Intervals of Transition

Like other modernist artists in their media, Dziga Vertov sought a new language of cinema that would expand the intrinsic technical, communicative, and social capacities of the medium. His 1929 masterpiece, The Man with a Movie Camera, brings these aspirations to bear on film with a maximum of intensity. Vertov programmatically asserted that cinema should develop according to its own material laws and sought in The Man with a Movie Camera to employ a “100 percent film language.” He also intended his film as a manifesto of cinema’s critical place within Soviet life in the 1920s, highlighting the process of film production and reception itself. Vertov embraced the chaos of potential meanings in film material drawn from “life caught unaware”; while he saw his compositional activity as giving form to that chaos, he left substantial latitude for an open-ended generation of meanings, respondent to different situations and audiences.