Stavros Alifragkis (Athens) and Franois Penz (Cambridge)

Dziga Vertovs Man with the Movie Camera (SU 1929)Ontology-based Metadata Annotation for Non-acted, Montage Moving Image Works about Urban Cinematic Landscapes

1. Introduction

Th is paper wishes to introduce a consistent and systematic method for analysing existing moving image montage-based works that experiment with the cinematic iconography of urban landscapes. Th e method has been modelled, using Dziga Ver-tovs Man with the Movie Camera (elovek s kinoapparatom, SU 1929), as a concrete and particular instance of an urban creative geography constructed by montage-based sequences and scenes organised in themed episodes. Th is research proposes a relatively fl exible and comprehensive tool f or the formal and stylistic analysis of moving image works that exploits and expands upon the categories introduced by David Bordwell and Kristin Th ompson for the aesthetic appreciation of movies in Film Art: An Introduction.1 Th e shot-by-shot stylistic analysis of the mise-en-scne, the mise-en-cadre and the editing techniques, coupled with an investigation of the formal structure of Vertovs Man with the Movie Camera, aided mining and identi-fying key concepts that could serve as the basis for domain ontology construction. Ontologies, a shared and common understanding of some domain that can be

1 David Bordwell/Kristin Th ompson, Film Art: An Introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill 2006 [Orig. 1979].

Starvros Alifragkis/Franois Penz52communicated across people and computers, explicitly describe an abstract model for a particular phenomenon and identify the relevant concepts.2 In other words, particular categories from Bordwell and Th ompsons infl uential work, comple-mented with additional categories, could inform the construction of an ontology designed to provide suffi ciently detailed and extensive descriptions for a specifi c domain: non-acted, montage-based moving image works about urban cinematic landscapes. Th ese works have been generically referred to as city symphonies, a genre that fl ourished in the 1920s and 1930s, and even exists in various forms today. Th is rather fl uid term has been used extensively to provide a sketchy description for what constitutes an extremely diverse and loosely connected group of mov-ies, which employ wide-ranging editing and cinematographic stylistic approaches. Ontology-based annotation of montage-based moving image works that appear to share a common interest in the urban form, coupled with a statistical stylistic analysis and interpretation of the accumulated metadata, could inform a discussion towards identifying shared features in terms of family resemblance rather than exhaustive defi nitions for city symphonies. Th us, the shot-by-shot analysis of Man with the Movie Camera constitutes a starting point where the shaping of the tool takes place, a tool whose analytical potentialities will continuously be sharpened as the research expands to include other movies.

2. Formal and Stylistic Analysis

Th is research draws widely upon Bordwell and Th ompsons work on reading, un-derstanding and appreciating fi lm form.3 Th e method proposed here builds upon their basic distinction between formal structure and style and aims, on the one hand, at exploring the intricate set of relations that link stylistic techniques (a. mise-en-cadre or cinematography; b. mise-en-scne or staging; and c. editing) to the narrative form, and for Man with the Movie Camera, on the other hand. Th ese formal categories for describing and reappraising style have been comple-mented with additional features borrowed from Vlada Petri and Graham Roberts analyses of the movie and Jean Mitrys seminal work on rhythm in experimental cinema.4 Th ey have been coupled with our own investigations on the nature of

2 Rudi Studer/Richard Benjamins/Dieter Fensel, Knowledge Engineering: Principles and Methods, in: Data and Knowledge Engineering, 25, 12/1998, pp. 161197, here p. 184.

3 See Bordwell/Th ompson, Film Art.4 Vlada Petri, Constructivism in Film: Th e Man with the Movie Camera A Cinematic Analysis, Cam-

Dziga Vertovs man with the movie camera 53the urban landscape depicted in the movie, based on research on the urbanist-disurbanist dispute over the future of the socialist city.5 Th e part of the analysis that focuses on style mise-en-cadre and mise-en-scne in particular off ers itself to a statistical analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. Th e part of stylistic analysis that focuses on the foregrounding of specifi c editing techniques combines statis-tics with the detection of patterns to draw inferences. Th e ensuing exploration of Man with the Movie Cameras narrative structure resorts to the interpretation of both statistically reliable information gained from the computer-aided process-ing of quantifi able parameters for each shot and the rich and in-depth descriptive values of qualitative metadata.

