Man With a Movie Camera (1/15/19)

     This film made me feel like I was having a panic attack and I absolutely loved it. It claims to lack the "help of theater" and it claims to lack the "help of actors" but I'm not too sure how true that is for this film. There is no doubt that there are no inter-titles, but I couldn't help but think of Shakespeare "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts". The set is the city, the actors are the populous, the story is the constant movement and machinery in and around the city. There claims to be absolute separation from the language of theater and literature, but in this he found the language of film. The end of that Shakespeare monologue reads "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." when discussing the end of the actors role, while it discusses the end of a life. This film in a sense is the end of literature and theater, it is sans plot, sans set, sans actors. It is incredible, in this absence breeds a piece of art that each viewing will bring new insights and new ideas. You will become infatuated with the strangest things and you will be utterly hypnotized by the movement of the film from one shot to another. This film to be quite honest blew my mind it was a whirlwind of art and interpretation and I loved it.
      As for the overall meaning of the film as a whole I had a few interpretations that at various parts of the movie either became more concrete or sort of fell apart. The first thing that came to mind came from the very jarring stillness that occurs when the editor is going through each reel of film frame by frame. It reminded me of the opening scene in Eraserhead by David Lynch, where the "man in the attic" looks out into space at Henry's life and pulls a lever to control his fate, he is supposed to represent a God or a Fate of some sort, he sits alone in his room looking out on someone else's life. That is what the editor is like in this film. She alone decides who lives or dies in this film, she can show a close up of a person or leave them cut out on the floor. She alone controls who lives or dies in the world of this universal language. She is the hand of God, the cameraman is the eye of God. They look over the heads of thousands of people, they focus on the faces of dozens of these passerby. We as the audience only see what they choose. This is a whole living breathing world on screen. What is in this world is not up to us we just have to submit to the cameraman and the editors absolute power. This was so interesting to me, it painted the filmmaker as a God, or the artist as the creator. I find this to sort of be a little self important, but again in the this film creates it is not disproved in the slightest. We see sort of inhuman feats preformed by the cameraman and the editor. The camera holds steady in the fray of constant action, he can see all. He is omnipresent, he is everywhere at once, in the largest factories, in the deepest mines, at the birthplace of a new child, at the funeral procession of a dead person. The editor, bends time and matter to her will, she makes buildings fold upon themselves, she cuts the frame in half, skews perspectives and freezes frames to her will. As a duo they create their own world, or at the very least their own view of our world. They are like an Adam and Eve in a sense or at the very least they are powerful creators.
     The other sort of overall meaning that I gathered was the filmmaker set out to film a day in the city. to capture everything that goes on in a day in a city. There is a feeling that exists called sonder, this is the realization that everyone around you, every random passerby, has a life just as complex as yours, every person that you ever see pass before your eyes has an epic story preceding them and an epic one in front of them. This film in my mind sort of sets out to capture a little bit of this phenomenon. It is isolated to a city and we only see a fraction of each persons day but the idea as the city being alive and the people in it being its guts and nervous system shines through for me. The idea that all the people in this film were working for each other and the good of the city and the state is a very communist version of the idea of sonder. There are two other films that come to mind when I think about this meaning for the film. One is the film Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman, it is about a playwright named Caden Cotard who lives in a terrible world where no one respects him and he barely respects himself, he wins the McArthur grant and is given financial freedom to make his masterpiece. He begins to craft a play that will be "real" he wants to make real life on stage, however the stage becomes a city and the play grows in size until its a world within a world, then later on a third world grows as we see the previous events of the movie begin to play out in his staged performance. His play is never staged and he dies however. But the whole feeling of the movie is sonder, he works tirelessly everyday to give every character notes, he has worlds inside his head and he works to put them on the stage. He attempts to show every angle and every moving gear in the city, this film conveys this as it focuses on a communistic oneness instead of each individual. The other film it reminded me of is the video art piece by director Steve McQueen the director of Hunger and 12 Years a Slave it is an early film called Drumroll. It is a multi-channel video art piece depicting 3 cameras in an oil drum rolling down a city street for 22 minutes. It is meant to depict the hustle and bustle of a city and the disorienting feeling of being lost and alone in a new place. It is a bit hard to watch especially if you have motion sickness but it is truly meant to bring the city to life. These films interpretations of the idea of cities and personal life are interesting in comparison to the ideas presented in Man With a Movie Camera as there is a difference in political and social perspectives.

Pictured above are a still from Drumroll by Steve McQueen (TOP) and a very famous still from Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman (BOTTOM) where Caden Cotard writes his thousands of notes for his actors in his stage-play. 

