split screen shots, a further assertion of the poten-
tial of cinematic forms. Overall, then, the self-demonstration of the
camera can be read as a critique of a naive, Constructivist/
technicist adulation of the camera apparatus. The outstanding
example is the series of four shots prefacing the final montage |
crescendo (shots 1509-12). The second and fourth of these shots 33
show a speeded-up pendulum oscillating fast back and forth. These
can be read as meaning * imminently'. The first shot uses super-
imposition in differing scales to show the Man with the Camera
towering over a street crammed with tiny people, and gradually
panning his camera round towards the camera through which we
see him. The third is the celebrated shot (still 1) of the. Bolshoi
collapsing into itself. Taken together, the four shots can be read
as proclaiming the imminent death of ' acted cinema': a pro-
nouncement with grave historical irony given the subsequent
course of Soviet cinema.
Two further aspects of the film's invocation of the paradigmatic

remain to be examined: recontextualisation and multiple-meaning
(polysemia). Recontextualisation is achieved by repeating the same
shot in different montage contexts, which confer different mean-
ings upon it. It exemplifies par excellence the film's capacity to I
counter assumptions of fixed meanings for specific signifiers. The
film's refusal of any dominant diegesis enables it to exploit recon-
textualisation far more extensively than, say, the statuary and
Napoleon statuette of October or the reprises of bicycle wheels
and of the eviction in Kuhle Wampe. Recontextualisation can thus
set up a complex pattern of memories working across the film.
Appropriately, several examples focus on the Film Construction
Process. The children which the segment with the magician recon-
texualises from the first editing segment have already been referred
to. The Coda likewise recontextualises shots which have already
been shown in various of their previous stages before reaching
the screen: the shots of the new-bourgeois groups leaving the
station, the freeze-framing of some of them preparatory to the
first editing segment and finally the screening of some of them and
of continuation shots of them (shots 309-30, 330-71 and 1515-53),
or the set-up for the engine wheels of the train leaving the station,
shots of the wheels and then the screening of continuation shots
from these (shots 302, 313-7 and 1459-60). Other examples in-
clude the differing uses of vertically split screen shots whose two
halves show streets tilted up towards each other, the camera
moving forward through .both halves (shots 301 and 414). First
used as a transitional shot, on the second occasion this is inserted
into the divorce segment where it assumes the specific meta-
phorical meaning of' split paths in life '. Another example is based
on the shot of a man showing a javelin left to right across the
screen. This is first used as a critique of ballet, the javelin about
to spear across a cut, the head of a dancer vainly bouncing up
and down on the spot (shots 1313-4). When repeated, the shots
form the basis of the joke of the goal-keeper about to save a . . .
goal (shots 1333-4)-
Polysemia is a crucial aspect of the film's project of not fixing »
signifiers, and clearly neither limited to recontextualisation nor
34 simply a function of the film's necessary ambiguity mentioned
in Part I. One instance is the shots of the train intercut with the
shots of the Waking Woman (shots 150-6). As she wakes, camera
pans and tilts send the fast-passing train into vertiginous swirls.
The intercutting here might be read in various ways: on a literalist
level, the woman being woken by the passing train, or possibly
waking from a nightmare, or more probably the dis.orientation of
waking up. The subsequent intercutting - shots of the Waking
Woman getting out of bed and a spedded-up shot of railway tracks
filmed from a downward-angled camera mounted on the front of
a train - could be construed variously as indicating the bewilder-
ment of adjustment to waking life, the urgency of getting up or

the restrictions which waking (and working?) life impose on the
individual, particularly the blinkered life of someone of her class
position (this will be picked up later). The film's open-ended
j structure neither dictates a single reading nor proposes indiscrimin-
ate choices within a range of possible readings, but rather directs
the spectator towards readings promoting ideological awareness.
IIB The Film's Theoretical Reconstruction of the Contemporary

Social Formation
Man with a Movie Camera itself gives four indicators of its concern
with the Soviet social formation as related to urban and industrial
development in the late 1920s. First, there is its marked geo-
graphical pluralism, different parts of the film having been shot
in — at least - Moscow, Odessa and Kiev. The film's refusal to
define its locale as that of any specific Soviet city supports the
idea of a generalised reading: not so much a city film, more the
analysis of a way of life. Second, the film eschews aerial shots.
This absence would be extraordinary in a film both made in the
period of the development of aerial photography and so seemingly
concerned with exploring the possibilities of the camera etc - the
shots of the Man with the Camera with a photogun a la Marey
intercut with shots of biplanes (shots 1435-9) may be an oblique
comment on this — were there not more important considerations:
first, the creation of a composite Soviet city, and second, the
commitment to avoid reducing this object of analysis to a given
aggregate susceptible of instant untheorised comprehension like the
concept of population elaborated by the classical political econo-
mists whom Marx attacks in the 1857 Introduction.48 Third, the
focus on urban rather than rural is marked by the fact that only
one shot in the film shows any countryside, and then in no detail
(shot 298). Lastly, a multitude of references - to NEP, to industrial-
isation etc - place the film's analysis as contemporary.
It should be noted initially that the film shows labour in none 35 •
of the three ways familiar in capitalist societies. It is never seen \
as a drudge, as in, say, Saturday 'Night and Sunday Morning (both
novel and film), in Vidor's The Crowd or, for that matter, in the
later novels of Dickens. Nor is labour presented in terms of indi-
vidual creativity, as in the harking back of Morris — reputedly the
first Briton to read Capital — to eighteenth-century village industry,
a myth perpetuated in such films as Flaherty's 1931 Industrial
Britain. Nor, finally, is labour mystified as ennobling, as in many
other Grierson-produced documentaries. In marked contrast, Man
with a Movie Camera shows labour as a process of transformation:

from cotton bobbins being reeled to sewing, from the folding of
cigarette packets through the packeting of cigarettes into them
to seals being glued onto the packets. And the interconnectedness
of different kinds of work is also stressed: mines and dams power-
ing factories. The film concentrates on the process of work itself,
not on the individuals performing it. The only individual worker
singled out to any extent is the woman who folds cigarette packets.
The montage's recurrent assimilation of the filming and editing
processes to other forms of labour stands as a clear counterblast
to the aesthetic position of a Lukacs, conceiving art as a privileged
terrain somehow standing outside the relations of production. As
Svilova diligently works on editing, the Man with the Camera
ceaselessly scurries about during the working day looking for
set-ups, capering over bridges, having to retire before the scorching
sparks of a foundry, chasing after fire engines and ambulance,
and so on.
The theoretical reconstruction of cinematic forms analysed above
serves specifically to deny the possibility of unquestioning, ideo- \
logically determined acceptance of the contemporary social forma- J
tion presented in the film. Again, the key determinant here is the
primacy of the paradigmatic over the syntagmatic. The extra-
ordinary range of signifying forms thus released — especially of
montage combination between both consecutive and widely dis-
persed shots - is invaluable for the film's theoretical reconstruction
of the contemporary social formation. Here too, the paradigmatic
is essential, for postulating alternatives to the forms of the existing |
order.
In his ' scenario ' for Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov himself
outlines the terms of this aspect of the film's work, stressing the
importance of ' the struggle of the old with the new . . . of the
Revolution with the counter-revolution . . . of the co-operative with
the exploiting individual, of the dub with the bar, of physical
culture with depravity' as essential features of * the struggle
against the lack of confidence in the building of socialism in the
USSR. The camera witnesses the huge battle between the world of
capitalists, speculators, factory-owners and bankers and the world
of workers, peasants and colonial slaves.'49
36 This sets up a paradigmatic framework capable of exposing the
contradictions inherent in the contemporary social formation. This
framework allows for choices and substitutions to be made between
abstractions derived from the forms of social relations engendered
by an increasingly capitalist mode of production. The film focusses
on the major contradiction here: that between labour and capital.
. The critique of the contemporary social formation -is developed
•j through a set of oppositions which counterpose lack/excess, pro-
ductivity/non-productivity, health/depravity and education/
mystification. Through the continual juxtaposition of the social
practices equated with class divisions, the film points up the

