To Patty Zimmerman. She was a radical iconoclast—rest in power, Professor Zimmerman. 

“I am the Movie Eye. I am the mechanical eye. The machine shows you the world, as only I can see. From now on and forever I am free from human immobility. I am in constant motion… My path leads to the creation of a new perception of the world. That way I can decipher the world you don’t know.” These words of the great Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov have changed and continue to change the senses and cognitive experiences of modern filmmaking. New visual, auditory, linguistic, and literary codes and means of expression emerge and totally affect the existence of people and the communications between them. Over the decades, cinema has undergone revolutionary upheavals, breakthroughs, and leaps forward. One of these technological leaps, which lead to completely new artistic views and define the styles for years to come, is the film work of Dziga Vertov. Proof of this are the modern art pieces Lilo and Me, by Kip Fulbeck, RMB City by Cao Fei, Disorder by Huang Weikai, and Sky of Dubai by Anne Spalter reflect the influence of the “Movie Eye,” or Cine-Eye montage style of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera to highlight the shifting landscape of the modern world village, the working class, local culture, and community, thus creating a new mode of constructed realism. 

In his essay “The Man with a Movie Camera” Vertov says he is fighting “for a resolute cleanup of film language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature” and develops the “Movie-Eye” (Cine Eye) - an editing method. Vertov believes that it will help modern “man” to transform from a defective being into a higher, more accurate form, and compares man to machines: “In the face of the machine, we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what to do if we find the infallible ways of electricity to be more exciting than the erratic speed of active people […] I am the Movie Eye.”

Dziga Vertov links pieces of events in Man with a Movie Camera with editing sequences energized by a continuous orchestral accompaniment to the action. Vertov rarely employs long takes in Man with a Movie Camera, instead choosing short sequences to interpolate time disjunctively and emphasize the lack of “shifting relations,” or encounters, between social being and physical objects. Vertov cements the working order of machines and their operators in his editing style. On long takes, MacDougal laments “They may even appear as surrealism not because they invoke the irrational or the unconscious, but because they force upon us the recognition and confrontation with the unnamed and the unremarked.” The length of the film is itself an index of the meaning contained within each shot. With an hour-long  runtime, the film dynamically tells the length of the story of its own creation, metaphysical as it is in its poeticism and self-reflexivity.

Directing the film’s “eye” (according to Vertov) in the direction of the dynamics of life and industrial-socialist reality shows a world that is not yet fully developed. The Kino-eye, which is in “continuous motion,” seems to Vertov the only one capable of showing reality. Vertov’s original idea was that it was necessary to create a language designed for vision, not recognition. That way, the creation of new forms of art, through camera technology, as he saw it, can return the experience of the world to a person, resurrecting things and killing pessimism. His vision encouraged people to use their senses. One of the heroes of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is an editor. Here it is worth noting Sergei Eisenstein and his work Editing of Attractions, and Lev Kuleshov and his discovery of the Kuleshov Effect, which consists of the fact that the scene acquires an appropriate emotional color depending on the nature and content of editing connections. Thus, the editing table becomes a tool for constructing a film image, in this case, the image of a perfect person. 

The film depicts several time periods - from early morning to noon - from the life of the big city. It is not very clear which city this is, although everything was filmed mainly in Odessa, Ukraine (at that time part of the Soviet Union), with some episodes filmed in Moscow. The result is a synthetic city designed by the director. The lens of the film camera thus acts as both a window and an eye. The film camera absorbs the signs of a biological and mechanical device, eliminating the opposition between living and inanimate. The film lens becomes a mediator between two worlds - the world of man and the world of the city. From the first he borrows initiative and mobility, from the second - omniscience and the superhuman ability to see. Since a person can be seen everywhere in the city, examined with a cinematic eye, all his actions are recorded on film by a person with a camera. Participation in different worlds and the media function of the camera both, therefore, grant the camera one of the “heroic” roles of film.