     In Man With a Movie Camera there is a very distinct passage of time from the morning, with the sleepy street dwellers. To the work day which takes up a majority of the film. To the lazy afternoon at the beach (where everyone seems to be off work except the cameraman himself), and finally to the night, represented by the dark of the cinema. This is how he shows the city, in a sort of day / night cycle. Unlike Irony of Fate this story does not need to happen in a specific place at a specific time. It can happen anywhere at anytime, it is happening everywhere, all the time. That is the point of the universal language claim at the beginning of the film. It depicts a city in all its moving parts by showing people and lots and lots of shots of mechanical moving parts, often with the camera moving along with them. I saw this as going with the flow of the industrial machine that cities tend to be. I saw the happiness on the faces of the workers as a sign of a sort of propagandist attitude in this film. The only real job that was shown as not so great was the miner and that was only because he was crouched down in the dark, everyone else seemed to be having a great time working. This along with the references to Lenin and his five year plan made me think this was not only an effective art piece but an effective propaganda film to show that his ideas would work. It shows the day charging headstrong onward even with whatever new policies are introduced. At the beginning of the film not only is it a new day but we even see some things moving backwards, sort of resetting their position for a new day. The five year plans may have been big changes but inevitably everything would return to normal in the new day.
     The film overall interested me immensely but there are a handful of scenes within the film that I really enjoyed. The first one being the blinds shuttering open and closed towards the beginning with the eyes of the woman and the shutter speed of the camera. I just like this visual showing of how everything in this film is connected, the humans and the buildings and the camera are all one entity, they all act in the same way. I also really liked the shots of people's "editing" of themselves (haircuts, nail salons, etc.) inter-cut with the footage of the editor editing the reels of film. This sort of plays into the idea of the editor as God as it shows her editing people to make them look their best. I liked the recurring shot of the man directing traffic and how his device lined up with the eyes of the editor and the cameraman occasionally and the whole idea of directing the flow of things and directing where the eyes go is a very apt metaphor for what the cameraman was doing the entire film. He is really the only reoccurring character aside from the cameraman and the editor. He is the only thing we really have to hold on to in terms of establishing ourselves in a location. When the woman gives birth we see her legs spread, pushing out a child, it is followed by buildings tilted to make a crack and the cameraman pointing his lens into the chasm that formed. I saw these are related and I saw it as depicting the city as a mother, a mother gives birth to a child as a city gives birth to a community. There is so much meaning in every frame of this film I really loved it, I took too many notes to copy down here.
     While there is an almost constant barrage of imagery in this film, there are a few recurring images that pop up here and there that I feel have importance. For one, whenever the camera points at the audience I was really interested in this as not only is there an audience in the film, we are an audience as well and the camera is pointing at both occasionally. It was a little bit crazy but I have a feelings that when the lens is pointed towards us there is an importance in that. I also loved the images of eyes darting all over the screen, to me this reminded me of Drumroll the overwhelming imagery bombarding you from everywhere in the city, your eye has nowhere to focus. I saw these eyes as the eyes of the cameraman searching frantically for his next thing to show and add to his world. The various shots of trains and transportation were interesting to me as well not only were they integral to keeping the city going they were also a callback to the earlier French silent films we watched in class, only there was more motion in the camera and more movement surrounding these modes of transport. The final recurring theme that I wish to point out here is the crossing of wires. We see it in the phone operator office, we see it in the (I believe it is a) seamstress factory, where the spools of thread are being spun, we see it all over, the crossing of wires and the circular movement of gears and spindles. I really like this theme of crosses and circles, X's and O's. I like how we see everyone using both in various segments of the film. From the spindle in the factory, to the carousel for children and the racetrack for the adults, we see circular movement everywhere and I think this also plays into the cyclical nature of the film.
     Overall I think this may be my favorite film I have seen in the class so far. As a fan of surreal cinema I was immediately drawn in by the bizarre imagery of the city sleeping at the beginning of the film, with the riff-raff asleep and sprawled over every available surface, as the bizarre scenery begins to become more recognizable, the pigeons reset their positions for a new day and the mannequins that once inhabited the city are replaced with flesh and blood human beings. That is what initially drew me in but the themes portrayed in this film all are so interesting to me, the idea of pushing film to its absolute limits is why I love experimental and surreal film. Overall this film was fantastic, it is a treasure trove of analysis and I cannot wait to watch it again. I honestly feel like this post is a disservice to the film as I feel like I need a much better memory, and a lot more time to record all the things I loved about this movie.