incongruities and mystifications involved in these practices.
Whereas its satire on NEP and on alcoholism is congruent with the
Party line, the film's critique of existing relations of production
transgresses this line in its references to contradictions which
i those stated policies elide.
A touchstone throughout this critique is Vertov's polemic for a
Kino-Eye montage of actualities as against ' acted cinema' and
related artistic practices designed for bourgeois consumption such
as theatre and ballet. This is a crucial aspect of the ideological
' struggle entailed in the education/mystification opposition. Thus
shots of the Bolshoi function as a kind of banner introducing both
the film's segments showing NEP-type consumer goods (shots 94
and 284), while the death-knell of the Bolshoi described above
is carried through to the film's very last reprise of the new bour-
geois groups leaving the station. Vertov's bracketing together of
' acted cinema' and the new bourgeoisie extends to the juxta-
position of the Induction and the Waking Section. The relatively
' inactive cinematic consumption implied by the diegetic coherence
of the first is thus paralleled with the consumer ethic exemplified
in the second by the Waking Woman and the segments of luxury
goods intended for NEP people. The Waking Woman's occupation
is never made clear, but her class position is defined not only by
( her room(s) and her wearing styled lingerie (hence the montage's
stress on her bra and slip), but also by the intercutting of her
sleeping figure with the first shot of the poster for the ' fictional
drama ' film, The Awakening of a Woman, and with Perov's realist
painting, The Fishermen (shots 74 and 72). It is in this class
context that the railway track shot mentioned earlier takes on the
N
signification of a ' blinkered path in life'. Likewise, the rhyming
of the Waking Woman's morning blinking with the opening and
closing Venetian blinds - coupled with her non-appearance there-
after in the film - hints at some fundamental incompatibility
\ between her lifestyle and that of many outside the parameters
set up by her room(s).
• The critique of the contemporary social formation is prefaced
by an exposition of the social inequalities proceeding from it. Only
a few shots into Section One of the film, shots of two homeless
people, a man and a boy in tatters, are interleaved with a litter 37
bin inscribed with the words ' Please Put Your Litter Here ' (shots
79-82). The transferral of the sleep motif in alternating montage
from the Waking Woman asleep in comfortable bed to these home-
less people contrasts the two classes. Her silky stockings contrast
with the functional woollen stockings of a homeless woman sleep-
ing on a bench who appears to be woken by the camera, the
distinction underlined by the camera focussing on her legs (shots
218-22).
All four sets of oppositions mentioned above inform the film's
satire on NEP. The inclusion of alternative possibilities makes this

satire more constructively critical than that of, say, Ilf and Petrov's
novels, which barely attain even a moralistic distance from their
object, and on the face of it, more politically optimistic than
Mayakovsky's The Bedbug, which is overtly sceptical about the new
order.
The fundamental opposition of productivity/non-productivity |
emerges most sharply in The Day's Work Section of the film. The
non-productive new-bourgeois groups leaving the station at the
end of The Day and Work Begins Section can find no place in The
Day's Work Section beyond three shots showing them disappear-
ing for the day into friends' homes (shots 373, 375 and 377).
Significantly, it is the editing segment bridging these two sections
which freezes their postures of supercilious indifference and phases
them out of the film. The only other appearance of the new bour-
geoisie in The Day's Work Section places them unequivocally in
the context of being serviced by others: the hairwashing, shaving, ,
manicuring etc set against the workers constructing walls, wash-
ing curtains etc (shots 576-603).
The film sets up a manifest contrast - partly through the use
of concealed or visible camera — between the apparent vanity and 1
self-consciousness of the new bourgeoisie and . the ' natural' '
response of the proletariat before the camera, notably the post-
Revolutionary orphan who scratches his armpit on being awoken,
seemingly, by being filmed (shots 167-74). The same vanity marks
the ' weightwatchers ' (shots 1069-72 and 1097-1114). The second
of these segments immediately follows that of the magician. Coun-
terposing the excess consumption of the ' weightwatchers ' is the
physical culture which was promoted at the time and which is
used to satirise it. The ' weightwatchers ' are intercut, for instance,
with shotputters whose aim seems, across the cuts, to be directed
at the formers' heads. Ballerinas and dancers are assimilated into
this critique as with the javelin ' directed' at the dancer vainly
bouncing up and down. A woman with an expression of virtuous
self-indulgence is seen unaccountably jogging up and down -
before a shot reveals her foot in the stirrup of a horse simulator.
The excess satirised here finds its corollary in the inessential
consumer goods spawned by NEP and designed for the new bour-
38 geoisie: wigs and rings, a stuffed dog and models of sewing-
T
machine and bicycle, the last advertised as being available on hire- j
purchase terms (shots 95-109). The reappearance of model sewing- f
machine and bicycle is prefaced by a pointed historical reference J.
to the necessary compromise of NEP: shots of a shop sign adver-
tising trips on the steamboat Lenin and of a demonstration with
the banner ' Welcome New Leaders' (shots 282-3). "The bicycle
is this time being ridden by a mannequin in a futuristic leisure
outfit and is contrasted with a postman using his workaday trike-
cart on his rounds. And the now-activated model sewing-machine
echoes and counterpoints the real sewing-machines used elsewhere
in the film by workers for production (eg shots 250 and 618-25).

The folly of accepting such social excrescences as well as the
capacity of the film's Kino-Eye montage to expose them are pointed
up in a sequence of two shots following the model sewing-
machine: a shutter raised on a window to reveal a notice for
' Pince-nez' and the elaborate enonciation shot involving a mirror
swivelled through 150° which en route reflects the Man with the
Camera cranking the camera.
i Like theatre, luxury consumer goods trade on false impressions.
Contrasted with, for instance, the perfunctory hair-combing of the
women leaving work (shots 969-70) is the satire's constant return
to cosmetics, manicuring etc, an industry whose targets are
women (shots 576-97, 600-9 and 694-8). The last of these seg-
ments has the sharpest critique of this industry. Women's faces
being made up are interwoven with payment at a cash register,
the last shot of which is followed by a fleeting six-frame glimpse
of a pistol being raised in the direction of the cash register.
Man with a Movie Camera's critique of alcoholism is in line
with contemporary campaigns, as witness the 1929 film For Your
Health. Just as the health/depravity opposition affords the posi-
tive base for the film's satire on the ' weightwatchers', so the
critique of alcoholism in the Leisure Section is based on the
education/mystification opposition, the counterposing of Com-
munist clubs with alcohol drinking, Vertov's ' struggle of the club
with the bar'. Man with a Movie Camera backs up these terms
with its own promotion of Kino-Eye documentary as against' acted
cinema'. The series of segments involved (shots 1202-86) almost
dramatise the Man with the Camera as an emblem of the Kino-
Eye's ideological function: ' to help . . . the proletariat . . . to see
clearly in the living phenomena surrounding us \ 50 After a pan
showing an exotic poster for a film called Manuela playing, with
bitter irony for Vertov's campaign, at a proletarian cinema, the
Kino-Eye's power is emphatically reasserted with the first shot
since the Egressio using superimposition in different scales, here
showing the Man with the Camera towering over the city. But only
three shots into the subsequent beer-hall segment he is reduced to
having to climb out of a beer glass. At the end of the segment,
vertiginous drunken pans associate alcohol with religion — en route 39
we see a church spire and a shop selling icons and candles — before
steadying up in front of the Odessa Railway Workers' Club, where
people read and play draughts and chess. The capacity of the film
to order its material through editing is reasserted in the next but
one segment, showing the woman seemingly shooting away beer
bottles. The Man with the Camera is then seen walking aw"ay from
the alcohol store into a Lenin Club, where workers listen to the
radio and play chess and draughts.
The political situation outlined in Part I clearly imposed severe \
restrictions on any artistic practice seeking to deal with the con- |