Renowned researchers in the fi eld of statistical stylistic analysis, such as Barry Salt and Warren Buckland, have repeatedly and rather successfully demon-strated the immense possibilities of this method quantifying parameters of style in understanding how moving image works are constructed.6 Th e ever-growing computing capabilities and the advent of sophisticated software as Buckland, quite rightly, points out7 coupled with the closer collaboration of statisticians and fi lm theorists will, inevitably, lead to a proliferation of means and techniques and endlessly perpetuate the analytical process as a whole.8 Th is could, quite possibly, render it very diffi cult to achieve some kind of consensus among researchers about

bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 1987; Graham Roberts, Th e Man with the Movie Camera, London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000; Jean Mitry, Le Cinma exprimental: Histoire et perspectives, Paris: Edi-tions Seghers 1974 [Orig. 1971].

5 Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde: Th eories of Art, Architecture and the City, London: Acad-emy Editions 1995; Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City-planning 19171935, London: Th ames and Hudson 1970 [0rig. 1967]; El Lissitzky, An Architecture for World Revolution, London: Lund Humphries 1970 [Orig. 1930].

6 Barry Salt, Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures, in: Film Quarterly, 28, 1/1974, pp. 1322; Id., Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, London: Starword 1983; Id., Moving into Pic-tures: More on Film History, Style and Analysis, London: Starword 2006, here pp. 389396; Th omas Elsaesser/Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis, London/New York: Arnold/Oxford Univ. Press 2002, pp. 102116; Warren Buckland, What Does the Statistical Style Analysis of Film Involve?, in: Literary and Linguist Computing, 23, 2/2008, pp. 219230.

7 Elsaesser/Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film, p. 108.8 Salt reckons the statistical analysis of style could aid in making aesthetic claims performing

normative functions - by considering in addition to originality and the degree of fulfi lment of the authors original intentions the work of fi lm directors that have been infl uenced by a given artwork. (See Salt, Film Style and Technology, p.37.) Th ese, in turn, have to be reappraised on the grounds of originality, fulfi lment of original intentions, and again, the number and importance of artworks that they have infl uenced.

Starvros Alifragkis/Franois Penz54methods, tools and terminology. Attempting to delineate a particular domain, and construct an ontology for this specifi c domain, could present a viable way of deal-ing with what appears to be a problem inherent to statistical stylistic analysis uniformly applying the same set of categories to diff erent genres and ceaselessly expanding and refi ning formal categories.

Ontologies a formal, explicit specifi cation of a shared conceptualisation9 could function as a means for establishing communication between a database composed of independent media items and metadata created to support some specifi c function, or to describe properties of the resource as used in a particular context.10 As such, a domain ontology can serve as a mechanism for unearth-ing what corresponds in the neoformalist approach to fi lm analysis according to Th ompson to the identifi cation of the dominant the foregrounding of certain devices that appear to be all-pervasive.11 Th is research sets off on a shot-by-shot formal and stylistic analysis of a single movie Man with the Movie Camera and plans to build from there by considering additional relevant movies and construct-ing an ontology a fi nite number of relevant concepts (a formal category/class denoting each one of them, a description explaining its function and a set of rela-tionships describing a taxonomy) for a specifi c domain: non-narrative, non-acted, (primarily) montage-based moving image works, where the depiction of diverse natural locations of the urban terrain constitutes an important character12 city symphonies.13 Naturally, the description of the domain itself is expected to fl uctu-

9 Studer/Benjamins/Fensel, Knowledge Engineering, p. 184.10 Miguel-ngel Sicilia, Metadata, Semantics, and Ontology: Providing Meaning to Information

Resources, in: International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 1, 1/2006, pp. 83-86, here pp. 8384.

11 Kristin Th ompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton/New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press 1988, pp. 4344.

12 Character is understood here in the neoformalist sense of the term as collections of semes, or character traits. (Ibid., p.40.)

