Judith F. Rosenberg on Piano

(Chelovek s kinoapparatom). This witty, sassy movie, with an infectious joie de vivre, demonstrates Dziga Vertov's "kino–eye" theory endowing the movie camera with the flexibility of the human eye. A kind of documentary-the portrait of a city and its inhabitants (really three cities, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa merged)-it is a compendium of extravagant camera techniques and editing tricks, forever commenting on itself and our own watching. Appropriately, the camera–hero takes a bow at the end.

Malevich wrote:

"Showing the object 'as such,' (Vertov) forces society to see objects without the make–up: real, authentic, independent of the ideological order, thereby presenting a picture far stronger and more interesting than visages and their 'contents.'" (1925)"

I have discovered in The Man with a Movie Camera many frames with precisely Cubo–Futurist qualities: a shift in the street's current, the multidirectional motion of trams, with every possible shift in the movement of objects, wherein the structure of the motion develops not only in depth, toward the horizon, but vertically as well. The man who edited the film has marvelously grasped the idea or task of the new montage, which gives expression to a new, unprecedented shift." (1929)