A man-like machine or a machine-like man?

An analysis of the figure of the camera operator through two pillars of film theory.

The relationship between man and machine has always been something both fascinating and frightening. For man and machine to meet somewhere half way, does the former need to be more like the latter, or the other way, or both? This concept is thoroughly analyzed in two works of art that revolve around one central figure on set: the camera operator. The works I will be considering are: “I quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore”, 1916-1925 book by Luigi Pirandello, and Dziga Vertov’s masterpiece from 1929 Man with a movie camera.

First of all, I believe that a small digression on the figure of the camera operator is necessary. Initially, when the role of the operator was to place the camera in a position in which all the action would be visible, and start recording as the actors performed, the operator and the director were the same figure. It is not until 1908, on the set for The Adventures of Dolly, that a man called D.W. Griffith started an argument with DoP Billy Bitzer by limiting his freedom of creative choice (Carluccio). As the first real theorist of the modern role of the director and the man who canonized close-ups and variety between shots of the same scene, we can say that Griffith created the figure of the camera operator not by defining the role itself, but by seceding the director from a technical role and giving him more creative power. As a result, the operator became the person who follows the directions of the director and the DoP.

Since then, these roles have started to encounter more and more differentiation. Only eight years later, in Italy, Luigi Pirandello published a book by the name “Si gira…” (translated as “Shoot!”), and published a modified version in 1925 with the name “I quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore” (translated as “The notebooks of Serafino Gubbio [camera operator]”). The novel is about a man who works as a cinematograph operator for a famous motion picture studio, and believes to be the perfect model of an op. When he films, he stops being a person, he is only “a hand that turns the knob”, completely impassive towards what happens in front of him. Serafino feels deeply saddened by the advent of machines in the world, and feels that man has given a superior role to the machine. No one needs to feel a “superfluous” in him (referring to feelings, unproductive thoughts), and if these emotions go against efficiency, they must be put aside. Although this book presents quite a squalid melodrama as its main plot, involving a love triangle and a man that seems to be passive but secretly performs a revenge, the value of the novel lies quite far from what it writes about. What is written between the lines, and the numerous moments in which Serafino walks around the city of Rome in deep thought, are the real pearls of this work. Pirandello is here performing a harsh criticism towards cinema, the newest invention, which has taken more noble arts such as music, theater, and painting, and taken out all of their beauty. It’s painting without color, music without sound, and theater without a continuous performance.

I believe that an interesting comparison could be made with a picture that any film freak, if so they want to be defined, must see. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a movie camera may seem a bit confusing to someone who uses dialogue and continuity editing to navigate into a film. The whole purpose of the picture is to create a universal language, and to tell real stories as opposed to the ones that classic Hollywood filmmaking was making at the time. Now, if you know nothing about Vertov’s theories, this movie is still a lot of fun to watch. If you do know about the soviet avantgarde filmmaker’s “kino-eye” (kinoglaz) theory, all the images gain more meaning. Vertov’s theory rotates around the idea that the camera, just as the human eye, can see. Through the constant movement of the operator, the camera can see and document the velocity of the city in the beginning of the last century. The most famous shot of the movie sees the superimposition of a camera lens and the human eye, to symbolize this personification of the cinematograph. Adding to this, Vertov continues specifying that the lens can see more than a human, since it can control time and space through a series of techniques: slow-motion, fast forward, freezing of images, zooming, and with the aid of editing it can crosscut, split-screen, superimpose, reverse speed, move in stop-motion, and so on so forth. Even the fact of simply recording something that is alive, and replay it exactly as it is, without filters of emotions and memory, is to me quite fascinating, and Vertov never hides a childlike wonder toward what this new technology can do.

