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the unfolding film can explain more of what is going on. The photograph
may be summative, but it is in the end compelling only in its fragmentary
incompleteness.
Stillness,Movement,Montage
In 1925 the Russian artist and photographer Alexander Rodchenko
visited France to witness at first hand the growing energy and speed of
Paris. While there he bought a camera called the Sept. It could shoot
stills, short bursts of frames (like a motor-drive), as well as moving
footage, all on 35 mm film.^8 In fact, he bought two, the second for his
friend the filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Launched well before the Leica, the
Sept was a canny response to an emerging desire to close the gap between
photographs put together as sequences and cinema broken down into
shots or frames. That desire was nowhere stronger than in Soviet
Constructivism. Here photography and film came to share many of the
same concerns. What facilitated this was not so much technical equip-
ment butmontage, a principle of assembly that could be applied to still
and moving images. Jean-Luc Godard has suggested that what made
possible the kinds of montage advocated by Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and
other filmmakers was the angled shot: the look sharply up, down or at a
tilt so characteristic of Russian avant-garde cinema.^9 Renouncing the
supposedly ‘straight’ shot – frontal, rectilinear and neutral – did not
simply energize the frame with dynamic composition, it also announced
it as a partial image, just one choice among many. As Dziga Vertov put
it in 1922 : ‘Intervals (the transitions from one movement to another) are
the material, the elements of the art of movement and by no means the
movements themselves. It is they [the intervals] which draw the movement
to a kinetic resolution.’^10 The following year he was more explicit:
I am kino-eye. I am a builder. I have placed you, whom I have created
today, in an extraordinary room, which did not exist until just now
when I also created it. In this room there are twelve walls shot by me
in various parts of the world. In bringing together shots of walls and
