Contemplation on Vertov

For me, what Vertov has accomplished in Man with a Movie Camera, is a sense of social consciousness—an interconnectivity of the social sphere accomplished through the editing itself. Take, for instance, the juxtaposition—where, perhaps, juxtaposition isn’t even the right word—of the film editor and seamstress, the barber and the miner. There’s a sense that labor, as the base of the social order’s superstructure (to use Marxist terms) actually unifies the populace; and it’s conveyed through Vertov’s montages. Furthermore, there’s an emphasis on travel, I think—especially during a time when complex machinery needed to be made sense of, and thought through. Trains and cars expanded the boundaries of transport, as the telephone and mass media (i.e. newspaper) did with communication. This was an introduction to extrasensory perception; now, while that phrase may suggest something else entirely—there was a very real phenomenon occurring wherein reality was being experienced, as it never was before (as it is today, as well). And, perhaps, this is where the kino eye comes in—to make sense of and represent this experience; which may explain the cameraman’s association with movement—standing atop vehicles in motion, capturing reality from this perspective and it moves through (and subsequently intertwines) the social order.

I wonder, however, what Vertov would say of the image’s soundtrack. While the image captured by the movie camera may be objective—the music is ultimately a subjective choice; a choice which certainly can influence the ‘truth’ of the image.

This is more of an ethical question, I suppose; but—is the mechanization of humankind a positive thing? Or an attempt at divinity (both in the sense of omniscience and in evolving the perfect human self)?

Also, for what it’s worth—the conception of the kino eye reminded me of David Lynch’s Lost Highway—thematically, and specifically in a certain line: “I like to remember things my own way […] not necessarily the way they happened.”