[For Film 220]
Even with the title card, Vertov and his Kino-Eye collective have been very clear about it: Man with a Movie Camera is a proclamation of victory of their movement’s program of “cleansing [the] kinochestvo[1] of foreign matter – of music, literature, and theater…”(We: Variant of a Manifesto) and to establish a “visual (kino-eye) and auditory (radio-ear) class bond between the proletariats of all nations and lands on a platform of the communist decoding of world relations (Kino-Eye).” Other than an experimentation of form, more than what the disclaimer title cards would state,[2] Man with a Movie Camera is an experiment of socialist praxis in cinematic language after Eisenstein’s montage dialectics – to finally realize in cinema what does it mean to be a proletariat.