Let me ask you a question, how much does a filmmakers intent
matter to you when watching a film? Or how much do you let other opinions sway
you? Because Man With A Movie Camera is one of those films that is beloved in
its genre and is considered one of the best…the problem is I disagree with which genre it falls under.
Man With A Movie Camera is a documentary directed by Dziga
Vertov (Thank god I don’t have to pronounce that) and it is simply a collection
of seemingly random shots of whatever the filmmakers could shoot. There is no
purpose, no content, no message, yet it is often praised for it’s style of
creating a visual melody through creative editing and challenging the medium of
film as a whole. The question of what film’s purpose is can be widely debated,
for me it’s like any art, I think it should either entertain or challenge you,
films that do both are usually the ones I fall in love with. Not to say Man
With A Movie Camera is “entertaining” per se apart from an easy listening score
(Depending on which version you watch). But it is certainly a challenging film,
a film that challenges the definition of what a documentary should be. But is
it a documentary?
This is where my point about disagreeing with intent comes
into play. Because to me, this is not a documentary, but a surrealist film.
When it comes to my personal definition of what a documentary is, this is not a
film that falls under it, it’s not informative, it doesn’t follow any standard
conventions, the only definitive trait it has in common with documentaries is
that it films real life, but to no real narrative. Now most people say this is
why it’s amazing for how it challenges your preconceptions of documentaries,
but under that analysis I simply don’t find much value. However, as a
surrealist film and from what I know of that genre, this very much is a
masterpiece. Surrealist films have never been one of my favourite genres
because from what my understanding of what a surrealist film is-that being an interpretation
of dreams, or emotions, a stream of consciousness, etc.-none of them ever feel
accurate. A film like L'Age d'Or or Un Chien Andalou to me don’t represent
dreams, they come across as too constructed or nonsensical. Dreams-though very
hard to define-to me where always both structured and non-structured. You could
have a dream where a story is being told, or it could be nonsensical images and
sounds, but enough there that even in our hazy states, we still believe what we’re
seeing is logical enough.
Man With A Movie Camera is the first film to accurately
portray this. It’s a film that feels structured, yet random. If you told me
they laid out all of their film, closed their eyes and just pointed at random
strips and said “I want this one, then this one, this one played twice, this
one played backwards and this one upside down” I would completely believe it.
And within this film there are many mini-narratives being told, single stories
contained within just a few seconds of film. Emotions riding high, multiple
events happening at once, and yet at times it does come across as just a random
assortment of sounds and images.
So I ask, even if this is not the interpretation everyone
has, does that really matter when we end up at the same conclusion? If we both
say its one of the greatest films of all time, me presenting it as a surrealist
film, you presenting it as a documentary, does it matter? All of film is up to
interpretation and either way it is still an incredibly challenging film.
Anyone who knows me (Or if you’ve read other instalments of this series) would
know the phrase “Russian surrealist film from the 1920s” is not exactly a type
of film I would usually be a fan of. Yet here we are, Man With A Movie Camera,
to most, one of the greatest documentaries of all time, to me, one of the most
surreal.
-Danny
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