Techxual Cinema

In Man With a Movie Camera (1929) and Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), directors Dziga Vertov and Stanley Kubrick create a picture of the values prioritized by their respective societies through optimistic associative imagery and satire.  While extending the reality of these societies in order to make a point about them, the directors of both films convey a message through thematic patterns.  Through these patterns, gender roles and sexuality are portrayed through the "lens"of human interaction with technology, illustrating the different cultural values of the respective societies in which the films were made. 

The portrayal of women is one way cultural values within both films are illustrated.  In Man With a Movie Camera, images and editing, rather than narrative or dialogue, are used to convey the role of men and women in the film.  The audience sees women participating in work, sports, and recreation at a seemingly equal level to men.  Director Dziga Vertov also shows aspects of family life in couples getting married and divorced, as well as the cycles of birth, life and death.  Sex is implied only inasmuch as it perpetuates life cycles and creates families that contribute to the community.  Men and women seem to be portrayed as equal in these tasks and only differ in their natural reproductive roles, such as one scene where a woman is shown giving birth.  Women are filmed while exercising and getting groomed and pampered, emphasizing a luxury and leisure aspect of this society, in which women are clearly participating.  Yet in another scene, a woman is packing cartons of cigarettes in a factory or workhouse of some sort.  This depicts the industrial environment of the Soviet Union, and since women of various ages are shown working in numerous scenes, it also emphasizes equality among genders in the labor market.  The woman packing cigarettes is also smiling and seemingly chatting cheerfully with the cameraman, indicating that she is happy and enjoying her work.  These are significant images because they distinguish Vertov's society in terms of how women are valued, in this case beyond simple reproductive value to their contribution to economy and labor.   They depict a society in which women are allowed and encouraged to work; in some cases in the same jobs as men.  This may not seem significant to someone watching the film in the present day, but the work ethic of the Soviet Union contrasts with those of many other countries in 1929, including many in the Western world, where it was very uncommon for women to work, especially if they were married. 

Conversely, in Dr. Strangelove, women are virtually non-existent. The few women that are shown in the film are depicted as mere sex objects, with no real involvement in the plot.  One female character is General Turgidson's bikini-clad secretary, Miss Scott.  She serves an almost completely irrelevant purpose as she answers Turgidson's phone, and then seems to become nothing more than a second phone receiver as she channels the conversation between Turgidson and his caller, only making her mark by "dressing up" Buck's blunt responses as she repeats them.   In fact, the only reason we see her at all in this scene, is to draw attention to the obvious sexual relationship between Miss Scott and General Turgidson. This sexual role is the only real purpose she serves for Turgidson, just as it is the only role women play throughout the film.  The other example of this is, and indeed the only other glimpse of a woman we get during the entire film, is a Playboy centerfold Major Kong is looking at aboard the B-52 (reportedly the same woman who played Turgidson's secretary, real life Playboy centerfold Tracey Reed [Boxen]).  This is another example of a woman who is nothing more than a sex object (in this scene she isn't even real), and this is the very limited role women play in Dr. Strangelove.   This is not to say that Kubrick is sexist, or that he did not want women in his film.   But rather he is setting up a world within the film, mimicking real life, in which the action is dominated by men, in order to show how nuclear war and the technology involved is an obsession linked to male sexual fantasies.

In Man With a Movie Camera, men's roles substantiate the roles the film gives women by painting them in a very similar light.  They are doing many of the same things as women such as working, sports, socializing and drinking.  In one shot, men and women are even shown drinking together in a tavern.  In another scene, men are shown running and engaging in sporting activities while women cheer them on.  In the very next shots, women are shown participating in the same events as the men we have just seen, but this time, the men are shown on the sidelines cheering for the women.  The use of editing, and the placement of these shots sequentially suggests that these roles are interchangeable in this society and completely independent of gender.  Both men and women can and do engage in sports for recreation, and both find a place cheering on their counterparts.  Men are shown to occupy a very similar place as women in the world Vertov is trying to construct. 

However, in Dr. Strangelove, men take on very different roles compared to Vertov's film.  The film is populated with very powerful men in both political and military positions.  Whereas women barely seem to exist, men control everything.  And in the same way women are shown to be submissive sex objects, men are struggling amongst themselves for dominance.  The situations dealt with in the film are filled with innuendo and sexual symbolism, beginning with the opening credits.  Kubrick uses romantic music played against the image of two planes refueling to symbolize a sexual act.  Phallic symbols are peppered throughout the film from the B-52 bombers to machine guns, to the bombs themselves, the ultimate objects of destruction.  Some male characters display their own sexual obsessions through recurring oral fixations such as Ripper's ever-present cigar, Turgidson's constant gum chewing and Dr. Strangelove's cigarette.  These characters and their bombs are all in positions of power, and since men are the only ones with power in this film, the film makes implications about male pre-occupation with sex and power, and that basic sexual urges drive decisions at even the highest levels of government (Maland 197).