temporary social formation. Production conditions made this
especially true for cinema. Historical material was evidently safer,
as witness the spate of such films in 1928-9, including October,
Fall of the Romanov Dynasty and The New Babylon, and indeed,
the re-titling of The General Line as The Old and the New. If
satire on NEP and on alcoholism was more than condoned, critiques
logically developing from the former into an analysis of the rela-
tions of production and of the new bureaucracy were actively dis-
couraged. Hence Man with a Movie Camera's relative inexplicit-
ness about this part of its project. One obvious symptom of the •
pressures against any explicit statement of such a critique is the .
absence of any clarification of the labour/ownership relations
governing the work shown in the film.
This said, some portions of the film's Work Section neverthe-
less counterpose the productive processes of industry as either ^
labour or capital-intensive. The principal example starts from the
seemingly unequivocal celebration of the efficiency of machine-
sewing contrasted with the tedium and inefficiency of sewing by
hand (shots 618-23 and 610-14) in segments analysed in Part III.
But the assurance of this celebration is undercut both by the con-
temporary situation of the textile industry and by the subsequent
segments of the film. As an essential basic consumer industry, the
textile industry should ideally have been taken over by the state,
but any such attempt was abandoned with the abolition of Glav-
textil in 1927. This left it even more susceptible than previously
to the production of luxury fabrics and garments for members of
the new bourgeoisie such as the Waking Woman or those leaving
the station (hence the late 1920's adoption of silk stockings as a
cultural emblem of the new bourgeoisie, as in Romanov's A Pair
of Silk Stockings and Eisenstein's 'Notes for a Film of Capital').
This problem was compounded by the 192S crisis of State over-
production of textile machinery which exacerbated the unemploy-
ment situation.
The critique of capital-intensive productive processes arising here !
is expanded in the film's subsequent five segments (shots 632-98)
in terms of the class beneficiaries of mechanisation. Paradigms are .
set up between manual and mechanised labour, and between the '
40 j needs of the proletariat and of the automated, communications-
dependent orientations of a modem industrial society. A shot of
machine-folded newspapers slithering off the press immediately
precedes the segment showing the woman mentioned earlier fold-
ing packaging paper around a wooden stump and then throwing
the packets over her shoulder for filling with cigarettes. The seg-
ment is framed by shots of a machine shunting boxes — themselves
apparently machine-made - with the label ' Password' and the
size of chocolate or cigar boxes. The subsequent montage
[ crescendo is structured on the antithesis: filling cigarette packets/
operating a switchboard. There follows a shot of typing and the
cosmetics/cash register montage referred to earlier. The con-

Jgruence between machine-made and new bourgeoisie on the one
i hand, and between manually made and proletariat on the other
; extends the critique of capital-intensive development. In the shots
of the smiling cigarette packet folder, as of the sewing machinist
before, this critique encompasses the illusory contentment offered
to the worker by machinery. These five segments have echoes else-
where through the film: the felt boots of mineworkers which side-
step the camera (shot 261), the homeless of the Waking Section
who are doubtless unemployed, the bewildered-looking mechanic
framed by an array of cogs which seem to overwhelm him (shot
253), the rhyming of water swirling over the brink of a (man-made)
dam with printing rollers which it thus appears to be powering j
(shots 771-2), the compositional highlighting which links two j
women machine-winding cable with the cable of a traffic signal, j
controlled by a policeman, in the following shot (shots 630-1). The j
prefacing of these five segments by shots of an abacus with a near- I
by notice enjoining us to ' Keep Silent, Please ' (to what, or whose i
ends?) and of a cash register — emblems, respectively, of the old i
and the new — hints at the development of the later 1920's as a i
falling away from revolutionary ideals. The critique culminates in I
the shot of the pistol being raised, across a cut, on the cash j
register. I
; Many transitional shots extend this critique to State function- j
;
aries. The recurrent transitional shots featuring policemen using
signals to direct traffic at road junctions (eg shots 127, 934 and
936, stills 4, 8 and 9) have an obvious enough symbolic value,
underscored by such montage series as that meshing a woman
(apparently a bureaucrat) speaking on an office phone with a police-
man at a crossing signal, the series framed by shots taken from
the Bolshoi (shots 381-6). Other transitional shots often show
trams at the Petrovka Street and Trades Union Building junctions
in Moscow (eg, respectively, shots 938 and 940, stills 10 and 11).
Like the junctions with traffic signals these are always filmed with
a static camera concentrating on continuous and controlled move- ]
ment without any visible destination, seemingly condemned to a I
futile circularity. Other movements in the film reinforce this idea: '
the speedway/carousel segment where motion is both circular and 41
circumscribed (shots 1162-99) and the railway track shot men-
tioned above as being associated with the Waking Woman's class
position. Indeed, the film's only(?) two series of actions which are
closed both involve rails: the Man with the Camera returning
across the railway tracks after filming the train (shots 140-59)
and the train arriving at and leaving the station (shots 305-19).
Trains speeding nowhere recur as transitional shots in the Coda,
where there is also a segment intercutting members of the audience
with shots of various forms of road transport moving in almost
identical semi-circular arcs (shots 1466-1504).

Through its use of the paradigmatic, then, Man with a Movie
Camera is able to set up particular referents, moving between them
so as to construct a critique based upon a synthesis of the spec-
tator's consciousness and the ideas presented by the film. The
film, as stimulus, thus engages in catalysing a dialectical process.
By using the above-mentioned sets of oppositions as the base for
an (acceptable) satire on NEP and on alcoholism, the film is able
to extend this into a more thorough-going critique of the social
formation and of the relations of production it engenders. What is
therefore achieved in Man with a Movie Camera is a realisation of
a politicised, self-conscious cinema in accordance with Vertov's
materialist theory of film.
Ill Diachronic Analysis of Shots 576-630
This part of the film follows the segment of ambulance and fire
, engines, and precedes the segments analysed above as a critique of
j the existing relations of production. Its relative unity as a group
of segments is suggested by its being framed by similar transitional
shots of a traffic junction. Its six segments are:
1 Worked for/working (shots 576-99, stills 13-23 for shots 589-
99)-
2 Haircutting and maniCuring/cutting and splicing film (shots
600-9).
3 Sewing by hand (shots 610-14).
4 A transitional segment: filming as work (shots 615-7, still 24
for shot 615).
5 Sewing by machine (shots 618-23).
6 Identifying film rushes/winding by machine (shots 624-30).
The following shot breakdown lists shot number in the film, its
length in frames, shot scale and the action shown. All shots are
filmed from a static camera position except for the last. Camera
angles at no point set up any consistent system; the few significant
variations will be detailed as relevant in the analysis..
42 Table
Shot Length Shot Action
number in scale
frames
Shot Length Shot Action
number in scale
frames
Segment 1:
576 46 MCU A well-groomed woman wearing a white
turban sits at a table and looks blankly
ahead.

