Eyes on the Future

Dziga Vertov's documentary Man with a Movie Camera is more than 80 years old, yet it positively thrums with the onward rushing energy of a freight train, a type of futurist dynamism as surprising as a slap in the face. In 1929, Dziga Vertov, (a nom de guerre which actually means "spinning top") set out to challenge the conventions of narrative cinema, arguing for a break from movies' reliance on novelistic narrative, and the fusty theatrical trappings of stage drama.

Vertov stated his intentions in a manifesto that trumpeted: "This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema -- ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY -- on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

Almost a century later, David Shield's manifesto, Reality Hunger, picks up where Vertov left off. Shield's book, like Vertov's documentary, is comprised of different, seemingly unrelated shards of perceptions, fractured, shattered realities reassembled crazy-quilt-like, into something that approximates our constantly shifting sense of culture. Reality Hunger consists of 618 different sequentially numbered blocks of text that build inexorably towards a larger sense of purpose. As with the jump cuts that Vertov pioneered in his film, the reader is forced to look for connections that may or may not exist between ideas, their perceptions staggering to assemble something that resembles narrative.

Is this the birth of a new artistic movement, or simply a continuation of ideas that are old as the hills? Is there really much difference between the two?

Shields bravely tootles out his own revolutionary intentions in the opening salvo of his book stating:

a: overture

1

Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. Zola: "Every proper artist is more or less a realist according to his own eyes." Braque's goal: "To get as close as I could to reality." E.g., Chekhov's diaries, E. M. Forster's Commonplace Book, Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up (much his best book), Cheever's posthumously published journals (same), Edward Hoagland's journals, Alan Bennett's Writing Home. So, too, every artistic movement or moment needs a credo: Horace's Ars Poetica, Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie, André Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto," Dogme 95's "Vow of Chastity." My intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of "reality" into their work. (Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.)

How do you like them "apples"?

Strange beauty of ordinary things

Reading Shield's book and watching Vertov's film, pretty much back to back, I was struck not only by the similarity of their intentions, but by the structure that each man uses to break down expectations and supply something different in its place. The original intent of Man with a Movie Camera was to capture the zippy pace of life in a modern Russian city. Vertov shot what looks like one day over the course of four years in three different cities and then assembled the footage into a veritable flood of consciousness. From the opening scene, in which an audience piles into a movie theatre where the seats have already magically descended to accommodate them, the reality show is just that.

But this is reality modified, messed with, made into art, yet it is still ordinary recognizable daily stuff -- store window mannequins, a woman snapping the buttons on her bra, kids watching a puppet show, women getting haircuts, factory work -- the film's fiendish attention to the smallest details commands attention. I found myself drawn to the shape of people's teeth, the froggy movement of swimmers, the sleek hide of rushing water, the zigzagging intersections of streetcars, pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages that carry on like an elaborately choreographed ballet. One of lasting impressions from Man with a Movie Camera is a sense of giddy energy and movement, the human body, as perfect as gyroscope, a fulcrum, a pivot point, shot in action, leaping, running, hurling itself into mid-air.

Invention in all it fizzy bubbling energy boils through the film, carrying the viewer along with it, through sheer momentum. Vertov used 1,775 shots with an average length of 2.3 seconds each to create his film. This degree of narrative speed feels comfortable, as it is the current rate at which most contemporary films take place. There are so many things to see in this film, and ways in which to see it. The most interesting aspect is that the film makes no effort to hide what it is doing. Instead, the apparatus of film-making is made explicitly clear, whether it's a shot of the camera man in action, digging a hole between railroad tracks to capture a steam engine's forward advance, or scenes of Vertov's wife (who edited the film) carefully splicing shots together.

Shields is engaged in a similar process, taking bits and pieces from a variety of different sources (literature, film, essays and interviews) and assembling it into something that is more than the sum of its parts. He is entirely clear about what he is doing. The final coda in the book is a list of all the sources from which he has pilfered, plagiarized, and pastiched (supposedly forcibly included by the lawyers at Random House). If you really want to read the book as it was intended, the author cheerfully tells you to cut out the last bit with a pair of scissors.

What Shields typifies as the quality of the new artistic movement -- "Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity...a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real." -- is already explicitly rendered in Vertov's split screen, jump cuts, animations, stop-motion, and freeze frames.

The end of fiction?

Yet Vertov's intention, to do away with fictional film and assign documentary the ruling place in cinema, didn't happen. And, despite the increasing current interest paid to reality in all its multiplicity, it probably still won't happen.

Shields is less didactic in his arguments. Essentially he is making a case that older forms of media such as the traditional novel are falling away, becoming less relevant or meaningful, as our sense of narrative shifts. The problem with manifestos is that they're often just a little too neatly wrapped up. But here is where Shields differs Vertov, in that he is basically saying that the sprawling nature of reality can be never be neatly packaged, nor ordered, and that moribund forms that try to do so are destined for the dustbin of history.

There is always this odd sense that culture is speeding up, rushing headlong to some unknown endpoint. But sometimes it is the smallest earthquakes that signal something has fundamentally changed. My mother said it first. "I can't read novels anymore..." She announced. "They bore me." This statement, coming from a woman who has spent her entire life reading everything she could literally get her hands on, stopped me cold.

Sometimes you can almost feel culture change, like the ground swelling under your feet. I knew immediately what she meant. I don't know when the shift to non-fiction happened exactly for me, perhaps in incremental fashion, but the process has probably been underway for a while now. Reality Hunger makes the case that only the forms that can encompass the constant shape-shifting nature of narrative will do in the future. The fact that Vertov's film with its fluidity and quicksilver sense of invention and energy is precisely able to do just that is curious -- and oddly, wonderfully joyous.

Man with a Movie Camera screens on Sunday, July 25, 7:30 pm at the Vancity Theatre, and the justifiably famous Alloy Orchestra will accompany the film. The Alloy Orchestra will also accompany Josef von Sternburg's seminal gangster film Underworld (Saturday, July 24, 7:30 p.m.) and The Black Pirate, starring Douglas Fairbanks (Sunday, July 25, 3:30 pm).