Dziga Vertov defines himself as a poet of non-fiction cinema, inventing new cinematic techniques for capturing “pieces of life,” facts from life in a new reality. The romantic radicalism with which Vertov defended the leading role of newsreels (with its rejection of words, plot, and acting) in the development of Soviet cinema in the 1920s, proclaiming the newsreel’s monopoly in depicting revolutionary everyday life, testifies to him as an unfailing fighter for film language and film truth. In search of pure cinematic language, Dziga Vertov advocates for  the removal of everything that is not cinema (literature, theater, painting) from cinema, standing against any mediation between the camera and life. He attempted to create an absolute cinema based on the theory of fact, on the one hand, and the constructivist theory of things, on the other.

In Sky of Dubai, American new media artist Anne Spalter rejects the glamor of French city films and replaces it with a neo-constructivist expression through sophisticated digital editing, reimagining the constructed reality of early post-revolutionary Soviet past. Spalter creates a kaleidoscopic expression through mixed media (helicopter footage combined with custom software) to merge East and West, “old and new, and bring spiritual order to visual complexity.” In the spirit of Dziga Vertov’s Cine-Eye, Spalter uses a “neo-constructivist” animated expression to unify specific intersectional socio-political narratives of the increasingly globalized world in the common language of cinema. The editing, or “visual order,” of Spalter’s cityscape rejects the style of the French city film and its galvanization of people for discussion. Instead, her experimental approach is more visually akin to the realism sought by Vertov: “The body of cinema is numbed by the terrible poison of habit. We demand an opportunity to experiment with this dying organism, to find an antidote.” Through participating in such visual experimentation, Spalter suggests an obstructed view of globalization.

Spalter showcases modern-day Dubai in a neo-constructivist editing mode by showing a picture constantly dominated by a digital edition of the revolving, spinning industrial structures that make life in the desert possible. In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov uses the camera as a neutral observer, recording life as it is. In the editing sequences, the recording is assembled, creating a constructed realist picture, understood in the tendency of the director not to connect any element in a flowing thought, but to use an approach of constant changes and surprises. Through a long drone shot, Spalter rejects Vertov’s Cine-Eye editing technique in favor of digital effects. While this may seem contrary to the Cine-Eye editing mode, Spalter, in Vertovian spirit, uses modern technology to achieve her “aesthetic,” reproducing reality through a modern approach.

In the tune of constructivist editing, Spalter invokes Man with a Movie Camera as an avant-garde constructionist expression, using a variety of camera tricks and editing devices to create meaning. The picture Spalter creates explores Dubai silently and smoothly, cathartically arriving at a still image of a series of highways, using the availability of technology to record the world around, but omitting its sound. In the absence of any voiceover narration, orchestra, or subtitle signifying or separating elements of the action in the film, the artist showcases an aerial view of Dubai with a critical, distant eye. This perspective reflects the unplanned, unpredictable, and unplayed filmic poeticism of Vertov’s cinema by replacing sound with an oversaturation of visual element: a blue hue to dominate the length of the picture and a barrage of kaleidoscopic motion image manipulation to splice pieces of reality into a new, constructed one. In Sky of Dubai, Anne Spalter seeks spiritual meaning by omitting sound in her meditative study of the Dubai skyline and replacing the sensory deprivation with a stimulating construction of visual effects.

Lilo and Me (2003) is a project that represents the world through a distinct perspective, that of its Hapa creator, Kip Fulbeck. In the context of his upbringing as a mass media consumer in the late 20th century in the United States, this autobiographical project is rooted in Fulbeck’s personal frustrations with his underrepresentation as a mixed-race person. Lilo and Me uplifts and represents Hapa people in the New World by challenging Disney’s authority over child idols in the mass media. This autobiographical project is a democratic, educational video response to systematic racism against Asian-Americans in the U.S. mass media. Through Lilo and Me, Hapa filmmaker Kip Fulbeck examines race and resists Disney’s lack of representation for people that look like him.

