Of Men and Movie Cameras: Buster Keaton, Dziga Vertov, and the Aesthetics of Political Documentary

Resum

As cinematic stylists, contemporaries Dziga Vertov and Buster Keaton had little in common, yet they shared a remarkably homologous vision of the cinema’s unique role in interpreting the sometimes overwhelming condition of modernity. This article offers a comparison of Keaton’s The Cameraman and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, released within one year of one another, as complimentary testaments to the active interpretive power of the cinema in the face of modern social and industrial forces. Through this comparison, the article aims to illuminate the artistic and ideological motivations behind Vertov’s unique combination of documentarian footage and avant-garde cinematographic technique and link his filmmaking to Keaton’s efforts in the United States. Composed in the face of strenuous resistance and criticism from Hollywood executives and Soviet elites, respectively, and fortified by a commitment to the camera’s powers of analysis and arrangement (derived, in Vertov’s case, from his engagement with Marx’s The German Ideology), both The Cameraman and Man with a Movie Camera make a lasting case for the documentary power of the cinema as an instrument of interpretation uniquely conditioned to the social and political challenges of the modern age.