Man With A Movie Camera Vertov

Benjamin’s essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Vertov’s film, Man with a Movie Camera, both propose that through film we have more control over how we are able to tell a story. Prior to film, stories were only able to be told in four ways: spoken verbally, painted in works of art, written in books, or performed on stage as a play. Although artistic in their own way, they all lack a component of presentation that film possesses. Oral stories and books are each capable of telling detailed stories but lack the ability to engage the sense of sight; whereas film is primarily told through its visuals. Paintings and plays both have the ability to visually tell a story, but they are not able to control the dimension of time in their story telling. This is

Also, control in storytelling is heightened as the camera allows filmmakers to have a moving perspective, including some perspectives that are not natural for the human eye. Vertov does all of these things in Man with a Movie Camera as he displays the camera’s capability in how it can project a new view of a common city. He used time manipulation, forced perspectives, and mirror images to convey the idea that we can now control storytelling more than ever before. Likewise, Vertov also wanted others to agree with his assertion “we have violated the movie camera and forced it to copy the work of our eye”(Vertov 16), or how it would be ideal for mechanical reproduction to be used to do what was not possible before. He believed that machines should be extensions of us to help us improve what we are capable of doing. Settling to only using them for what we could already do is a waste of their potential and purpose. This contradicts what Benjamin believed was the ideal purpose for mechanical reproduction: to remove the gap between the haves and the have-nots. He imagined this to be possible in two