What we cannot see, the camera can

Our eyes can only see so much, and they see cities very poorly.

Image credits: Eye of the cameraman (Vertov), still from the film

I’ve lived away from home for the past two years, so I watch it from afar. I watch through the lens of Marcel Heijnen and Erica of Sheung Wan Cats, Hong Kong’s resident shop cat photographers. Through social enterprise-turned-corporatised Humans of New York imitators. Through breaking news notifications, documenting the deterioration of political freedoms in the city, on top of hours doomscrolling retrospective Twitter pages, longing for the days before Hong Kong’s skyline was reimagined to a pastiche of “global financial hub”. 

But my experiences observing the movements and developments of the city is always a mediated form of reality, whether it be through text, AI, or constructed dialogue in movies. Somebody or something is present, telling me what to do and what to think.

Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929) begins with a man climbing out of the head of a movie camera. The camera then assumes the role of both spectator and participant — hovering amidst a city in constant motion, it witnesses birth, death, work, marriage, divorce, and the process of filmmaking itself. The empty streets of an unnamed Soviet city slowly awaken. People start to work and swim and sweep. 

Image credits: Vertov’s storyboards

Man With a Movie Camera defies almost all conventions of the movie: there is no story, no character, no dialogue, no set. Throughout the film, we watch it being put together. Scenes of Vertov’s brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman percolate the screen: he climbs on moving cars, trains, motorcycles, and stands amidst bustling traffic and factory lines to capture the energy and machinery of the city. We also see Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova working tirelessly to construct the film we are watching. In the editing room, she selects, cuts, and splices with surgical precision. Behind the camera — we see the eyes of Vertov — the cameraman himself. The often invisible human labour behind filmmaking unfolds. 

This 68-minute film demands a type of understanding that is visceral and immediate, one which is grounded in the present, rather than being mediated by text or the theatrical pursuits of the actor. It’s still referred to as a documentary, but what city is being portrayed here anyway? Kiev? Moscow? Odessa and Kharkiv all at once? I’m inclined to believe Vertov was not concerned with the reflection of a world outside of Man With a Movie Camera, and yet the camera captures something from this world the human eye will never see. 

Born in Bialystok, Poland, in 1896, David Kaufman adopted the pseudonym Dziga Vertov in his early career, which roughly translates to “spinning top” in Ukranian — a name evoking images of the cameraman’s winding of the film camera crank. Like many other artists of his generation, Vertov was heavily influenced by Italian futurists of the early 1900s, who proclaimed the end of decadent art and literature. Futurists embraced innovations in technology and were transfixed by the dynamism of modern urban life. They called for a decisive break from the old, though at the cost of destruction — war and the dismantling of all cultural signifiers of the past — museums, libraries, academia and the such. 

Russian futurists yearned for a new Soviet culture, aiming to displace the Pushkins and Tolstoys that had defined imperial Russian culture for the past century. “For us, the most important of the Arts is cinema”, Lenin said in the 1920s, a decade of immense cultural and artistic experimentation. As part of the broader Kino-eye movement, Vertov sought to create a new language of cinema through the abolition of convention. Characteristics of filmmaking associated with bourgeois European culture and the rising cultural hegemony of Hollywood were dispensed with: intertitles, plot, actors, studios, replaced by the ordinary peoples and streets of 1920s Soviet Russia. Along with other kinoks, Vertov pioneered an ideology of cinema that rejected the “fiction film”, offering a critique of how narratives are constructed.

Image credits: Mikhail Kaufman filming Man with a Moving Camera, still from the film

Image credits: Elizaveta Svilova editing Man with a Moving Camera, still from the film

He wanted the material in his films to be found and not staged. In fact, Vertov found “old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous.”

— Keep away from them! 

— Keep your eyes off them! 

— They’re mortally dangerous!

— Contagious!

He denied the present state of cinema to guarantee its future. In typical modernist fashion, Vertov deconstructs the innate conventions underpinning cinema, dispenses with them, and is still able to create meaning in the process. Writing in 1923:

“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion... Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, manoeuvring in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations... My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.”

Our eyes can only see so much, and they see cities very poorly. Even with technology and the kino-organisation (editing) of others, all I see are Sydney Trains and corporate universities and ‘Romanticising Parramatta’ Instagram reels. But I still search for John Razalo’s Instagram and watch Chungking Express on days I feel homesick because I don’t live in my city anymore. I just dream of it and desire to experience it all — its textures, abstractions, sights, and sounds, what is happening now or at a point of time in the past that is not to be forgotten. 

In Wim Wender’s 2023 film Perfect Days, the camera, again, captures something I will never see. Centred on the life of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), a charming elderly man with a love for 70s rock and Japanese folk music, the camera follows his everyday life as he cleans Tokyo toilets, visits the sento (public bath), and reads Faulkner before bed. Hirayama doesn’t say much, nor is there any traditional “plot” to the film. But the camera observes the beautiful and often lonely mundanity of urban life, calling to mind Wender’s earlier work Wings of Desire (1987) where the camera floats and flutters across the city of Berlin, spectating mortal life through the lens of two angels. Hirayama, to me, is like the angels in Wings of Desire. He leads a relatively solitary life separate from the other inhabitants he encounters in Tokyo, studying the city with angel-like attention. On every lunch break, he takes a photo of the same tree and bows to the shrine atop it. He collects boxes and boxes of photos, each labelled by month and year, taking note of the tree’s changing shadows, branches, and leaves — a meticulous observation enhanced by the eye of his Olympus camera.

Image credits: still from Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

Vertov’s theory of the Kino-eye reimagined the possibilities of the human eye through a unique kind of synthesis with technology. Man With a Movie Camera is a testament to the ways in which film is able to construct a new social reality through the lens of the camera, penetrating more deeply into the visual beauties of the city in which we are often blind to. Tryus Miller, Professor of Art History and English at UC Irvine, wrote that the Kino-eye “is not separate from, but an extension of the human way of seeing.” It is more akin to an enhancement of the human eye, a cyborgian construction of the future, if you will. In Svilova’s experiments with temporal manipulation throughout the film, editing loses regard for time or formal continuity. Slowing and reversing time, Svilova disrupts the linear progression, inviting the human eye to appreciate the potential of the Kino-eye in concert with the art of editing and aesthetic choice.  

The global influence of the Kino-eye movement has been discussed extensively, but perhaps its most interesting legacy lies in the participatory Man With a Movie Camera: Global Remake. In 2007, artist Perry Bard crowdsourced scenes shot by people from around the world employing Vertov’s Kino-eye approach to filmmaking. The film was broken down shot-by-shot, so that people could reinterpret and deconstruct his work in their own light. Like the works of Wim Wenders, the Global Remake embraces the camera as an organiser of reality, making something out of the energies of city life. Rather than being a mere imitation of the film, however, it looks to the past to detabilise the present, and encourages us to question how we can view and construct reality. 

The human eye is limited after all, and what we cannot see, the camera can.