577 57 CU A woman has mascara put on her right eye-
lash.
578 27 MCU The woman of 576 puts her hand to her
forehead, then smiles awkwardly as if (?)
surprised by the camera.
579 42 CU The woman of 577 smiles as her right eye-
brow is made up.
580 169 MCU A woman wearing coarse working clothes
bends down out of frame, scoops up hand-
fuls of mud-like substance and throws them
onto a substructure (possibly wall-building).
581 41 CU The woman of 577 smiles as her left eye-
brow is made up and her right eyebrow
retouched.
582 92 MCU The woman of 580 looks at the camera
whilst still working and then looks back
towards the substructure.
583 40 CU The woman of 577 has surplus eyebrow
make-up wiped off with cotton wool.
584 73 MCU The woman of 580 smiles for a long time
at the camera then turns back towards the
substructure and recommences work.
585 38 CU A woman has her hair shampooed.
586 81 MCU The hands of a woman plunge lace curtains
in and out of a wash-tub.
587 81 CU The woman of 585 continues to have her
hair shampooed, smiling and nodding in
conversation.
588 80 MCU The hands of 586 continue to wash the
curtains.
589 77 CU , The woman of 585 has her hair rinsed.
(Still 13)
590 78 MCU The hands of 586 now wring the curtains.
(Still 14)
591 55 CU A man with a chin beard and moustache has
(Still 15) his right cheek lathered for a shave.
592 54 CU A hand strops a razor.
(Still 16)
593 83 CU The man of 591 has his right cheek shaved.
(Still 17)
594 76 CU Hands hone an axe on a grindstone.
(Still 18)
595 80 . CU The woman of 585 has her hair blow-dried
(Still 19) and smiles, hairdresser wearing a bow-tie
is now visible behind her.
596 30 CU A hand cranks a camera.

(Still 20)
597 S3 cu The woman of 585 continues to have her
(Still 21) hair blow-dried.
598 106 CU A camera, being cranked by the Man with
(Still 22) the Camera, films itself in a mirror headed
' Specialist Shoeshiner from Paris '.
599 107 cu A shoeshiner's hands brush a man's shoe
(StilS 23) (speeded-up motion).
44
F
22

Segment 2:
600 67 CV Hands comb and cut hair of head seen from
behind.
603 51 MCU The head of 600 is revealed to be that of a
woman, In addition to the hands of the
hairdresser, a smiling manicurist is now
revealed as working on the woman's left
hand.
602 51 CU The woman, seen from behind as in 600, has
her hair cut.
603 79 MCU The manicurist of 601 shapes a finger-nail
on the woman's left hand. The hairdresser
is no longer visible.
604 76 CV Hands cut with a sharp knife between
frames of a fiimstrip held over the light-
box of an editing table.
605 55 MCU The manicurist, shown as in 603, pushes
back cuticles of the woman's fingers.
606 38 ECU The hands of 604 place film in a splicer.
607 25 ECU A hand from 604 dips a brush into a small
bottle of editing cement.
608 42 ECU The splicer of 606. The brush paints cement
onto the edge of the film. The hand clamps
down the splicer lever onto the pieces of
film.
609 54 MCU The manicurist, shown as in 603, cuts the
woman's finger-nail.
Segment 3: 45
610 28 MCU A glum-faced woman is about to thread a
needle.
611 20 CU The face of the woman of 610.
612 55 MCU The woman pulls the cotton through the
needle and picks up material from her lap.
613 19 CU Her face looks down.
614 76 MCU The woman tacks a hem.
Segment 4:
615 27 ECU Crab-like hands and arms cranking a camera
(Still 24) are reflected in a convex lens, the lens sur-
round itself showing its writing to be
reversed.

616 6 CU A hand cranks a camera of the same type
as is shown in 596.
617 21 ECU As 615.
Segment 5:
618 27 CU A woman smiles as she works at a sewing-
machine.
619 40 CU Hands set material in place on a sewing-
machine.
620 29 CU Fly-wheel of a sewing machine, steadied by
a hand.
621 28 CU The hands of 619 feed the material through
the sewing-machine.
622 39 CU The woman of 618 smiles as she works at
the sewing-machine.
623 47 CU The hands of 619 continue to feed the
material through the sewing-machine.
Segment 6:
624 55 CU A filmstrip whizzes over a lightbox and is
brought to a halt.
625 84 CU A woman at a sewing-machine steadies
wheel, bends back, bends forward, then
steadies wheel again.
626 88 MCU Svilova, the editor of Man with a Movie
Camera, takes a reel of film from one of
the racks in front of her and inspects it.
627 43 ECU The hands of 604, now recognisable as
Svilova's, note a number on a slip of paper.
A smiling woman wearing a headscarf
628 109 MCU controls a machine-wound drum of fine-
gauge cable.
Svilova, seen as in 626 in front of the racks
629 50 MCU of film, places a slip of paper into a reel of
film and leans forwards towards the racks.
The camera pans back and forth five times
630 180 MCU between the woman of 628 and a woman
opposite her engaged in the same work,
then tilts down to the cable-drum and the
belts driving it.
Figure 1 :
Shot •
576 577 578 579 580 581 582 583 584 585 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598 599
Turbanncd
Woman 46 ' 27
Make-up 51 42 41 40
Working
Woman . . . 169 92 73
Shampooing 38 81 77 80 83
Washing 81 80 78
Shaving 55 83
Razor-
Stropping 54
Axo-honing
Cranking
Camera 30
Camera
Filming
Itsell" 106
Shoeshining 107

The ensuing analysis aims to illustrate the sequential operation 47
and interaction of features outlined in the foregoing synchronic
analysis. It therefore takes account of the interaction of the film's
work on cinematic forms with its work on the contemporary social \
formation. It focusses particularly on the way in which the film's
dominant structural principle, the ceaseless displacement of one \
' system' by the next, serves the development of conceptual argu-
ment. The diagrams heading the discussion of each segment show
the patterning of different actions within each. Numbers within
the diagrams give shot-length in frames.

Segment 1
(see Figure 1, opposite)
The first segment's alternating montage serves, first, to separate

out different diegetic spaces and second, to set up an antithesis
between worked for and worker. The first pattern is broken only
by the razor of 592, which can be read as belonging to the same
diegetic space as the man of 591 and 593. Once established with
579-80, the second is carried through consistently to the end of
the segment, the length of 580 serving as an emphatic assertion
of the proletariat after four successive shots of the new'bourgeoisie.
The regularity of this pattern of class-based antithesis set in
different diegetic spaces is reinforced by the allocation of three
shots to each of the figures involved: the woman having her eyes
made up/the woman involved in construction, the woman having
her hair shampooed/the woman washing curtains (stills 13-14
show the last two shots (589 and 590) of this regular patterning).
The pattern is established to be undermined (stills. 15-23 of shots
591-99 illustrate this development). For 591-3 (stills 15-17) could
be read as occupying the same diegetic space, while the worked
for/worker antithesis is maintained. The shot of the razor being
stropped (still 16) not only disrupts the diegetic separation pattern,
it is also the segment's first shot to foreground an object to such
an extent. In both respects, it functions as a kind of transition
marker preparatory to the extraordinary shot of an axe being honed
(still 18). This shot not only disrupts the temporary respite of
diegetic coherence; more, it is a remarkable invocation of the para-
digmatic at the level of the signified. The film's montage poses
the question directly: either one serves the new bourgeoisie (the
razor), or one works to eliminate them (the axe followed by the
exposed neck of the woman luxuriating in the sensation of having
her hair blow-dried: still 19). The work proposed here is in the
first place ideological, this being the point of using the axe shot
as a transition marker for the introduction of the camera two shots
later: the camera, via editing, as ideological weapon against the
48 ruling class. Rhymed with the circular movement of the blow-drier,
the hand cranking the camera (still 20) stands as the segment's
first phasing-in of the Film Construction Process. As throughout
the film, filming is designated as labour, here assimilated to it
through the ongoing worked for/worker antithesis. After the final
appearance of the woman having her hair blow-dried (still 21), the
camera is seen filming itself in a mirror headed ' Specialist Shoe-
shiner from Paris ' (still 22). The joke linking this with the sub-
sequent shot of shoeshining (still 23) is the transition marker for
the end of the segment.

