Vertov’s "Man with a Movie Camera" is like Ambien for Modern Day Viewers
- Isla Ramie
- Jul 24
- 13 min read
“Ambien is indicated for the short-term treatment of insomnia characterized by difficulties with sleep initiation. Ambien has been shown to decrease sleep latency for up to 35 days in controlled clinical studies.” Side effects may include sensation of feeling drugged, emergence of new thinking or behavior abnormalities, and dependence (Sanofi-Aventis U.S. LLC 1).
First things first, clarifications and corrections must be made to my start-of-term essay. “Ruminating is one of my finer qualities; I tend to be an overthinker about everything and anything, but one thing I don’t overthink is film,” was misstated. I should have said, one thing I don’t overthink is movies. Truthfully, my film consumption for the past few years has consisted of a diet of Marvel movies. With all of the predictable plots and action-packed scenes, my brain barely registered that it was cinematically starving to death. The statement, “Nothing fails like success,” surely applies. I realized that my movie repertoire was malnourished, and in anticipation of our first day of class, I saddled up to the movie buffet and bought two movies I had seen clips of at work: The Departed and The Book of Eli. These movies did little to prepare me for what was to come. Little did I know I would soon be eating soup with chopsticks.
Book of Eli official trailer
Scene One: Eating with Utensils
If you had asked me to name film genres, my glib response would have included Sci-Fi, Romance, Comedy, Drama, Action, and Horror—the chicken nuggets and French fries of film genres. It would be like asking me before my Art History classes to name types of art. I would have replied, “Painting, drawing, mosaic, fiber art…,” completely missing the historical, contextual, and artistic foundations of art movements. I was also oblivious to the crossovers and connections between film and other art forms. There I was, happily dining at the kids’ table of the cinema, eating my peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off, when gingerly, a plate of appetizers was set on the table to entice. A small round plate with six escargots was presented with a fourchette à escargot. Like an initiation to fine dining, we were introduced to the language of film.
Film offerings and cinematographic techniques were placed before us in courses, but nothing was familiar. We learned about German Expressionism, Kino Pravda, Film Essays, and Film Noir. I love spaghetti, but had never heard of Spaghetti Westerns. The immersion into “film as art” and the “language of film” was overwhelming and dizzying, and it was a struggle to synthesize all the new experiences into meaning during class. I fumbled to know what fork with which to eat my salad and, as if living a fever dream, realized I had worn shorts and flip-flops to a Michelin restaurant.
Scene Two: Beware of the Magic Mushrooms
“Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head”
(Jefferson Airplane)
Learning the language of film is a journey, a bit like Alice's adventures in Wonderland. It's a journey that can be disorienting, but also endlessly fascinating. Understanding how lighting and camera angle can build suspense and even discombobulate viewers enriches the viewing experience. Whether film artists used drugs or they “were drugs” [sic] as Salvador Dali once said, “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs,” it is hard to deny the dreamlike and sometimes disorienting surrealism in early film (Menegas). A good production has ambiguity and artistry, serving as a form of medicine that provides food for thought. Surrealism is an exploration of the subconscious. Surrealism in film, broadly stated, acts like a mind-altering substance, forcing the question, “What is happening here?” High caliber films make you ask a second time, as the mind falters and we are unable to discern the truth of a situation: “No. What is really happening?” The genesis of inquiry into deeper meaning is the foundation for film as an art form. We see this in German Expressionism, as exemplified in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, where we are compelled to question the reality of the situation.
Expressionism’s exploration of subjective emotions and the subconscious is technically a precursor to Surrealism. We see this artistry in the angular set design of Dr. Caligari, which produces a dream-like quality to the settings. Yet we are confronted with a different type of Surrealism (or Reverse Surrealism) in witnessing artifacts of the horrors of the Holocaust in Night and Fog. We are sickened as the camera slowly pans downward, then upward, finally zooming outward from a colossal mountain of human hair horror softened only by a flute and clarinet lilting playfully in accompaniment. We question, “How could this happen?” and posit, “This atrocity is so horrendous it feels surreal.”