Documentary is by definition participatory and democratic, and is meant to represent a variety of perspectives. According to American film critic Bill Nichols, “Documentaries not only represent the world from a distinct perspective but may also stand for or represent the interests of others. In a participatory democracy, each individual participates actively in political decision making rather than relying on a representative.” Through a careful exploration of his mixed-race heritage, Fulbeck participates actively in the political act of making his identity known. By examining the muting of race in mainstream media and its effects on multiracial Americans, Fulbeck conditions white American viewers to reevaluate their privilege. From a Soviet lens, however, Fulbeck’s exploration of state-controlled media and disregard for the fiction film medium would eliminate all stereotypes attached to minorities completely, along with the uncanny ground of racial ambiguity on which modern Disney films tread. Thus, if Lilo and Me were restored in Soviet society, Fulbeck’s self-representation would be seen as an act of democracy. 

Vertov was interested in some of the poetry of the Russian futurists. The distinct style that would later largely contextualize Vertov’s response to Soviet ideas at the time, constructivism, as pioneered by Aleksandr Rodchenko and others, was met with meaning from the sounds of the letters themselves, the typing sound of a typewriter. From a Vertovian perspective, however, the act of creating a work like Lilo and Me is an act of racial liberation in defiance of the corporate-controlled mass media landscape of the United States. By cementing himself and his mixed-race identity as something beyond the corporate grasp of Disney, Fulbeck establishes a distinct Hapa heritage representation in the media as well as commenting on the lack thereof. He does this in defiance of the cyclical sorting of people into ethnic categories as a part of his larger artist involvement in identity politics in the United States.

The sound in the video rendition of the SecondLife digital media project RMB City is joyous and effervescent throughout. Constructed by Cao Fei, a contemporary Chinese multimedia artist, this work serves as a space for digital immersion and reflection upon the modern world, as well as an exhibition of the atrocities of modernization. RMB City’s disjunctively spliced hymn of sonic movement invokes Dziga Vertov’s criticism of a Hollywood sound. According to Vertov, “media-induced perception (the Cine-Eye and the Radio-Ear) trains modern eyes to see simultaneity and speed and modern ears to register non-tempered sounds (industrial and urban noises).” The movement of the sound from repetitive carnival-like music to a 3D world transiently violates any perception of time and space for the viewer, while also remaining free of dialogue. 

In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov rejects the Western notion of using new motion picture technology to invoke a hallucinating audience stirred primarily to consume. Vertov, instead, creates a film that would encourage the viewer to use their senses to respond to everyday reality. Though he argues that cinematography does not need any inauthentic representations, Vertov and company used Cine-Eye montage to create dramatic figure-ground superimposed constructions that may be interpreted as misrepresentative of everyday reality. Aimed at representing the reality of his existence instead, Vertov steers away from peer revolutionary narratives, and pioneers a cinema that would show that nonfiction film can be infinitely more creative, dynamic, and interesting than fiction film.  

Through the use of a repetitive soundtrack, Fei draws attention to the cycle of consumerism and material production characteristic of the Chinese modern metropolis. The video rendition of RMB City’s cacophonous soundscape builds a world of excess on SecondLife, a tune eternally backed by the industrial processes echoed in the real-life megacities of China. The sounds of the industry of the Chinese megacity drown out all human presence, making the film sonically disorienting. In the absence of a falling action, the electronic soundscape transforms into a hypnotic, meditative specter of its former tone, as the cityscape is revealed throughout the film’s run. The tone of the soundtrack engages the viewer overwhelmingly with repetitive sonic hymns, until the filmmaker, the world’s creator, Cao Fei, decides the ending section of the film will bring the viewer’s attention away from the details and back to the construction and the city.

