a videographic montage experiment.

Made in a seminar on montage theory in Fall 2023 at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. 

Inspired by Lev Manovich’s „The Language of New Media“ this investigation of Человек с киноаппаратом (Man With a Movie Camera) from 1929 by Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Kaufman, and Yelizaveta Svilova turned into a communal videographic re-thinking of the film through today’s media.

Starting with a randomly assigned montage sequence from the film, the the task was to remake that sequence, with exact same length of the individual shots as in the original.

The result touched and made us think in unexpected ways, forging new understandings not only what Человек с киноаппаратом did and still keeps doing, but also of our own media practices, how we watch, think, and move through our world. 

This videographic experiment is an analysis as practice. It opens up new associations between different times, media, practices, and perspectives. And it makes clear that we all, as we are seeing, filming, editing, and projecting our existence while we live it, have become those BEINGS WITH A CAMERA which Vertov, Kaufman, and Svilova dreamt of.