Gender and sexuality are explored and delivered in both films through the use of technology.   In Man With a Movie Camera, men and women share common interactions with technology.  A major aspect of the film is capturing the people behind the Soviet Union's massive industrialization in the late 1920s.   Much of the technology shown in the film is labor-intensive industrial technology.  We see both men and women working in mills and on assembly lines, with no obvious organizational or hierarchical implications.  Everyone seems to be working at the same level and doing equal work.  "Workers are not seen as oppressed, but as participating cheerfully in the country's economic growth (Bordwell and Thompson 445)." But cinematic technology is also on display in this film, and this also highlights how gender roles factored into the making of the film.  The people involved in making the film are actually shown on screen performing their respective skills.  In another very gender-balanced example, male cameraman Mikhail Kaufman is shown getting shots at the filming locations, while female editor Elisaveta Svilova appears on screen editing the film Kaufman has been shooting.  These scenes as they are related to each other through editing, show how men and women can equally use and benefit from technology.  This is no surprise, considering the society from which the film came, and the strong need for labor and manpower to facilitate the Soviet Union's industrial development which required the cooperation of both genders in order to meet labor quotas.  Vertov's treatment of these situations gives an insight into the popularly held Marxist ideals of community and egalitarianism that were prioritized in the Soviet Union in 1929.

In Dr. Strangelove, there is very little interaction between women and technology, with one exception:  the telephone.  We see Miss Scott using the telephone, though it is in actuality a very ineffective use of the telephone.  She also uses it inappropriately when she calls Buck in the War Room to discuss their relationship.  We also see examples of more effeminate male characters attempting to use phones, but with little success.  Group Captain Mandrake and President Merkin Muffley have both names and demeanors that indicate to the audience that they are more aligned with the ineffective, submissive idea of women in the film, rather than with their irrational ultra-masculine counterparts such as Ripper and Turgidson.  For both Mandrake and Muffley, the telephone becomes an obstacle to achieving a desired goal through their inability to effectively use it.  Mandrake is unable at first to call SAC (Strategic Air Command) Headquarters because he doesn't have enough change to use the pay phone, and Muffley's conversations with Premier Dmitri Kissov are less than helpful because he can't get past trivialities such as whether they can hear one another clearly.  On the other side of this, the ultra-male men in this film wield technological weapons somewhat more effectively, but are also ruthless and destructive in doing so.  Ripper is successful in starting a nuclear war, but he has no regard for the human life he is destroying.  His attack is just an assertion of his sexual virility, which he feels has been threatened, by a "Communist fluoridation conspiracy;" likely nothing more than a paranoid manifestation of his impotence.  But even the men in this film display a distinct lack of control over the technology they possess.  They are unable to safely control the use of nuclear weapons, but this is perhaps more telling of the fact that they are unable to control themselves.  As General Turgidson laments, "The human element seems to have failed us here." Through the use of technology to highlight gender and sexual relationships, the film asserts and underscores themes about American Cold War society.  The issues and priorities that dominated American society at this time were mainly how to protect its capitalist way of life from communist infiltration at all costs.  Capitalism does not promote equality, but rather reinforces a class structure that Marxism attempts to resist.  The so-called "American Dream" is simply an animalistic struggle for dominance in a society where inequality not only exists, but is encouraged.  The film demonstrates how man's obsessive struggle for dominance permeates every layer of society.  Women cannot operate technology in this film because the technology itself is created by men to be surrogate sexual organs used to assert domination. 

Both of these films deal with completely different issues, and use different film forms to convey their messages.  However, the combination of all of these aspects in their films give a very telling portrait of why these films were made the way they were at the time that they were made.   Vertov's emphasis on industry and equality show the issues that were predominant in an adolescent Soviet society attempting to develop.  Thirty-five years later, in Kubrick's film we see a criticism of predominant American ideals, specifically at government and military levels.  With such completely opposite values, it is no wonder that these two societies were at war with one another.  Vertov's praise of his country's Marxist ideals does not come without overlooking certain truths however.  His celebration of this system in itself, as well as the absence of negative images relating to Soviet society, arouses its own criticism.  And Kubrick's criticism is also an exaggeration, with no suggested alternative methods. While Kubrick does not suggest that the Soviets are any better than their American counterparts in Dr. Strangelove, he does suggest that paranoia can bring mankind to the brink of destruction, if not completely over the edge.

Works Cited

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Boxen, Jeremy. "Just What the Doctor Ordered: Cold War Purging, Political Dissent, and the Right Hand of Dr. Strangelove." Queen's University.  19 April 1995.  23 February 2005. <http://www.film.queensu.ca/Boxen.html>.

Maland, Charles.  "Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus."  Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. Revised Edition.  Ed. Peter C. Rollins.  Louisville:  University Press of Kentucky, 1998. 190-210.