An excellent film bends or warps our perspective on reality in some fashion. It encourages and sometimes demands its viewers to solve a puzzle. “Why did they choose that music for that horrific scene?” Biting the cinematic mushroom can also force “logic and proportion to fall sloppy dead,” leading us down a rabbit hole of delightful nonsense laced with subtle symbolism as in Une Chien Andalou (Jefferson Airplane). Here, we see religious references and stigmata, with the oppression of religion depicted as a cross to bear, except that the cross is represented by a grand piano, two stone tablets, two priests, and a slain donkey as a sacrificial offering, or Christ-like stigmata in the hands, with Dali-esque ants marching out of the holes. This indelible imagery possibly alludes to the decay of Christian iconography—or does it? The questions in surrealist art lead to more questions, making the inquiry a journey with value and reward, with dividends of personal growth.
Un Chien Andalou- Film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali
Scene Three: The Main Course
“Man is more miserable, more restless and unsatisfied than ever before, simply because half his nature--the spiritual--is starving for true food, and the other half--the material--is fed with bad food.” (Brunton)
The film entrée that does not work for me is actually the entire genre of Film Comedy. I need to make a distinction between the Film Comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and Absurdist Humor like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, as well as tragic comedy, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which feature a surrealist thread or some existential questioning. It is an overarching distaste for slapstick humor, and I dislike it all, from Keaton and Chaplin, all the way to Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura. This stems from a discomfort of seeing people “hurt” in the name of comedy. It is a peculiar juxtaposition. The boxing match in City Lights is one example of physical “comedy” that I find trite. People abusing their bodies for money is not funny in any universe, and this activity is better suited to serious films like Million Dollar Baby. A second irksome scene is the whistle scene.
It is neither plausible nor humorous that Chaplin’s Tramp would gleefully get a whistle lodged in his trachea. It is nonsensical and is quite triggering for someone who works with individuals who swallow all manner of items in attempts at self-injury. When your patients have a code blue (medical emergency) called because they swallowed a spoon in front of your student, and your student spends the rest of the day feeling responsible for a patient’s impulses, this type of humor loses its luster.
When I was in elementary school, one of my English teachers told me that ending a story by stating “it was all a dream” is an unsatisfying trope. Although Sherlock Jr. doesn’t reverse the entirety of the film by saying it was all a dream (we are fully aware he is dreaming), it still plays as kitschy, as revolutionary as the plot line may have been at the time. Film Comedy doesn’t nourish the mind; in Keaton’s era, it served as a diversion from the hardships of the Great Depression (Clark). Although City Lights highlights problems with class systems, I would find it much more tolerable without the lowbrow, slapstick humor. And if this sounds pretentious, it is because I was just served snails with white napkins and fourchette à escargot. I cannot return to Tater Tots and Spaghetti O’s. I acknowledge that this review of Film Comedy is simplistic and understand that there were more serious works, such as The Great Dictator (which I have not seen), from Chaplin. Overall, the main critique is that movies such as City Lights and Sherlock Jr. wrap everything up in a neat little package, leaving no questions unanswered and nothing to the imagination. This is also how I initially felt about Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda opus The Man with a Movie Camera, which put me to sleep - twice.
Scene Four: Postprandial Somnolence
Certain movies have an immediate tranquilizing effect. Suppose, for the sake of explanation, that I am suffering from a bout of insomnia, in that case, the doctor only needs to order a viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life (yes, although it's my favorite impactful film, it puts me to sleep every time I watch), La La Land, and apparently Man with a Movie Camera. Man with a Movie Camera’s action is frenetic and exhausting to watch. The sound score is relentless, and its metronomic tempo is perfectly aligned with the action, with the scenes quickly flipping to the beat. The plotless nature of the film makes it difficult to follow without a consciousness drift. The active participation required to view it was insurmountable with the choo-choo train chugging soundtrack. Interestingly, when I went to sleep the night after watching the film, it consumed my dreams, vividly and hauntingly repeating, with pistons and gears intruding and penetrating my psyche. Some people report that when they take zolpidem tartrate, Ambien, a sedative-hypnotic for insomnia, it will put them to sleep, but it will also cause disturbing dreams.
How could something that was Kino-Pravda, “film truth,” and essentially a plotless documentary of the mundane Soviet experiences of bathing, working, and socializing in 1920s modernity, be affecting my mind so voraciously? I understood that the editing techniques used throughout the piece were cutting-edge for the time, and since it is a highly regarded film, I decided to give it another viewing. Again, I fell asleep but not before realizing the more nuanced timings of the clips and the alignment of the soundtrack to the transitions.
