In The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, we see the first ever twist ending in film and, Shymalans aside, a twist usually serves a purpose. For the most part, a twist ending puts everything that came before it in a new frame. The opening of Caligari seems nonsensical, on its first viewing. As the movie starts, we stumble into a conversation between two men in a decrepit garden. One of them says, "there are spirits--- everywhere. they are all around us. they have driven me From Hearth and Home- From Wife and child." The other man replies, "That is my fiance," referring to a woman walking by much like a ghost herself. "What she and I have experienced is even stranger than what you have lived through." The man, Francis--our hero--then begins to narrate his story. But what happened to the other man's story about spirits? When I first saw it, I wondered if maybe ghosts were popular subjects for movies at the time and this was a comment on their prevalence--a bait-and-switch for an audience used to ghosts. After Francis's true nature is revealed at the end of the movie, however, the opening scene becomes coherent. Once you know that they are two insane men conversing, a non-sequitur coming from the man sitting with Franics becomes passable as insanity coming from an insane man.
The revelation at the end of the movie, when combined with its framing counterpart at the beginning, gives the stylistic choices in the middle of the film all new meaning. Repeat viewings of the movie, like any with a twist ending, becomes like the I Spy series of books, but instead of looking for "a lion, a spring, an oar/A lobster claw, and dinosaur," you're finding colorized filters, expressionist set design, and altered representations of space. Every new element that supports the idea that this story is taking place in Francis's head is a little "a-ha" moment. | |
| A nighttime scene, shown through a filter. |
All of those artistic choices serve the purpose of placing us in the mind of the unsettled Francis. The color filters, while also serving the purpose of showing us night-time scenes under a cool blue, show the subjective view in which he perceives the real world. The set design also bring us into the mind of Francis, with its expressionist architecture and warped perspective created by painted shadows. The set's mostly sharp corners and flat backdrops create a surreal atmosphere--particularly in the festival. The festival contrasts with the asylum as a place where emotions can run wild. Painted shadows create interesting representations of space, making the whole story seem to take place in a physically small area, which in reality it is: Francis's brain.
One scene in particular combines both the filter and set design, where Jane, Francis's love interest, worries about her father (shown right). We see her through a rose filter--much like Francis sees her real-world counterpart--in front of smooth, curving crescendos painted in the background, some of the only curved set-pieces we see in the film. These elements, when combined with the framing narrative, put us in the perspective of a madman.
Man with the Movie Camera also has a framed narrative that challenges our perceptions. The movie is mainly composed of experimental shots strung together with no stronger of a plot than the ingredients list on a cereal box. As the movie opens we purvey a movie theater eager to be filled with an audience eager to watch a film, which is also the same film we're watching. The film we're watching is also a film about the making of the film we're watching. Somewhere in this mess our perspective is lost, but that's okay, because the fast pace of the movie holds our attention longer than we have to think about it. The beginning of the film within the film starts with scenes of an empty city, preparing for the day, echoing the empty theater preparing for the audience. The similarities between these scenes evokes Shakespeare's As You Like It, suggesting that maybe "all the world's a stage," but not quite as dramatically as the melancholy Jaques. 
Man with the Movie Camera is filled with images of eyes, from the people in posters watching the sleeping woman in the beginning, to the eyeball that is superimposed over the lens of the camera at the end (right). This motif raises questions about an audience's relation to what they are seeing, as does film itself. The director Dziga Vertov writes in his manifesto at the beginning that he wants to portray film as a completely separate form of communication in Man with a Movie Camera. He wants to show that a movie camera can really immerse audiences more than any other form of art, and take them to new places visually. There is a visual allusion to the Lumiére Brothers's L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat--and other early films--featuring a train coming right at the audience, which had allegedly scared early movie-goers into ducking in their seats to avoid being run over. Now, however, the audience only reacts with acceptance, as film has become common enough for people to know better--which is one of a goals of the movie.
Is there a character in the movie, if at all? You could say the cameraman is the closest thing we get to a character, in the main story. Of course, since we see through both the camera he's using and another camera filming him, it's hard to know who's point of view we're seeing this through. That's where the framing device in Man with the Movie Camera comes in: the audience watching the film is our real perspective. There is already a very strong connection created by the movie as they are scenes of the common man, but that connection is furthered as we are seeing these scenes through the eyes of an audience. We, as a people, are both the subject and the perspective! It's a movie for the people and by the people. Take the title of the film: Man with a Movie Camera. It's not The Man or A Man, it is Man, as a collective, pushing the boundaries of this new, totally immersive art form, together. This theme of unity is not too far from the communist ideas brewing in Russia at the time, either.
Both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Man with a Movie Camera transform when placed in their framed narratives. In Caligari, our perspective moves to an abstract realm in the surreality of a crazed man's mind. In Man with a Movie Camera our perspective is hyper-real, viewed through several layers of our own reality. In a way, everyone views reality through different frames: our senses are the only connection we have to the world around us, and then we are also framed by our culture, education, class--anything that effects how we view the world. Film, even in its infancy, is the chance to shed our own frames and see through a new lens.
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