In this essay from 1972, first published in Artforum, Annette Michelson explores Dziga Vertov's masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) at a moment when the name of the master of Soviet ...documentary style was gaining traction but his work was under-analyzed. Rigorously inventorying the many techniques Vertov uses to disrupt cinematic illusionism, Michelson argues that the film marks a significant transition in Vertov's practice—from the “world of naked truth” of the Kino-Eye to the more complex “exploration of the terrain of consciousness itself” that structures The Man with a Movie Camera.
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Among Dziga Vertov's films,
is unique in its immediate and enduring approval within the Soviet Union. The film was commissioned for the tenth anniversary of Lenin's death and made extensive use of ...archival material documenting Lenin's political trajectory and his funeral. Annette Michelson offers a reading of the film's political function within the historical situation of the USSR in the 1930s, claiming that the register and scale of
make the film a “kinetic icon” for the deceased leader. Michelson discusses similarities between religious icons and films, particularly the way in which death haunts both, and she examines the way in which the film's emphasis on the role of the female mourner enables it to transform document into monument.
Vertov's "tricks" (reverse motion, odd camera angles, rhythmic repetition) challenge temporal and spatial continuity, creating an eerily poetic effect, while, at the same time, celebrating the ...impersonal and mechanical man-machine. ...connections were keenly felt at the É Tudo Verdade (It's All True) International Documentary Film Festival in Brazil, where the Dziga Vertov retrospective often played to sold-out houses. Cineaste: Media theorist Marc Ries remarked that Vertov's vision is close to our digital age, when videos taken by passersby with phone cameras become news.
