A Film Canon

This extraordinary film is structured around three rough narratives. The first sees a cameraman taking his apparatus into increasingly dangerous situations - placing it beneath the railway tracks in front of an oncoming train, balancing it on the side of a rapidly moving car, lying down with it in a hectic factory courtyard. Not only does this construe cinematography as a kind of heroic labour, but it suggests that its true province are all those spaces and objects which elude conventional perception. Accordingly, those spaces and objects form the focus of the second narrative, which deals with a single day in the life of Moscow. Alternating extraordinarily dense montage sequences with haunting, lyrical images, Vertov provides a portrait of the modernist metropolis that attests both to its energy and austerity, as well as suggesting that cinema is the only medium really suited to its expression. Frequent analogies between the mechanics of urban life and those of film production reinforce the wonders of cinema, most poetically in Vertov's juxtaposition of individual shots with the continuum that proper editing produces, but also in the third narrative, which brackets those images with a cinema audience's ceremonial experience of them. Similarly, stop-gap animation both imbues the camera with the illusion of autonomous movement, as well as suggesting that it is the most appropriate inhabitant of this emergent cityscape. This astonishingly sophisticated self-referentiality forms part of a pervasive experimentalism which, encompassing jump cuts, split frames, tracking shots and extreme oblique angles, seems designed to take visibility to its limits. More than any film that I have seen, Vertov's attempts to conflate what the eye can see with what the mind can imagine it seeing, culminating with the final - and fastest - montage sequence, in which the rapid transition between the editor's eyes and a summation of the film's images gives the former a translucency that allows them to both engulf and exude everything else.