Gender and the Modern Body: Men, Women, And Machines in Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera‪.‬

Dziga Vertov devotes little attention to women in his writings about the "kino-eye." He assigns the kino-eye several related meanings. It denotes a type of film-making: "the union of science with newsreel to further the battle for the communist decoding of the world" (Kino-Eye 41-2). It signifies the camera's vision: "more perfect than the human eye for fathoming the chaos of those visual phenomena which evoke spatial dimension" ("Film" 52). And it describes a fusion of human being and machine: "I am the kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye" (Kino-Eye 17). But gender does not seem to be a property or concern of the kino-eye. Yet Vertov's last silent film, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), widely held to be the apotheosis of his kino-eye philosophy, overflows with images of women. Man with a Movie Camera shows proletarian women and bourgeois women doing what they do and interacting with one another. It depicts women working, exercising, sun-bathing; women sleeping; women waking up; women getting married, giving birth, mourning near graves. The film presents men, too, in different postures and activities, but the camera focuses most intently on women.