13 For additional information on the generic features of the genre, see Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-fi ction Film. New York: Oxford Univ. Press 1993, pp. 73-81 [Orig.1974]; Colin McArthur, Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City, in: Th e Cinematic City, ed. by David B. Clarke, London/New York: Routledge 2001, pp. 19-45 [Orig. 1997]; Scott MacDonald, Th e City as Motion Picture: Notes on Some California City Films, in: Wide Angle A Quarterly Journal of Film History Th eory & Criticism, 19, 4/1997, pp. 109-130; Carsten Strathausen, Uncanny Spaces: Th e City in Ruttmann and Vertov, in: Screening the City, ed. by Mark Shiel/Tony Fitzmaurice, London/New York: Verso 2003, pp. 15-40; Helmut Weihsmann, Th e City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the City Film, 1900-1930, in: Cinema & Architecture, ed. by Franois Penz/Maureen Th omas, London: British Film Institute 1997, pp. 8-27; Franois Penz, Architecture and the Screen from Photography to Synthetic Imaging:

Dziga Vertovs man with the movie camera 55ate as more moving image projects are considered. Furthermore, this method could be utilised in analysing other projects by Vertov, because, as Hicks quite rightly points out, similar stylistic patterns can be detected in a range of earlier works.14

2.1 Constructing the Ontology: Classes, Subclasses and Categories

Th e analysis utilised the DVD version of Vertovs movie, released in 2000, by the British Film Institute.15 Th e DVD has been sourced from the 1996 restoration of the original BFI copy by fi lm historian David Shephard.16 For our analysis, the movie was captured in an uncompressed DV PAL format with Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Subsequently, all individual shots were traced, by cutting the media on the timeline, where the original edits existed. Th is was neither easy nor straight-forward. For instance, it was diffi cult to distinguish between shots 437a and 437b medium-long shots of the cameraman and his movie camera at the foyer of a building, shot from the interior of an elevator since, in the DVD version, it was impossible to tell with absolute certainty when the upward movement of the elevator stopped (shot 437a) and the downward movement began (shot 437b). Th e mise-en-scne simulates a vertical linear wipe with top to bottom direction (shot 437a) followed by a similar eff ect with the opposite direction (shot 437b), while the mise-en-cadre at the beginning of shot 437a and the end of shot 437b, remains unchanged. In ambiguous cases, such as this one, we compared our shot list against Petri and Roberts studies.17 Th en, all 1,694 shots (excluding the credit sequence at the beginning, the end title and black frames) were numbered and exported as individual AVI clips (each clip containing a single shot). Th eir duration varied from one frame to approximately 23 seconds (565 frames). Discrepancies between this and other analytical approaches, as far as the count of shots is concerned (Petri: 1,682; Crofts & Rose: 1,716; Sauzier: 1,712), can be attributed to the availability of prints of various lengths. Discrepancies that involve shot duration have do to with

Capturing and Building Space, Time and Motion, in: Architectures of illusion: From Motion Pictures to Navigable Interactive Environments, ed. by Maureen Th omas/Franois Penz, Bristol: Portland 2003, pp. 135-164. Th e bibliographical research furnishes the description of the domain with two additional features: a. dawn-to-dusk narration; and b. episodic narrative structure.

14 Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: Defi ning Documentary Film, London: I.B. Tauris 2007, pp 6364.15 ISBN/EAN: 5035673005026.16 http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=5563717 See Petri, Constructivism in Film, and Roberts, Man with the Movie Camera.

Starvros Alifragkis/Franois Penz56the projection speed and, in instances where source material is on DVD, diff erent methods for frame interpolation of moving images.18 Finally, one still image was generated for each shot at a halfway point duration-wise. Th ese were particularly useful for the annotation of static elements of form, the segmentation of the plot and the production of tables that visualise patterns of plot development.

Th e shot-by-shot analysis of Vertovs Man with the Movie Camera was per-formed in two stages. For the fi rst stage, the analysis focused mainly on fi lm style (mise-en-cadre, mise-en-scne and editing), primarily utilising Bordwell and Th ompsons categorisation. Th is was performed manually, using a table designed in Adobe Photoshop CS2 9.0.

18 Th e information, such as projection speed and method for frame interpolation for the BFI DVD version of Man with the Movie Camera utilised in this research, is not currently available.

Figure 01. Th e manual annotation table accommodates diff erent aspects of style along the horizontal axis and shots in sequential order along the vertical axis. Th us, each row of the table provides coded information dots on a regular grid about a fi nite number of stylistic characteristics for a single shot, while each column off ers a way of tracing fl uctuations in the value of a single stylistic aspect for a sequence of shots.

