This contrast of beauty and peril speaks directly to the experience of the filmmaker himself. Among the countless experimental techniques exhibited in Vertov's film, he employs a variety of modes which suggest self-reflexivity, especially as it relates to the filmmaker's balance of beauty and peril. From the very opening scene, there is a meta-reality implied by the acknowledgement of the content itself as being cinematic in nature. That is, the opening theatre sequence in which viewers file in, an orchestra prepares and a man readies the projector seems almost to reverse the concept of opening credits by mimicking the experience of the audience itself.
Such devices are employed thereafter as a vehicle for the delivery of the film itself. Long sweeping shots capture the filmmaker himself, traversing a symbolic demonstration of modern life. As Vertov observes the lives of citizens in the various Soviet cities used for the film's gathering of imagery, he transcribes the process of creating a film to an awakening in the early outset. The images of sleeping citizens, opening factories and vistas at dawn suggest a collective morning that implies more than just the act of rising for the day. Vertov connects the experiences of morning with the presentation of the filmmaker setting out for a day of human experience. This corresponds with Friedberg's explanation that "the virtual gaze is not a direct perception but a received perception mediated through representation." Friedberg continues by explaining that the virtual gaze "travels in an imaginary flanerie through an imaginary elsewhere and imaginary elsewhen." (Friedberg, p. 2)
Quite so, the way that Vertov jumps rapidly from one place to another, presumably representing infinite moments occurring in simultaneity, and moreover the way that Vertov only reveals selected bits of each image he offers, suggest that the morning at the outset of the film is a symbolic one. A concrete presentation of this moment would not allow for the sheer spectrum of images used to suggest this universal human experience of awakening.
Works Cited:
Friedberg, A. (1994). Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. University of California Press.