Segment 2
Figure 2
Shot
600 601 602 603 604 605 606 607 608 609
Haircutting 67 51
Haircutting and
Manicuring 51
Manicuring 79 55 54
Cutting and
Splicing 76 38 25 42
This segment phases out the worked for/worker antithesis for a

parallelism through alternating montage. It therefore opens with
a modified form of the dual antithesis structuring the previous
segment. For while 600 and 602 centre on the person worked for
and 601 and 603 show those working - first both hairdresser and
manicurist, and then just the manicurist — these four shots repre-
sent a coherent diegetic space. 601 thus serves as a delayed master
shot answering the questions raised by the play with framing in
600: What is happening here? Who is having this done for him/her?
Worked for and worker in these shots are therefore separated only
by framing within a coherent diegetic space. 603 introduces a
double shift: from antithesis to parallelism of activities, and from
diegetic coherence to the separation of diegetic spaces. The alter-
nation established in 603-9 between the manicurist and the editor
assimilates editing to other labour processes. But a significant
divergence between their activities emerges in the course of the
segment. Both start from cutting (fingernail/filmstrip). Whereas
the manicurist is doing the same at the end of the segment, how-
ever, the editor has advanced from cutting to splicing film. Editing,
then, can transform and create from its raw material; manicuring
cannot. The point is given ironic emphasis in the shot (607) break-
ing the alternation pattern - and also serving as transition marker
for the end of the segment — which highlights the editor's finger-
nail as she dips the brush into the editing cement.
Segment 3 49
Figure 3
Shot
610 611 612 613 614
Seamstress 28 55 76
Her Face 20 19
This is a segment of extraordinary diegetic coherence for the film,

albeit lasting only five shots. It even opens with a master shot of
the woman glumly and clumsily sewing by hand, probably at home,

and follows eyeline match conventions in the cuts between close-
ups of her face and medium close-ups of her figure. This switching
between face and figure in a way maintains the film's dominant
principle of montage alternation. The segment picks up the film's
many preceding shots of bobbins being reeled, thus suggesting the
interconnectedness of different forms of work. Its transition marker
is barely noticeable, if it qualifies as such anyway: the relative
brevity of 613 contrasted with the increasing lengths of 610, 612
and 614.
Segment 4
Figure 4
Shot
615 616 617
Camera Lens 27 21
Cranking Camera 6
The phasing-in of enonciation in the form of shots of the camera

in this segment clearly breaks any simple involvement the spectator
may have had with the previous segment, thus initiating con-
sideration of a problematic investigated through the six segments.
The ostranenie of 615 (still 24) and 617 depends on such dis-
tortions of visual perception that it is difficult to work out how
the shots could have been constructed. The convex lens reflects
the Man with the Camera filming it, hence the crab-like arms which
are presumably cranking the filming camera. But this is first turned
through 90°, and second superimposed(P) within a shot of a
camera which is already filming itself in a mirror, hence the
reversal of its writing which can be seen to read correctly else-
where in the film. The six-frame shot of the cranking of the
camera is the segment's transition marker. This transitional seg-
ment sharpens the contrast between the preceding and subsequent
segments showing different forms of sewing, stressing both as
choices within a paradigm.
50 Segment 5
Figure 5
Shot
618 619 620 621 622 623
Seamstress 27 39
Material 40 28 47
Sewing Machine
Fly-wheel 29
In this segment the sewing is done by machine in a factory. The

machinist's smile obviously contrasts with the expression of the
woman sewing by hand, and the speed of her work with the
slowness of that of the woman in Segment 3. Montage alternation
is similarly maintained throughout this segment in the interweaving
of shots of the material on which the seamstress is working with
shots of her and of the sewing-machine flywheel. Again, the diegetic
coherence of the segment enables the spectator to concentrate on
the kind of work which it shows, to the extent even that there
seems to be no transition marker for the next segment. This seg-
ment finds its memory in earlier shots in the film of the model
sewing-machines on display in shop windows for the new bour-
geoisie. This memory combines with that of the sewing by hand
in Segment 3 and thus advances the argument from the antithesis
of worked for/worker of Segment 1. Thus far, the group of seg-
ments under discussion develop the terms of the productivity/
non-productivity and lack/excess paradigms outlined in Part IIB.
Segment 6
Figure 6
Shot
624 625 626 627 628 629 630
Identifying Rushes 55 88 43 50
Machine Winding 84 109 180
At this point the argument is further developed by the introduction

of the opposition labour-intensive/capital-intensive and the para-
digm education/mystification. Segment 6 returns to the diegetic
separation of activities last seen in Segment 2. This formal parallel-
ism establishes an implicit equation between the servicing done
in the first'and the factory work done in this segment. Here the
activities shown are the identification of film rushes and factory
work involving winding by machine. It is the motion of winding
or turning which links the two series: winding on the viewing table
of 624 rhymed with controlling the sewing-machine flywheel of 625
and winding the fine-gauge cable of 628 and 630. The critical
difference between the two series lies in the difference necessary 51
to, and in this film, also generated by editing and, conversely, the
non-reflective nature of factory work in the given social formation. *
When the machinist stops the sewing-machine flywheel, it is only
to direct the material on the correct course. When Svilova stops
the filmstrip, it is to identify it preparatory to reworking the filmed
material, to thinking through its final organisation. This theoretical
reconstruction is what fills the gap between the two aspects of
editing — cutting and splicing — shown in Segment 2. The diver-
gence between editing and the other activities in this segment is
such that the similarities between the two all but disappear after
the first two shots. While the factory workers continue machine-

winding through the segment, the editor takes a reel, numbers it -
this action pointedly breaking the regularity of the alternation
pattern - and thus identifies it. Editing, itself predicated on filming
- another reason for the inclusion of the filming process in Seg-
ment 4 - is far more capable of transforming material than is
sewing. This segment thus extends the argument initiated by the
razor/axe opposition in Segment 1. Not only does its sequence of
shots enact the capacities of editing to diverge from the pheno-
menal world it more often serves merely to reflect, it also exposes
the very processes which such reflection occludes. Moreover, the
establishment of the film's capacity, through editing, to transform
the appearance of the world casts further doubt — already sug-
gested in Segment 4 — on the diegetically coherent representations
of the world adopted in Segments 3 and 5. In terms of Man with
a Movie Camera, these two segments have exceptional diegetic
coherence, focussing considerable attention on their signifieds.
However, the contextualisation of these two segments by Segments
4 and 6 catalyses criticism of their apparent celebration of the
benefits of factory work within the given social formation. This
criticism is amplified in the two ways noted in Part IIB: by
knowledge of the state of the textile industry, and through the
five subsequent segments' extension of the argument into a critique
of relations of production.
Overall, then, the six segments move the spectator from a
straightforward perception-of class differentials, which presumably
in 1929 could have been easily recognised as such, towards an
awareness of the determinations of those differentials and hence
a possible transformation of them. The final shot's links with the
subsequent transitional shot (shot 631) explicitly point to such
connections. After elaborately panning back and forth between
the two machine workers, the camera tilts down to the revolving
cable-drum and to the belt-driven machine (these complex camera
movements, the only ones in all six segments, mark the end of this
one segment and of the whole series). The cable they wind rhymes
with that prominent on the traffic signal in the next shot, and the
belts of their machine with that of the policeman controlling the
52 signal. Beyond a limited range, their machine-aided work, it seems,
benefits not themselves but the social order which directs their
daily actions.
IV Conclusions
This article, then, has attempted to indicate why only a Marxist

