Jason Brooks
The
Silent Soviet Cyborgia: Vertov’s “Man with
a Movie Camera” as VR Antecedent
While the conflation of the virtual and the real is an increasingly popular narrative device in the cinema (e.g., “Fight Club,” “Total Recall,” and “Memento”), its film antecedents reach deep into the history of motion pictures. The present paper considers Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929) as a proto-Virtual Reality film. Although other studies have looked at Vertov’s picture in terms of its robotic and mechanical motifs, the idea that the film prefigures Virtual Reality as a space has remained essentially untouched by criticism. Joseph Christopher Schaub’s article “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye” approaches this topic, but focuses instead on gender hierarchy and futurism. My paper explores more the film’s implications for the representation of reality and its influence on contemporary science fiction film. “Man with a Movie Camera” is a major text in world cinema that cineastes, who invariably include contemporary directors, have long appreciated for its forward-looking, even avant-garde stylistics. Presenting his film as a documentary-symphony hybrid, Vertov’s use of montage and collage, as well as his dizzying array of images, creates a new, ideal, albeit Soviet, reality: a Virtual Space that one can occupy only ideologically. Analyzing Vertov’s use of film stylistics and leaning heavily on Vsevolod Pudovkin’s theory of montage (and therefore the control a director holds over the spectator), my paper considers the way visuals work to create or to destroy preconceptions of reality, to found new realities, and, ultimately, to manipulate the viewers’ perception of the Real outside the theater. After I delineate Vertov’s place in “Cyborgia” vis à vis contemporary presentations of Virtual Reality, I discuss questions of the Real and artistic integrity in the documentary film, specifically in their relation to the contemporary fiction film. My argument, then, will show that “Man with a Movie Camera” stands as a filmic forerunner to Cyborgia, thus informing and shaping VR space in contemporary cinema.