Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera: Thoughts on the Computation of Style and Narrative Structure

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a way for producing cinematic representations of contemporary urban environments based on the close study of Dziga Vertov’s mechanisms for story and plot development as instantiated in Man with a Movie Camera. Our investigation of screen cities and the way the image of the modern metropolis is constructed in cinema focuses on the examination of, and the experimentation with, the screen language of the “city symphony” film genre. This is pursued in two parts that tackle distinct - but to a certain extent complementary - aspects of the research. The first part of the article - the analytical segment- summarizes the results of the shot-by-shot formal analysis and the statistical processing of the accumulated metadata for Vertov’s cinematic text with the aim of mining relevant concepts for an informed discussion on aspects of film form and style for “city symphonies.” The second part of the article - the experimental one - attempts to transliterate the results of our analysis into the novel language of nonlinearity for the digital, interactive screen. This is deemed particularly important because, as this article suggests, a better understanding of the “city symphony” form will enable the production of more immersive filmic constructs about current urban phenomena.

Keywords:

• Dziga Vertov
• Man with a Movie Camera
• city symphonies
• shot-by-shot formal and stylistic analysis
• statistical processing
• contrapuntal montage
• metadata
• metadata visualization
• interactive narrative
• fugal narration

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stavros Alifragkis

Stavros Alifragkis is a graduate of the Department of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He attended M.Phil. courses at the Digital Studio, University of Cambridge and the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Stavros has taught undergraduate courses on film and architecture (Department of Architecture, University of Patras), technical drawing (Hellenic Army Academy) and history of art and architecture (Hellenic Open University). He has contributed to conferences with presentations on architecture and cinema, to film festivals with multimedia works, and to publications with papers on the representation of the city in cinema.

François Penz

François Penz teaches and researches in the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, where he is the director of the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies and the cofounder of the Digital Studio for Research in Design, Visualization and Communication (http://www.expressivespace.org). He coedited Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena through the Moving Image (2011) and recently completed a major Arts and Humanities Research Council project - the Cinematic Geographies of Battersea. He is currently coediting a book on Cinematic Urban Geographies to be published by Palgrave MacMillan, while his forthcoming monograph on Cinematic-Aided Design will be published by Routledge.