I am a person who can fall asleep at a stoplight. I am incapable of meditating without sleeping. I realized that this film must be drawing me to some subconscious place, although I wasn’t sure where. Until another bout of Ambien-like dreaming and a revelation hit me like a thunderclap. The film was a surrealist work disguised as a quasi-documentary. The overlapping film cuts, scenes that split like a kaleidoscope, and the visual parallels. It effused symbolism: life, death, marriage, divorce, the prosaic dissected through the magic of editing and effects. I became inspired. I wrote this on social media to document my thought process.
“We dug deep into the camera, communication, the language of film, and film as art. We learned about Dziga Vertov and "Kino Pravda," translated from Russian as "film truth." I hated the first screening of Vertov's, 'Man with a Movie Camera." It put me to sleep. So, I watched it again, and it put me to sleep again. But why? Is it that real life was so mundane I couldn't muster the attention span for it on display by Vertov? And isn't that the opposite of what Instagram, TikTok, and Shorts are? Those flashy, curated bits meant to hook us, but have no real consequence or meaning whatsoever in actual life or truth. Clickbait to keep us scrolling and connect us to a system that feeds on our attention, drinking our brain syrup and manufacturing an army of mummified zombie clones.In Fellini's 8 1/2, I learned that film and art should be an exploration of one's style, a process of finding oneself rather than adhering to traditional structures. In the movie, the central character, Guido, grapples with creating a film with meaning and the daunting creative block that threatens his purpose. What threatens our purpose as creators? I would venture to say “Trends.” Trends are death to creativity. We use trending reels to be noticed to appease the Algorithm, but in that vain, we become like worker bees for the Meta hive. We can create beauty, but I would argue it isn't Truth. Not true to who we actually are, as in Kino Pravda. It often isn't our favorite song that we're using for that Reel; it's some audio that we hope will get us noticed by an algorithm. If that doesn't evidence us being connected to a Matrix, I don't know what does. The camera gives us truth, but in our perfectly curated edits and cuts, we are losing truth to appease the masses. In our soundtrack and content choices, we are subjugating ourselves to something that lacks true meaning and genuine expression.” (Isla Ramie)
Vertov was revolutionary because he didn’t merely document; he questioned, explored, interposed, developed, and painted with film. He was an architect and builder of reality using a camera and editing. When the film came out, it was not well received (Crofts). It was “ahead of its time.” Looking back now, all of the techniques are dated; the film feels like a relic. In this paradox, we see the genius of a film that lives in the interspace – both frozen in and ahead of its time, simultaneously. His efforts to document “that which has been, owing to the manner in which it was perceived in natural speed, not absolutely unseen but missed by sight, subject to oversight. An attempt to approach slowly and calmly that original intensity which is not given appearance, but from which things and processes have nonetheless in turn derived,” exhibits the potential of all social media unadulterated by expectation, convention, and monetary reward (Vertov, xix). The camera literally and figuratively came to life in the film, and if it wasn’t already apparent, the stop-motion camera footage at the end of the film made this clear. Vertov elevated the ordinary to an art form as addictive as Ambien, and just as meditatively sedating.
Scene Five: There is Always Room for Dessert
The film that impacted me most profoundly before I wrote Scene Four was Orson Welles ' Citizen Kane. From the Dutch angle, as debuted by Vertov but rooted in Robert Wiene’s set design for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, to the soundscaping, the directorial and cinematographic collaboration between Welles and Gregg Toland is legendary. Montage scenes effectively develop character relationships. Symbolism, such as Emily Monroe Norton Kane reading the Chronicle in the breakfast scene, showcases evolving personalities. However, the message is the most enduring aspect of this film, by far. Childhood is a critical time in an organism's lifespan, and the nurturing and unconditional love of a caregiver cannot be overstated. There is nothing that will fill the void created by the parental or caregiver loss.
Citizen Kane, released in 1941, debuted during the period of discovery into Melanie Klein’s Psychoanalysis of Children in 1932, and the Theory of Object Relations, and the later developed Attachment Theory (John Bowlby, 1950s), which each relate to childhood trauma and object loss and their detrimental and lasting effects on the psyche and personality development. Bowlby stated, “The attempt to regulate affect – to minimize unpleasant feelings and to maximize pleasant ones -is the driving force in human motivation.” (9) This quote provides light on which to understand the inequality between love, trauma, and wealth for Charles Kane. The balance cannot be achieved for Kane because his childhood trauma is always greater, but never equal to the sum of love plus money.