theoretical framework can adequately come to terms with Man
with a Movie Camera. Through rigorous theoretical reconstruction
of its objects, the film thwarts attempts to read into it common-

sense ideological constructions, either of forms of cinematic repre-
sentation or of the contemporary social formation. The method
used is an invocation of the paradigmatic. This allows the film
both to set up and to explore the ideological nature of social con-
structions which form a problematic internal and external to
cinema's presentations of everyday life, in other words, of social,
political and economic consciousness. The paradigms set up are
taken to be familiar both to the film-maker and to the spectator.
Ideally, the interaction of the spectator, with his/her cultural
knowledge, and the film's presentation of that knowledge achieve
a synthesis of comprehension enabling the spectator to arrive at
a new consciousness of the status of the knowledge. With its focus
on this interaction between politicised cinema and the viewer's
cultural knowledge, Man with a Movie Camera exposes as ram-
pant stupidity - given their knowledge of Russian - the remark of
Luda and Jean Schnitzer that ' one of the reasons for Man with a
Movie Camera's great success [sic] outside the USSR is precisely
the fact that it is the only [sic] film which a spectator ignorant of
Russian [sic] can see in its complete definitive form '. 5l
From the late 1920's Vertov was all too well aware of the ideo-
logical recuperations to which his films were subjected.52 The film-
maker has very limited control, even at the time, over the pre-
ponderantly non-cinematic discourses determining the reception of
his/her film. Vertov's work in general, and Man with a Movie
Camera in particular, raise acutely the question of the historical
determinants, of the how, when and where of recuperation, prob-
lems which in Screen have sometimes been elided and sometimes
skirted. British recuperations of Soviet cinema - of which a classic
symptom is Manvell's capacity to analyse Battleship Potemkin's
Odessa Steps segment in terms of Pudovkin's theory of montage53
— are far greater blocks to our understanding of Vertov than is the
Soviet editing of his writings. There is material for at least a book
on the ideological recuperation of 1920's Soviet cinema in Britain
alone. No attempt can be made here to specify adequately the
range of determinations involved in the recuperation of Vertov. In
Britain, these have resulted in the non-availability of his films apart
from Man with a Movie Camera, Three Songs for Lenin and the 53
odd number of Kino-Pravda, and the existence of only piecemeal
translations of his writings into English.54 As will be seen below,
there are correspondingly few constructive writings on Vertov. It
is to be hoped that this dismal situation will soon be remedied.
The 1972 Cinethique 15-16 article, ' " Ne Copiez pas sur les
Yeux ", Disait Vertov', includes a very useful reading of* various
Russian and French recuperations of Vertov's work. Both of the
principal recent appropriations of Vertov's work uproot it from all
historical determinations. The first of these is conducted in the
name of realist Truth: Sadoul, for instance, whose Dziga Vertov55

has a chapter entitled ' From Dziga Vertov to Jean Rouch (Cinema-
Verite and Kino-Eye) \ The second is in the name of an avant-
garde formalism: for instance, Vogel's hailing of Man with a Movie
Camera as ' antedating the structuralist [sic] films of our day by
almost half a century '.5S
What characterises all the misreadings of Man with a Movie
Camera is their inability to read the film in toto, unless covering
it with such meaningless blankets as Kracauer's ' lyric docu-
mentary ' . " The few critical attempts at the film which actually
examine it carefully tend to fall apart after considering some twenty
shots or so, because they fail in any way to come to terms with
the film's overriding structural principle, the ceaseless displace- •'
ment of one ' system ' by the next. Michelson's essay on the film,58
which gets closer to it than most, epitomises the difficulties in
which idealist approaches to the film are caught. Her phenomeno-
logical formalism limits her account of the film to segments where
a coherent diegesis can be read in: for instance, the unmatched
shot/reverse-shots of the athletics segments, or the shot of the
Bolshoi which is then ' collapsed' by means of formal devices.
Pervading critical attempts at the film are straightforward errors
testifying to its incompatibility with the structures and processes
of memory: Barnouw's placing of the self-demonstrating camera
segment as the film's finale, to cite just one example.59 Some
critics apparently feel safer avoiding the embarrassment of con-
fronting the film at all: Robinson's World Cinema: A Short History
does not even mention it,'and Barsam's Non-Fiction Film: A Short
History devotes five words to the film - its title - while lavishing
several pages on both Berlin and Rien que les Heures. Throughout
Man with a Movie Camera's critical history, the terms of its dis-
missal have remained remarkably consistent, indices both of the
radical nature of the film's disarticulation of dominant assump-
tions in cinema and of the continuing perpetuation of those
assumptions. Such assumptions, then as now, centre on homo-
geneity. Thus it is an ideology of coherence which recurs con-
tinually through most writings on the film and whose assertion
often unwittingly includes its own negation, the negation on which
it is founded. Thus Abramov, writing in the USSR in 1962, an-
!L
54 nounces the film as ' a serious artistic fiasco ' and describes it as
a ' heterogeneous kaleidoscope '.60 Luda and Jean Schnitzer, whose
book was published in France in 1968, complain that ' the be-
wildered spectator could not follow the infernal cadence of the
film'.01 Grierson's 1931 remarks typify the problems of the British
documentarists' technicist appropriation of Soviet cinema. He
reviles Man with a Movie Camera as 'not a film at all: it is a
snapshot album. There is no story, no dramatic structure and no
special revelation about the Moscow fsic] it has chosen for a
subject \ 62 In 1929, Close-Up complains a la Bazin of the film's
'wilful interference with the raw material ',63 and in 1931 of its
being ' never a rounded work \ 6 4 On the basis of similar assump-

