Man With A Movie Camera - Vertov's Intentions

Vertov's Intentions

Vertov — born David Abelevich Kaufman — was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s. He belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks, or kino-oki (kino-eyes). Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making. This radical approach to movie making led to a slight dismantling of film industry: the very field in which they were working. Most of Vertov's films were highly controversial, and the kinoc movement was despised by many filmmakers of the time. Vertov's crowning achievement, Man with a Movie Camera, was his response to critics who rejected his previous film, One-Sixth Part of the World. Critics declared that Vertov's overuse of "intertitles" was inconsistent with the film-making style the 'kinoks' subscribed to.

Working within that context, Vertov dealt with much fear in anticipation of the film's release. He requested a warning to be printed in Soviet central Communist newspaper, Pravda, which spoke directly of the film's experimental, controversial nature. Vertov was worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public eye. Upon the official release of Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov issued a statement at the beginning of the film, which read:

"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

This manifesto echoes an earlier one that Vertov wrote in 1922, in which he disavowed popular films he felt were indebted to literature and theater.