Dziga Vertovs man with the movie camera 57Th e ensuing lightweight statistical processing and interpretation of the initial re-

sults, coupled with bibliographical research on Man with the Movie Camera, provid-ed the basis for mining the relevant key concepts (classes, subclasses and their cor-responding categories) for the conceptualisation of the domain.19 For the analysis of Man with the Movie Camera, aspects of style are pigeonholed in three major classes: a. mise-en-cadre (cinematography); b. mise-en-scne (staging); and c. editing.

19 Stephen Crofts/Olivia Rose, An Essay Towards Man with a Movie Camera, in: Screen, 18, 1/1977, pp. 958; R. Seth Feldman, Evolution of Style in the Early Work of Dziga Vertov, New York: Arno Press 1977; Id., Dziga Vertov: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. 1979; Mikhail Kaufman, An Interview with Mikhail Kaufman, in: October, 11/1979, pp. 5476; Lev Manovich, Th e Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass./London: Th e MIT Press 2001; Annette Michelson, Th e Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Tex-tual System, in: October, 52/1990, pp. 1639; Id. (ed.), Kino-eye: Th e Writings of Dziga Vertov, Lon-don: Pluto 1984; Petri, Constructivism in Film; Roberts, Man with the Movie Camera; Yuri Tsivian, Man with a Movie Camera, Reel One: A Selective Glossary, in: Film Studies: An International Review, 2/2000, pp. 5176; Id., Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties, Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2004; Malcolm Turvey, Can the Camera See? Mimesis in Man with a Movie Camera, in: October, 89/1999, pp. 2550.

Figure 02. Transcribing the results of the manual annotation of Vertovs movie. Th e Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, similarly to the Adobe Photoshop table, accommodates classes, subclasses and categories along the horizontal axis and shots in sequential order along the vertical axis. Here, dots have been replaced by a singular (absolute) numerical value for each category. Th is has enabled the lightweight statistical processing of the initial results of the shot-by-shot formalist analysis.

58 Starvros Alifragkis/Franois Penz

Figure 03. Th is research singles out three diff erent formats for visualising the results of the statistical processing of the accumulated metadata: a. pie charts that describe the contribution of each category to the total of the movie; b. line charts that display trends for sets of values over time; and c. tables that facilitate the detection of recurring patterns. Here, the line chart combines information for sub-classes: location (green); number of characters (purple); camera movement (blue); and shot scale (red) for a sequence of forty shots. Th is research experimented with diff erent combinations to investi-gate which categories of style appear to be more relevant.

Dziga Vertovs man with the movie camera 59Figure 04. Th e initial interpretation of the results of the manual analysis informed the segmentation of Man with the Movie Camera, which in turn, aided the reconstruction of its formal structure. It could be said that the movie is roughly about life in a fi ctional Soviet city from early in the morning till late in the evening. Th e dawn-to-dusk narration is employed here to provide temporal continuity to com-pensate for the lack of dramatic, character-based plot, character development and spatial continuity. It involves the sequential depiction and arranging of a number of themes or daily activities (waking up, working, exercising, going to the movie theatre, etc.) in two themed episodes (a: labour and b: culture/recreation) marked by the introduction and the epilogue. Each themed episode contrapuntally combines a number of scenes and sequences within scenes and concludes with a climactic sequence, the recapitulation, where motifs that preceded are presented in abbreviated form. On a diff erent level, the story is told in roughly three interlocking layers. Th ere is the storyline of life in the Soviet Union, which is intertwined with the storyline of fi lm production (shots depicting the cameraman, Mikhail Kaufman, and his movie camera recording life unawares, and the fi lm editor, Elizaveta Svilova, reor-ganising the world as a meaningful whole). Both function as a mise en abyme, when framed within the third storyline: opening (intro) and closing (outro) sequences of people watching Man with the Movie Camera at the movie theatre.20 Yet, the third storyline assumes a unique role; on the one hand, it is an integral part of fi lm production (thus belonging to the second storyline), while on the other hand, it concludes the list of activities that Soviet citizens of that ideal socialist city can enjoy (thus belonging to the fi rst storyline). Also, the closing climactic sequence (recapitulation) renders the layers and their corresponding narrative frames literally indiscernible, thus merging the three storylines in one story-world. Th e chart demonstrates the fl uctuation of shot duration (in frames) for the 1,694 shots of the movie. It investigates whether shot duration in general, and short duration in particular, can act as indicators of shifts in the formal structure of the movie, marking the end of sequences, scenes and episodes. Th is understanding of the formal structure of the movie deviates signifi cantly from both Petris interpretation who understands sequences showing machines in operation, sports events, and musical performance executed with spoons and bottles as integral parts of the same diegetic domain21 and Crofts and Roses analysis which greatly expands upon the waking and working sequences.22

