serial consign

[stenberg brothers / man with a movie camera poster / 1929]

I have recently been preoccupied with the implications of the database as a critical paradigm. Database culture has fundamentally changed traditional conceptions of the archive and by now we are quite familiar with the idea that information is distributed across a networks of interrelated nodes rather than simply "filed". Once you fragment data, narratives and ultimately perception, the manner in which the user interacts with the archive is irrevocably different than more traditional modes of organizing information. This has been one of the key areas of investigation in new media over the last few decades. We can see this in discussions about interactive narrative, mashup applications and even information visualization. Any discussion of the database as an abstract machine inevitably becomes an examination of interface.

Lev Manovich's text The Language of New Media identifies the database as the "symbolic form" of the computer age. To Manovich, the database is a construct onto which we can project our understanding of culture in hopes to articulate our evolving relationship with information. One of the reasons that The Language of New Media is such an compelling text is the manner in which it reads new media in relation to cinema. In delineating database culture, Manovich looks to the 1929 documentary Man with a Movie Camera as a harbinger of the information economy.

Man with a Movie Camera was an experimental silent documentary directed by Dziga Vertov. The film was produced under the umbrella of the Russian State and is considered to be the masterpiece contribution to the Kinoks movement. The film is pardoxical in nature as the Kinoks advocated the development of a social realist, narrative-free style of cinema, but Vertov's work was highly experimental in its execution. Man with a Movie Camera is a frenzy of jump cuts, split screens and double exposures and it relishes in the manipulating the flow of time. The film juggles a variety of velocities and cuts between the photographic freeze-frame, stop-motion animation and an accelerated urbanism. The project catalogues the rhythms of the individual, the city and the state and positions the camera-toting artist as a protagonist who obsessively indexes and recodes urban experience.

Man with a Movie Camera is prefaced by the following statement:

The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)

This statement succinctly describes the modus operandi of the film - as an attempt to develop a new language for documentary cinema, one free of reference to literature and the theatre.

There are a number of incredible sequences in Man with a Movie Camera, but perhaps the one that speaks most directly to the status of the film as what Manovich describes as "database-cinema" can be viewed by examining the above image. This composite of four stills is captured from a sequence in which footage of a child slows and freezes as a still image. The scene cuts to reveal that this still image is a single frame on a roll of film, and that the roll is one of many. The scene then cuts to a large archive of filed footage, and back to the light-table where a "real" cut is being made - with a pair of scissors.

If the genius of Man with a Movie Camera is that it turns the filmmaker into a protagonist, this segment foregrounds the editor as an archivist, an information broker who creates vectors that cut through the holdings of a large repository of data. This sequence demystifies the myth of cinema, that of continuity. In his text In the Blink of an Eye, film editor virtuoso Walter Murch tackles this topic quite directly:

The truth of the matter is that film is actually being "cut" at twenty-four frames a second. Each frame is a displacement from the previous one - it is just that in a continuous shot, the space/time displacement from frame to frame is small enough (twenty milliseconds) for the audience to see it as motion within a context rather than twenty-four different contexts a second.

Manovich describes the database as an archive of information where the user can view and navigate the material in storage. Man with a Movie Camera yields not only a reconfigurable treatise on urban life, but these editing suite sequences reveal a startling awareness of the limitations and possibilities offered by cinema.

I have seen excerpts of this film over the years, but never viewed it from start to finish until quite recently. Watching Man with a Movie Camera in its entirety was one of the most satisfying experiences I've had with a film for a long time. When immersed in this documentary the 20th century just makes sense, and oddly enough the aesthetics and self-reference within the film map quite cleanly onto contemporary paradigms as well. Man with a Movie Camera ranks alongside other ambitious "informational" projects such as Sol Lewitt's Incomplete Open Cubes and Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, both of which explore organization and classification.