tions accusations of camera trickery and formalism become easy
excuses for failing to come to terms with the film. Even Leyda, in
1930, laments its ' intricate camera pyrotechnics \ 6 5 The 1935
Special Number of The Studio, ' Art in the USSR', describes the
film similarly:' a brilliant display of pyrotechnics, this exposition
of Kino-Eye said little more than that. Vertov as a documentalist
[sic] has still to get to grips with the sociological importance of
his material'. A 1971 Soviet article by Kopalin,' A Life Illuminated
by the Revolution, dedicated to Dziga Vertov's 75 th Anniversary ',
criticises the ' exaggerated importance . . . attached to the cine-
camera itself - the Kino-Eye', and skirts any mention of Man
with a Movie Camera by title, though this does emerge in the
quote from Vertov used as an epigraph.66 Mitry in 1973 illustrates
the tenacity of the assumptions of dominant cinematic forms in
his criticism of the film for showing ' only the tricks of film ', not
the 'grammar \ 6 7 Indeed, the extent of Man with a Movie Camera's
disarticulation of such assumptions has made it less susceptible
to recuperation than Vertov's other films. The tangentiality to the
film of such critical remarks as are cited above leaves it relatively
unscathed and open to more ideologically conscious analyses.
What seems most to trouble such criticism, in fact, seems to be
less the film's absence of character and plot elements than its
simultaneous dismantling of diegetic coherence and retention of
diegetic elements, its refusal simply to accept or simply to reject
diegesis. If this undassifiable hybrid has thwarted film critics, it
also forces a rethinking of work in film theory which normalises
diegesis. One obvious instance is Metz's early ' Grande Syntag-
matique'. Focussing exclusively on the enonce and disavowing
enonciation, it normatises the diegesis of film as the basis for any
cinematic language system (fatigue). Any shot or segment outside
a film's diegesis is thus consigned to the dustbin of the non-
diegetic insert. Mechanistic applications of Jakobson's metaphor/
metonymy distinction to diegesis create similar problems. Through
its theoretical practice Man with a Movie Camera rids metaphor
and metonymy of their. (mis)application to diegesis and returns
them to their proper linguistic foundations, paradigm and syntagm.
Man with a Movie Camera's (unparalleled?) reworking of diegetic 55
space and time is more extensive than that undertaken by either
his contemporary Eisenstein or by Godard, who adopted the Dziga
Vertov Group banner for films he made with Gorin and Richard in
1969-71. Both in his theoretical writings and in his films of the
1920s, Eisenstein, conceiving signifiers primarily as a means of
expression and montage primarily as a collision of signifieds, tends
to assume a dominant diegesis. Hence the appearance of his
' intellectual montage ' segments, for instance the ' gods ' segment
and the Kerensky/titles montage of October, as excursuses from
the film. His unrealised Capital project indicates a move away

from this: ' The " ancient" cinema was shooting one event from
many points 0} view. The new one assembles one point of view
from many events.'65 However, this new direction was never
followed through. Godard's 1968-71 films experiment extensively
with multiple diegesis, in both fictional and documentary modes.
While his work on the latter modes does not rethink the notion
of diegesis as thoroughly as does Man with a Movie Camera, this
is because of his endeavours to set up a dialectical relationship J
between sound and image. Notably in Nume'ro Deux, made with
Mieville, Godard does begin to effect a political transformation of
the spectator's relations to meaning. In distinction from Man with
a Movie Camera, of course, this is in a fictional mode, It remains,
however, that neither Eisenstein nor, as yet, Godard has shown
the theoretical rigour informing Man with a Movie Camera's
theoretical reconstruction of its objects and the setting of the two
in parallel.
One of the problems which Eisenstein's ' intellectual montage '
left unresolved was that of the verbal cueing on which it depends
in his films. If any of Eisenstein's montage categories applies to
Man with a Movie Camera, it is ' intellectual montage '. The film's
liberation from the determinations of diegetic coherence in par-
ticular allows this to be activated throughout. Man with a Movie
Camera stands as one of the very few feature-length silent films
with no titles, the absolute refusal of which Vertov repeatedly
stresses.69 Its achievement is all the more remarkable for its
restriction to only one - albeit the most fundamental - of Metz's
five material categories of the signifier.70 But this concentration is
understandable given Vertov's description of the film as ' aiming
to fill a breach in the sector of cinematic language \ 7 1 It is vital
to think thoroughly through the modes of construction of the
moving photographic image alone in cinema, an investigation
probably pushed further by Man with a Movie Camera than by
any other single film. It is therefore wrong to assume, as does
MacCabe, that heterogenisation of the cinema can be attained only, \
or even primarily, through counterposition of non-diegetically
motivated graphic material to ' the plenitude of the image \ 72 To
assign an immutable function to any of Metz's five material cate-
56 gories of the signifier is to lapse into the God-given. Moreover,
it should be further noted that Metz's list makes no allowance
for intra-diegetic writing, which in Man with a Movie Camera does
serve to heterogenise the image.
Man with a Movie Camera points a route out of the impasse
which Barthes locates for avant-garde art and which enables him
to define it as ' that stubborn language which is going to be
recuperated'." The film disproves Barthes's notion that avant-
garde artistic practices, aimed at the ' destruction of discourse',
are inevitably negative operations doomed to the interminable
reassertion of the discourses they counter through simple opposi-

tion to them. Man with a Movie Camera demonstrates to the con-
trary that the ' destruction of discourse ' can be a dialectical opera-
tion. The complete inadequacy of idealist attempts to appropriate
the film is evident from the above quotations (Rouch himself
admits the film to be one ' which we have not yet understood '). 74
As long as avant-garde artistic practices limit themselves to work
on the signifier alone, they fall into the traps laid by and inherent
to the structures of dominant discourses. Through its invocation
of the paradigmatic, Man with a Movie Camera dialecticises these
opposite terms and thereby opens up a terrain beyond that directly
determined by dominant discourses.
Beyond those already considered, Man with, a Movie Camera
raises many further questions for film theory and film-making:
how films can most effectively contribute to ideological struggle,
what forms of documentary are now possible in the light of the
film's theoretical reconstruction of its objects of 1929, what sound
can contribute over and above the image, how a film can most
effectively build on the cultural knowledge of the general or of
the more specifically defined audience in order to increase (raise)
political consciousness and, finally, how such a distinction of
audiences, if necessary, can be achieved.
Credits
Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s Kinoapparatom): USSR 1929

1830 metres
Production - VUFKU. Released January 8, 1929. Scenario and
direction - Dziga Vertov (Denis Arkadevich Kaufman). Editing -
Elizaveta Svilova. Photography - Mikhail Kaufman.
Notes
1. M Enzensberger: 'Dziga Vertov', Screen v l 3 n4, Winter 1972-3.

2. Dziga Vertov: Articles, Journaux, Projets, Union Gene'rale
d'Editions 1972, pp 97-8.
3. Ibid, pp 101, 105, 93-4, 93. 4. Vertov, op cit, p 107.
5. Ibid, pp 69, 197, 83. 6. Ibid, pp 79-80. 7. Ibid, p 59. 57
8. Vertov: 'Film Directors, A Revolution', Cinema 9, 1971, p 27,
reprinted Screen v 12 n 4, Winter 1971-2, p 56; Vertov: Articles,
Joumaux, Projets, pp 95, 52, 105, 51.
9. Cf ' " N e Copiez pas sur les Yeux", Disait Vertov', Cinethique
15-16, 1972, pp 63-4.
10. In Eisenstein, Film Form, Meridian 1957, pp 55-63, 72-83.
11. Vertov: op cit, p 142. 12. Eisenstein: op cit, p43.
13. Marx: Grundrisse, Penguin 1974, p 105. 14. Ibid, p 101.
15. Ibid.
16. Nove: An Economic History of the USSR, Penguin 1976, p 136.
17. Articles, Joumaux, Projets is a complete translation of the 1966
Russian edition of Vertov's writings.
18. Carynnyk (ed): Alexander Dovzhenko: The Poet as Film-maker,

