Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is a poetic documentation of the rhythm within everyday life and the rhythm of observation. At its core, the theme of the film is that everything in life is a constant rotation repetition, and interplay. This leaks out in the juxtaposition between machine and life events of people in the editing. Every moment the movie camera is seen, it is moving to keep up with life and desperately trying to capture every angle of the rotation.
The choice to edit scenes of note in life up against other notable life events like birth, death, or divorce makes them stick out to the juxtaposition editing of average life and the ever-cycling machines. They are indications of the cycle of life instead of the juxtaposition pointing out how life is a cyclical and repetitive machine. These milestones in the cycle are not repetitive in one cycle, but a staple among many cycles that coincide. This film is built upon many cycles that run like cogs in a machine, making each other run. The bureaucratic cycle, the milestone cycle, the days cycle, the work cycle, and the unending cycle of the machine are all happening mostly individually in the reels with some interplay, but by the end of the film they are all meshed together at a neck breaking pace until they stop, closing off our observation of the intermingling cycles. This isn’t just the cycles, but the cycle of making and observing them.
The movie camera, something people don’t acknowledge often since it’s the tool by which people make films, is just as cyclical and ever moving as the rest of the film. Never in the film is the camera still or untouched. Dziga Vertov is almost always touching the crank of it to watch something like a car—a cycle built on a cycle to capture movement without losing it. He takes it to new heights by filming from the top of a bridge to capture the departure of trains. He uses editing to show how he is one with the movie camera. The lens is his eye —represented visually through double exposure. He manages to be this almost monolithic birds-eye as he represents with the double exposure that makes him larger than life and the literal filming of him on top of roofs. He manages to be part of everything and capture every detail, something he notes both visually with the double exposure of him in a cup or the close up shots he captures of the editor’s eyes. The editor, his wife Yelizaveta Svilova, is a conduit. His brother, Mikhail Kaufman, who is the actual man we see with the movie camera, is a conduit. Their work together makes this diary of the cycle of life and Russias people in the late 1920s.
This push of constant rotation and repetition is distinctly rhythmic. Not a word is said let alone non-diagetically typed outside of the title card and the end card. This lack of rhetoric and focus on the rhythm and points of harmony in observable life makes it Poetic mode through and through. This is the six reel diary of Dziga Vertov; it’s made up of what he’s seen and his own mental vision. As evidenced in the translation of the name he gave himself, it’s all about the rotation.