Man With a Movie Camera, Soviet Materialism, & Materialism
9/2/21
I recently watched the 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov. I was very impressed by the editing techniques and cinematography used, and it is on these technical merits that the film has usually receives recognition. In the title cards before the film Vertov states that the intent of the film is to create a film “directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.” Had other filmmakers adopted this intent film would be a truly unique medium that could present scenarios that do not indebt it to any other art form. I’d like to watch more films created in this vein at some point as it is a very admirable intent.
However that is not the reason I am writing on this film, while watching it I came to a revelation about Soviet society. The scenes of machinery running, of trains running, of cars in the streets, of storefronts, of mines, they are the scenes created by a materialist people. Man with a Movie Camera is meant to show the triumph of the Soviet worker and society, that they could be a collective society and still possess the technology and amenities that made the capitalists so great in the first place. Both East and West strove for the same material objects under differing ideological categories.
Communism (i.e. Soviet communism) and capitalism were very similar in economic structure. In the communist state, the state owned the industry as opposed to the capitalist viewpoint of private ownership. During the Balkan War, the United States targeted the state-owned industry of Serbia for destruction even if it was not related to military production in order to free up the eventual Serbian market for American and Western European corporations. (Read To Kill a Nation by Michael Parenti for this and more fun NATO Balkans action)
Questions about the owner of the means of production aside, East and West were politically opposed rather than ideologically. Lenin-Stalinism failed to create a novel mode of production but used the capitalist mode of production. Even if the communist state made a commodity for use by the people, they were not a communist society or even a dictatorship of the proletariat as the state replaced the capitalist. The inputs and outputs were state-owned, and the workers received a wage for their work. The state as capitalist then had turned money into capital and was free to do what it pleased with the profit. Their “defeat” at the hands of “The West” and “capitalism” was inevitable when they had never truly left.
The conflict between East and West appears more manufactured when one considers that both were materialist societies. Even without conflict both societies would have continued to exploit natural resources to create objects and technologies to strive for “progress.” Escaping from the primacy of the materialistic viewpoint today I believe is of utmost importance to both the individual and to society. Most every individual in the world today is surrounded by the fruits and/or detritus of our global economy. Things which should have never been created are parts of life for all but the poorest. I believe that a new society founded new principles which first of all respect the natural world, ourselves, and the human spirit. Sadly, fully breaking free from the materialist viewpoint would be impossible without violent revolution, and few people today would choose to forgo modern conveniences to fight for what to them would appear to be a regressive movement. This topic and discussion will be continued in what will likely be my next post here, a sort of review of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene by Roy Scranton, which I believe is flawed but still contains interesting insights.
In summary, watch Man with a Movie Camera if you get a chance, go either to your preferred torrenting site or if you’d rather watch in the googlesphere there is a good quality version on Youtube with the Michael Nyman score which is nice.
EDIT (9/8/2021): I won't go back and edit this, but in retrospect this is a far too expansive topic to cover in only 900 words, I will try and expand on various parts of it through other posts but just know this is a skeleton of an argument.