Ways of Seeing

“I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I'm in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”
Dziga Vertov

 

The Awakening of a Woman

Man With a Movie Camera, Mikhail Kaufman / Dziga Vertov


Awakening of a Woman, The Cinematic Orchestra

To watch, in order to see

Man with a Movie Camera
Vertov was one of the first to be able to find a mid-ground between a narrative media and a database form of media. He shot all the scenes separately, having no intention of making this film into a regular movie with a storyline. Instead, he took all the random clips and put it in a database, which Svilova later edited. The narrative part of this process was her job. She had to go into that random pool of clips that Vertov filmed, edit it, and put it in some kind of order. Vertov's purpose of all this was to break the mold of a linear film that the world was used to seeing in those days.
Vertov's message about the prevalence and unobtrusiveness of filming was not yet true—cameras might have been able to go anywhere, but not without being noticed; they were too large to be hidden easily, and too noisy to remain hidden anyway. To get footage using a hidden camera, Vertov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman (the film's co-author) had to distract the subject with something else even louder than the camera filming them.


Beauty #2, Andy Warhol