The whole idea behind both these theories is that man, in this case the operator, and the machine, in this case the film camera, meet halfway. In Pirandello, the operator acts as if he were a camera recording everything he sees. Even in his style of writing, he describes incredibly communicative images, for example when he enters the apartment of Varia Nestoroff, the femme-fatale of the story: at first, he describes the whole environment, then he stops on the furniture, and then on the details of the paintings his late friend Giorgio left to her. Sounds familiar? It’s exactly recalling the scheme of establishing shots, close-ups, insert shots, both the sequence that is the most efficient to film, and the editing technique that helps us navigate in the environment we’re in. First you need to visually establish a door in the room, and then you can show a character walking in and out from it. This style of writing is the center of the research done by Moses in his analysis of this film-novel. Following the shock given by the tragic ending, Gubbio becomes the perfect camera operator he always aspired to be, and the one a world ruled by machines wants: 100% mechanical, 0% human. Just like the films of the time, he becomes silent, losing his ability to speak. Vertov sees this meeting in a much more positive view: just like the children awe by watching the tricks of the magicians, so the adults are amused by the peppy performance of the camera itself. At one point, losing its subordination to the operator that operates it, the camera takes off on its own through the technique of stop-motion, jumping up and down and nearly dancing. As Turvey notices in his article, the spectators are not afraid: they know that the human characteristics attributed to the camera are a prestidigitation trick, and think it’s funny. Traslated to Vertov’s theories, we have reason to believe that his personification of the camera is a metaphor. Although this theory has some criticisms and limits, I believe that the personification of machines and of the city itself in Vertov’s work is to die for.

There’s actually no reason for a bunch of machines to be stopped at night, were not for the people who need to supervise the work. Machines don’t need to rest, people do. But in Man with a movie camera, the machines of the factories are seen at rest, while people sleep, as if they were sleeping too. The many parallelisms with the human activity don’t have the intention, like in Pirandello, to undermine their behavior as soulless, but rather show a mutual collaboration between the man and the machine. The operator operates the camera, the camera shows the operator the most unimaginable of wonders of the world he lives in. Men and machines here work the same way: the woman wakes up, the city wakes up, the Venetian blinds “blink”, the machines start working, the camera iris adjusts its focus. Elements that are the most human, like love and the end of this love, are shown through a connection with the machine: as the trains around the city meet and move apart, these shots are alternated with men and women signing marriage and divorce licenses. All these connections, which man cannot see, are shown through the camera, metonimy for the entire process of making a film. The central idea in Vertov’s work is that men and machines are both perfect, they complete each other, they continue each other’s work (just think of the crosscutting between what seems like a sort of weaving machine and all the switchboard operators), but the camera can also help man to understand the connections between jobs that may seem completely different (like the match cuts between the editor working on the movie and the woman using the sewing machine). This ideology is specific to the context Vertov operates in, and the ideology of the upcoming industrialization of the Soviet Union, as well as the theories, recent for the time, of the conservation of energy (Turvey) that see man as a machine constantly converting energy into other forms.

Other considerations may be made on the controversial relationship between art and technology on this basis, but perhaps this will be for another article. To conclude, there is no one line in which the camera operator meets the camera: both creation and creator, the cinematograph is surely the most innovative element of the twentieth century, the one that will change the whole perception and the process of thinking of men of the time.

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Works Cited “David W. Griffith.” Il Cinema: Percorsi Storici e Questioni Teoriche, by Giulia Carluccio et al., Carocci, 2015, pp. 29–32. Manuali. Moses, Gavriel. “‘Gubbio in Gabbia’: Pirandello's Cameraman and the Entrapments of Film Vision.” MLN, vol. 94, no. 1, Jan. 1979, pp. 36–60. Italian Issue, The Johns Hopkins University Press. Pirandello, Luigi, and Simona Micali. Quaderni Di Serafino Gubbio Operatore. Classici ed., Feltrinelli, 2017. Turvey, Malcolm. “Can the Camera See? Mimesis in ‘Man with a Movie Camera.’” October, vol. 89, 1999, pp. 25–50., doi:10.2307/779138. Vertov, Dziga, director. Man with a Movie Camera. 1929.