Th e corresponding subclasses are considered in three groups: a. qualitative data that cannot be ranked (categorical or nominal variables); b. qualitative and quantita-tive data that can be ranked (ordinal variances); and c. quantitative data that can be ranked, which is approximately normally distributed (scale variances).23 Th is is because in descriptive statistics, which is widely used in statistical stylistic fi lm analysis, data of diff erent nature off er themselves to diff erent kinds of treatment.

20 Tsivian, Man with a Movie Camera, p. 55.21 Petri, Constructivism in Film, pp. 7273.22 Crofts/Rose, An Essay Towards Man with a Movie Camera, pp. 1516.23 On many occasions, one does not know how to treat variances before one collects the data and

starts performing some basic tests.

Starvros Alifragkis/Franois Penz603. Tools

3.1 Computer-Aided Annotation

Beyond the process of manual annotation, discussed in section 2.1 (Constructing the Ontology: Classes, Subclasses and Categories), the second phase of the analysis was performed with Architect Media Tool (BT 2005), an authoring tool for the production of computer-handled, interactive, digital projects.24 Th is experimental software was being developed over a period of several years before it partly formed the basis of a new toolkit designed for the New Millennium New Media (NM2) collaborative research project.25 It endeavoured to inspire and realise new media productions that sought to experiment with non-linear editing for multimedia da-tabases and the interactive screen. Th is was made possible by enabling the design of programme templates that described the overall structure of the moving image work rather than by producing a single, fi nal cut. In addition, Architect Media Tool facilitated the generation of multiple programmes (instances of a programme template) utilising the same set of resources a single database.

24 Th e project utilised standalone client version v.1.5.22 (released in 2005). Architect Media Tool (pre-viously named Smart Media Tool and in 2006 Flexible Media Tools) was developed by BT Ex-act: Future Content Development at Adastral Park, Martlesham Heath, Ipswich, UK (http://labs.bt.com/barc/FutureContent.html).

25 NM2 (http://www.ist-nm2.org; and more recently http://www.shapeshift.tv) is a European Com-munity Integrated Project, whose principal aims are to produce eff ective digital tools and experi-ment with novel media genres for interactive screen and broadband distribution.

Dziga Vertovs man with the movie camera 61

Figure 05. Lev Manovichs understanding of the database as a new symbolic form, a cultural reposi-tory for contemporary society, was an important point of departure for this part of the research.26 In a reverse engineering analytical process, Man with the Movie Camera perhaps the most important example of a database imagination27 provided 1,694 individual media objects (or resources) for the database: black and white clips with no sound. All individual clips (each one corresponding to a single shot from the movie) were imported to Architect Media Tool, where they formed a rich, non-hierar-chical pool of media.

Th is could happen in three main modes of operation:28 a. Annotation: Th e Meta-Data Editor, which allows users to annotate media fi les, was modifi ed to adjust to the aforementioned ontology; b. Template Production: Th e Template Editor func-tionality allows users to create programme templates by constructing individual

26 Lev Manovich, Th e Language of New Media, p. 219.27 Ibid., p. 239.28 Tim Stevens, BT Exact Smart Media Tool: Guidelines for Use. Martlesham Heath, Ipswich: BT

Exact, 2004, p. 5 [unpublished manual].

Starvros Alifragkis/Franois Penz62scenes in sequential order;29 c. Template Population: Reviewing the outcome of a programme template is enabled through the Content Synthesiser. Th is is where an instance of the programme template will be assembled and previewed.

Figure 06. