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Darting eye and opening shutter, lens and flower, a continuous blossoming. The overture has the empty theater swiftly filled, lights out, orchestra ready for the movie that is shown. Slumbering figures at dawn lend the proper oneiric note, the centrifugal kaleidoscope that follows might be a dream except that it's a galaxy of actualités. "Excerpts from a camera operator's diary," six reels of them. Trolleys, ambulances, conveyor belts, smokestacks, the swarming public, just a day in the city. People and machines in motion, workers and pistons and pedestrians and gears, a sort of Picabia acceleration makes them all dance. The ultimate mechanism is naturally the camera itself, the wandering fellow carries its tripod over his shoulder. (He hovers above the cityscape, cf. Wenders' Wings of Desire, then rises out of a beer mug's foam, cf. Preminger's The Moon Is Blue.) Childbirth and funeral, marriage and divorce, the whole gamut of life, why not, cinema was created for such things. Dziga Vertov is the jester who comes alive at the editing table, two thousand gags at his fingertips—he loves Metropolis and Sherlock Jr. but he also wants the medium to lay bare its tricks, the apparatus is part of the spectacle. Cigarette packs are a finished product, so is the flickering image that races along or freezes mid-frame. The slow-motion that captures the athlete's feat, the reverse-motion that restores chess pieces at the Odessa Workers' Club, the tilted angle that nearly tips a streetcar over. Contrasts and rhymes, factories and beaches and beauty salons, Marx's bust. Muybridge's horse is acknowledged, along with the Lumière train. Laughing faces in the audience, "when you look carefully, it's a funny job" (Comment ça va?). "A truly international language" out of Bolshevik newsreels is Vertov's stated goal, the art of looking concurrent with Vigo and endlessly studied by Chris Marker, Brakhage, Godfrey Reggio. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |