An Editing Tutorial in Man with a Movie Camera
00:00:03
	Made in 1929, a little more than a decade after the Russian Revolution, Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera was a dynamic experiment in filming the life of the modern Soviet city. In the '20s, cities were transformed by new technologies like automobiles, streetcars and skyscrapers. People flowed into metropolitan centers to participate in new forms of labor and leisure including the movies. Man with a Movie Camera builds on films celebrating this
00:00:32
	transformation, like Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and it exemplifies one of the richest artistic movements in film history—Soviet montage. Along with filmmakers like Lev Kulashov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vladimir Pudovkin, Vertov pioneered confrontational, often disjunctive editing or montage techniques. You can see examples of this here; the film alternates between shots of a speeding train and shots of horse-drawn buggies and automobiles on city streets.
00:01:08
	Vertov, his brother, cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, and his wife, editor Elizaveta Svilova, called themselves kino-oki, which translates as "camera eye" and they pioneered the newsreel form. Man with a Movie Camera was their most ambitious film yet. As the title suggests the cameraman, himself, is the protagonist. In this sequence, which occurs about 21 minutes into the film, the cameraman, played by Kaufman, is filming the inhabitants of the city. Here
00:01:37
	the image alternates between shots of what the cameraman films, passengers and horse-drawn buggies on their way to the train station, and shots of him filming from a car running alongside; this reveals the camera eye, normally unseen by viewers, although we don't get to see who films the cameraman. The film is clearly self-reflective. We even see one of the women making a cranking gesture, mimicking the cameraman.
00:02:03
	Next we see an even more startling montage effect—the juxtaposition of moving and still images. Suddenly the horse comes to a halt. The viewer experiences a jolt. Is something wrong? We see a woman with a parasol—a street scene. The series of still images freezes the subjects in time—a large crowd, a close-up of a peasant woman. Finally, we see
00:02:35
	an image that shows the filmstrip itself with several frames visible, each a photogram. When the film cuts back to a single full frame we can imagine it's one frame of many on the filmstrip. We cut again to a shot of a filmstrip. We see an array of shots arranged in strips for the editor to select. And as the film is spooled onto the flatbed, we see how movement is restored to still images by machines and
00:03:05
	by human labor. The woman at the editing table is Man with a Movie Camera editor Elizaveta Svilova, Dziga Vertov's wife. She selects the image, cuts, splices, sorts, and the subject comes alive for us. The film continues to alternate between showing the editor at work, images of filmstrips drained of life, and the
00:03:37
	film itself. The film we were watching moments before is deconstructed before our very eyes. Up until this point we marvel at the feats of the Man with a Movie Camera, but now we're made conscious of the subtler magic of the woman at the editing table. The sequence shows the very means through which the film's illusion is animated. We see the filmstrips and footage from other sequences in the film—young children entranced by the performance of a magician on the street, the
00:04:04
	peasant woman haggling. The editor is assembling the very film we ourselves are watching.
00:04:18
	Finally, the woman with the parasol is set in motion again. A woman speaks. The horse resumes its journey. Now we understand that the meaning we derive from the sequence of actions has been actively shaped by the editor off-screen.