Like interest compounded, Kane’s wealth grew, and so did the effects of his childhood losses. His life became a blackhole, sucking love and affection but never reciprocating. For Kane, reciprocation was internally perceived as an additional loss. Jed Leland touched on this when he stated, "I suppose he had some private sort of greatness. But he kept it to himself. He never gave himself away. He never gave anything away. He just left you a tip." The symbolism permeates the film as we witness Welles’ take on a Shakespearean tragedy. The main character's transformation fully devolves when Kane tears up his list of principles. This brilliant symbolism represents his fall from greatness. Kane’s pursuit of love through power was the hamartia that led to his downfall. It is a universal reminder applicable to all viewers as we assemble the pieces of our life’s puzzle. The movie comes full circle with opening and closing scenes that closely mirror each other but in reverse. An addition is made to the end sequence where smoke spews from the prominent chimney, rising from the fires burning Kane’s “worthless” earthly possessions. Ashes to ashes. It is poetic. The movie leaves no loose ends, yet it begs the viewer to explore the human condition using Charles Foster Kane as Exhibit A. The cinematography does not yield to the “no trespassing sign.” The tenebrism of the set lighting cannot hide the failures of Charles Foster Kane. As was stated in class, more is revealed in darkness than in light. This is a reason why Film Comedy will never reach the greatness of a movie like Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane demands an examination of our egos while pondering existential questions about the alignment between our values and the meaning in our unique life experiences. Citizen Kane implores us to solve a puzzle not only for the protagonist but as an act of self-reflection. In this way, Toland and Welles have drawn from self-reflective qualities of German Expressionism and even Surrealism as we ponder, “What is happening here?”
Scene Six: Check, please!
(Pay it Forward)
The gourmand pushes back from the table, wipes the crumbs from the corners of their mouth, and loosens their shrinking waistband with a smug contentment in conclusion of a well-prepared meal. The cinephile presented with the gourmet film offerings of this past week feels no such satisfaction. There is only a lingering hunger, an addiction to film that rivals Kane’s rapacity, made apparent through his acquisition of headless statues. Film as art, meritorious in its exploration of the human condition, leaves us with more questions than answers. It shakes us to our core and uplifts our collective consciousness, imploring us to pay it forward. It requires us to pay homage to our creativity, explore, discuss, and challenge what we think we see to glean more profound meaning in the mundane, the archaic, and the egregious. The language of film sets the bait, luring and trapping us in interspaces of light, sound, and editing to dance over webs, daring us to pull a thread, summoning those things from the depths of our psyche to devour who we thought we were. When consuming film products, be aware of potential side effects, which may include the sensation of feeling drugged, new thoughts, behavioral abnormalities, disturbed sleep, and dependence. Clinical studies have shown these symptoms can manifest in a period as short as a week.
Remember what the dormouse said…feed your head.
Works Cited
Bowlby, John. 1999. Attachment and Loss. 2nd ed. Basic Books.
Brunton, Paul. n.d. “The Notebooks of Paul Brunton.” Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation. Larson Publications. https://www.paulbrunton.org/notebooks/para/14109.
Clark, Robert G. “Movie Going in the Great Depression: Sophistication or Light Nothingness?, Peterborough Movie History. n.d. Retrieved July 21, 2025.
Crofts, S., and Rose, O. 1977. “An Essay Towards Man with a Movie Camera.” Screen 18 (1): 9–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/18.1.9. Retrieved July 22, 2025.
Isla on an Adventure [@isla_ramie]. “This is a post about how we document our lives…” Instagram, 21 July, 2025. https://www.instagram.com/isla_ramie/
Jefferson Airplane. “White Rabbit.” Surrealist Pillow, RCA Victor, 1967. Musixmatch.
Klein, Melanie. 1960. The Psychoanalysis of Children. Translated by Alix Strachey. First Evergreen Edition. Grove Press. Library of Congress (60-11091). https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Klein_Psychoanalysis_of_Children.pdf.
Menegas, Christa. 2019. “Salvador Dalí’s Got Your Number.” Medium, September 17. https://medium.com/@christaweilmenegas/salvador-dal%C3%ADs-got-your-number-b6f4b035949e. Retrieved July 21, 2025.
Pay It Forward quotes ... Movie Quotes Database. https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/pay-it-forward.html
Sanofi-Aventis U.S. LLC. Ambien (zolpidem tartrate) [package insert]. US Food and Drug Administration Website, https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2008/019908s027lbl.pdf, Revised February 2008, Accessed July 21, 2025.
Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. University of California Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=N-T_ogXMzlgC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&ots=2noyWthpbb&sig=t#v=onepage&q=paradoxically&f=false.
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