MIT Press 1973.
19. Translated in October 2, Summer 1976.
20. Kozintsev: ' L a Fin des Annees Vingt', Colliers du Cinema 230,
July 1971, p 5; Eisenstein: op cit, p 26.
21. Vertov: op cit, pp 137-8; Fevralski: ' Dziga Vertov et les Pravdisty',
Cahiers du Cinema 229, May 1971, pp 28-9.
22. Vertov: op cit, pp 83-5; Fevralski: op cit, pp 28-9.
23. Verlov: op cit, p 118.
24. Fevralski: op cit, pp28 and 31-3. Vertov: op cit, pp234-6, 286, 294.
25. Vertov: op cit, p 51.
26. Barthes: ' L'Ancienne Rhetorique', Communications 16, 1970,
p213.
27. Vertov: op cit, p 119. 28. Ibid, p209.
29. Ibid, p 61.
30. Ibid, pp 34, 102.
31. Lenin: On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers 1970, p 17;
cf Vertov: op cit, p240.
32. Heath: 'Narrative Space', Screen v 17 n 3, Autumn 1976, p 107.
33. Quoted Abramov: Dziga Vertov, Premier Plan 1965, p57.
34. Ibid, p 58.
35. Cf Wollen: '"Ontology" and "Materialism" in Film', Screen
v 17 n 1, Spring 1976, pp 14, 22.
36. Preface to Vertov: Articles, cit, p 11.
37. Vertov: op cit, p 129. 38. Ibid, p 119.
39. Lacan: Ecrits, Seuil 1966, pp502-3. Cf especially p502: ' I t is in
the chain of the signifier that meaning insists, but none of the
elements of the chain consists in the meaning of which it is capable
at that particular moment.'
40. Vertov: op cit, p283. 41. Quoted Abramov: op cit, p58.
42. Vertov: op cit, pp29-30, 31-2.
43. Michelson, 'The Man rtith the Movie Camera: from Magician to
Epistemologist'. Artforum v X n 7, March 1972, p 69.
44. The ambulance of shots 534-68, for instance, belongs to the Kiev
brigade, and the Railway Workers' Club of shot 1219 is in Odessa,
while the litter bin of shot 80 and the marriage and divorce certifi-
cates of shots 390 and 402, for example, are inscribed in Ukrainian.
45. Vertov: op cit, p61.
46. Contrast Grierson on Drifters' rattling good yarn of Man's epic
struggle against the elements: ' If you can tell me a story with a
better crescendo. . . . Men at their labour are the salt of the earth.'
Forsyth Hardy (ed): Grierson on Documentary, Faber 1966, p 135.
47. Metz: Essais sur la Signification au Cinema, Klincksieck 1968,
pp 121-34, summarised in Daniel: ' Metz's "Grande Syntagma-
tique": A Summary and Critique', Film Form 1, Spring 1976.
48. Marx: op cit, p 100. 49. Vertov: op cit, p 384.
50. Ibid, p 73.
51. Luda and Jean Schnitzer: Dziga Vertov, 1896-1954, Anthologie du
Cinema 1968, p 187.
52. Cf Vertov: op cit, pp 117-8, 144-5, 145-50.
53. R Manvell: Film, Penguin 1944, p48.
54. Those available are listed in Lawder (ed): Essential Cinema, New
York University Press 1976. Many are, in the most generous terms,
unscholarly, as witness the unacknowledged excision of Vertov's
quotes from Lenin, cited in Part II above, from Film Culture 25,
reprinted in Sitney: Film Culture Anthology, Seeker and Warburg
1973 and in Geduld: Film Makers on Film Making, Penguin 1970.
The most useful single item of Vertov's writing available in English
is his 1923 'Film Directors, A Revolution', Cinema 9, 1971,

reprinted in Screen v 12 n4, Winter 1971-2.
55. Editions Champ Libre 1971.
56. Vogel: Film as a Subversive Art, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1974,
p43.
57. Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton University Press 1947,
pl85.
58. Cit, note 43.
59. Barnouw: Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film,
OUP 1974, p 63.
60. Abramov: Dziga Vertov, Premier Plan 1965, pp57, 59.
61. L and J Schnitzer: op cit, p 186. 62. Grierson: op cit, p 127.
63. Lenauer: ' Vertoff, His Work and The Future', Close-Up, Decem-
ber 1929, p 467.
64. Quoted Leyda: Kino, Allen and Unwin 1973, .p 251.
65. Leyda: op cit, p251. 66. Soviet Film 1971, n 1, January 1971.
67. Mitry: Histoire du Cinema Muet 111 1923-1930, Editions Universi-
taires 1973, p256.
68. Eisenstein: 'Notes for a Film of Capital', p 18.
69. Vertov: op cit, pp 118, 379.
70. Metz: Langage et Cinema, Larousse 1971, p 180.
71. Vertov: op cit, p 148.
72. MacCabe: "The Politics of Separation', Screen v 16 n 4 , Winter
1975-6, p55.
73. Barthes: he Plaisir du Texte, Seuil 1973, p 87.
74. Rouch: 'Cinq Regards sur Vertov', in Sadoul, op cit, p 12.
COMMUNIST UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

No 9 9th-17th July 1977
The Communist University of London is now the largest Marxist
theoretical event in Britain. The object of the University is to develop
Marxist theory and concepts both in relation to the academic
disciplines, and to open up new areas of debate and discussion. This
year there are 25 Specialist courses, including Art and Design
(Problems of Realism), Literature (Marxist Aesthetics); 17 General
Courses including Culture and Ideology, together with 12 Courses on
Problems of Marxist Theory and Politics, including Semiotics.
For further details write to Sally Hibbin, 16 King Street, London
WC2E 8HY. -
British Film Institute Publications
Chilean Cinema ed Michael Chanan published Jan
1977; a political and cultural context of Popular
Unity cinema in Chile; 91p/$3.15 incl postage
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1976; a historical perspective on Algerian cinema

from colonialism to nationalism; 51p/$2.20 incl
postage
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Michael Chanan published 1976; the early days
of trade unionism and the division of labour;
66p/$2.60 incl postage
available from:
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FILM: POLITICS AND FORM
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University of Stirling, Scotland
Details from: Summer School Secretary

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Working Papers in Cultural Studies 10
ON IDEOLOGY
The first part of the 1977 issue will analyse different concepts of ideology
within the marxist tradition. The theorists considered will include Grams.ci,
Althusser, and Poulantzas. A series of case studies are presented in the second
part. These involve the ideological aspects of the crisis in education, a critique
of sociological notions of working class 'community', and a commentary on the
problems of ideology in marxist aesthetics.

AVAILABLE APRIL 1977 £1.75
CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
BIRMINGHAM 15
May 1977
contents:
Psychology, ideology and the human subject
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Class, language and education
Review of Vplosinovon Marxism and linguistics
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, _ subscription: personal-£2.70 for one year including postage' -,"N*

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An Essay Towards Man with a Movie Camera*

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Vertov's career, writings and achievements have already been

This article originates from postgraduate work by Stephen Crofts at

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This article proposes a Marxist analysis of a film on the one hand

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Man with a Movie Camera is easiest approached in terms of a

* Shot numbers are given to indicate the placing of segments etc

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IIA The Film's Theoretical Reconstruction of Cinematic Forms

Vertov's publicity for Man with a Movie Camera's premiere

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a film adopting a Day to Night structure (contrast here the clocks

Character in any psychological sense is clearly inimical to Man

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IIB The Film's Theoretical Reconstruction of the Contemporary

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Ill Diachronic Analysis of Shots 576-630

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596 30 CU A hand cranks a camera.

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(see Figure 1, opposite)

The first segment's alternating montage serves, first, to separate

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This segment phases out the worked for/worker antithesis for a

This is a segment of extraordinary diegetic coherence for the film,

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The phasing-in of enonciation in the form of shots of the camera

In this segment the sewing is done by machine in a factory. The

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