Acting contrary to the Stalinist use of sound for pictures meant for manipulating audiences and spreading his ideology, Fei adopts a Vertovian approach to sound design and cinematography. As put by Douglas Kahn, “[the] advent of sound Stalin’s doctrine of socialism in one country would enjoy its cinematic counterpart.” Rather than for propaganda, as Stalin saw sound to adopt the new technology, Dziga Vertov, in his later career, along with his contemporaries, saw sound’s coming to the motion picture as an additional component to montage. 

The soundscape in RMB City invokes Cao Fei’s conception of creating a space meant for contextualizing China’s place in world politics, showcasing “a rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City [is] realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country’s future.” In creating a sensational and electronic soundscape in their digital artwork, the artist accepts China’s obsession with modernization, intending a digital landscape as such to be an online space for reflection on the present reality of their country. Thus, Cao Fei challenges the notion of an immutable reality by building a world consistent only with the digital sound experience in an imagined Chinese megacity on SecondLife.

Huang Weikai’s documentary film Disorder distinguishes its cinematic perception of events from Vertov’s Cine-Eye and Radio-Ear by employing a variety of amateur video sources and orchestrating them into a new socio-philosophical expression. Weikai does this in order to represent the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society, which is invisible in the eyes of the Chinese state-controlled mass media. In relation to the working-class people depicted in the film, the camera is positioned on eye-level. Rather than acting in accordance with the industrializing, metropolizing machine of modern China, as Vertov once acted in accordance with the goals of the revolutionary-era Soviet Union, Weikai edits contrarily. The anti-government stance Weikai approaches through editing is thus identified in the democratic cinematographic perspective of the film. 

As American literary critic and historian Hayden White analyzes the medium of representing factual content, “It seems to be a matter of distinguishing between a specific body of factual “contents” and a specific “form” of narrative and of applying the kind of rule which stipulates that a serious theme - such as mass murder or genocide - demands a noble genre - such as epic or tragedy - for its proper representation.” Through the compilatory, news-reel editing style of Disorder, Huang Weikai witnesses the world on level with the public and draws attention to the underbelly of people suffering political violence amidst the growing forces of China’s industries. The visual witness of social unrest in Disorder, revealed on level with the public, and the depiction of sociopolitical violence is told grimly, and in accordance with Cine-Eye.

Weikai does this through adopting an eye-level camera and expressive, low-key, natural-light fueled black and white tone, creating a cinematographic mode consistent with realism. However, the compilatory editing style, echoing in its depiction of the life of the working class, highlights the same series of dualities (life and death, marriage and divorce, etc.) explored through editing techniques such as superimposition in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. This characterizes Disorder more closely as an expression of neo-constructivism, that is, a new mode of editing. 

Dziga Vertov and the iconic Cine-Eye style of constructivist montage embossed within Man with a Movie Camera are celebrated through the contemporary works Lilo and Me, by Kip Fulbeck, RMB City by Cao Fei, Disorder by Huang Weikai, and Sky of Dubai by Anne Spalter. Through making his identity known, Fulbeck liberates his misrepresentation in the eye of the United States mass media. Fei, in turn, reflects the industrial sounds heard in the everyday industrialization of China. Weikai edits in the realist style consistent with the Cine-Eye of Kino Pravda, but stylistically separates from modern Chinese state narratives by rejecting the fast-paced, machine-oriented Cine-Eye editing style of Man with a Movie Camera, expressing Weikai’s alignment with the social being, rather than the material. Spalter uses pieces of a mute reality distantly witnessed through the global eye and reconstructs it to create spiritual meaning out of a globalizing landscape. Through the critical use of a variety of filmmaking techniques, the authors of the above mentioned contemporary works synthesize a new approach to modern documentary filmmaking. They present a new mode of documentary filmmaking by both stylistically embracing the poetic expressions of Vertov’s filmmaking style and retaliating against them using the framework of constructed realism set forth by Dziga Vertov and Man with a Movie Camera.

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