-Devdutt Trivedi
Dziga Vertov’s vision of the camera eye, where the unprejudiced gaze of the camera captured a precise version of Kino Pravda or the ‘Cinema of Truth’, was certainly placed one level below the ideological works of Sergei Eisenstein and his conception of montage, until Jean-Luc Godard along with Jean-Pierre Gorin resurrected his importance by forming the politically aligned Dziga Vertov Group named after him. Vertov’s masterpiece most certainly is The Man with the Movie Camera, where he documents action to record ‘life as it is’ in the absence of the camera.
To understand Vertov’s attempt at cinema, one must go back to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, where representation can only be avoided by capturing the totality of matter. In this way Vertov is very much in line with the agenda of the Futurists, to capture movement through machinations for their precision and in this way allow for what Deleuze calls a ‘communist deciphering of reality’ through the actual evolution of man, in Vertov’s words “from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man.” Vertov’s dictum can be alternatively approached in the paintings of the Italian artist Umberto Boccioni, who uses the surface of canvas to produce a cubist-like assemblage of machine parts to create the affect of movement in his masterpiece Dynamism of a Cyclist.
Vertov study through the Bergson’s reference eventually results to the matter of the mind: the brain and its study. In the case of Vertov the machine-like aspects of both the camera and motion in the frame are a reference to the motor aspects of the brain and how they relate to the process of becoming in the Deleuzean sense which can be defined as the formation of material time.
Deleuze’s study of Vertov deals with his ability to prefer freeze frames or the interval in between shots where non-human and precise perception arises. Vertov plays off the idea of camera placement to capture images in ways which the eye wouldn’t see and make these the norm, much like changing the same tension on a note in music by changing its duration and entry and exit points. In this way Vertov captures separate discontinuous chunks of matter and associates them through Bergson’s dictum of movement that allow discontinuous materials in space to engage with one another. Godard builds on Vertov’s logic by designing his vision of two ‘distant realities’ in the same image to form a ‘reality of a reflection.’ Godard attempts to transform Vertov’s scientific montage to dialectics through the use of sound to term cinema as ‘Son+image’ or ‘Sound+Image.’
In this way Vertov hopes to ‘reach the static’ where idea and image result in a withdrawal of movement that is still moving because of the movement of the frame. This static property of that which exists in between two images is what would give rise to a cinematic signal which Deleuze would call optical-sign. Deleuze defined sign: ‘what happens within such a system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates.’ The ‘disparates’ Deleuze is referring to here are the matter spread across the world and that which ‘flashes across the intervals’, is that
portion in between two successive images. That which is lies between the intervals in precisely the ‘Cinematic Object’ that has not yet been made into a representation of the object to fit the approach of a realist.
Other than Godard and Gorin’s landmark collaboration named the Dziga Vertov Group, Jean Rouch made his first film Chronicle of a Summer using Vertov’s theory and approach. His collaborator Edgar Morin named the approach Cinema Verite, a direct translation of Vertov’s Kino Pravda. Perhaps the most important cinema movement that owed its debt to the cinema of Vertov alongside the American Independent Cinema represented by the likes of Shirley Clarke and John Cassavetes, was the British Free Cinema movement led by the likes of Karel Reisz and the important film maker Tony Richardson.
Courtesy:
Cinema 1; Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze, Les Edition De Minuits, 1985
The Brain is The Screen: Gilles Deleuze and The Philosophy of Cinema, Gregory Flaxman,2000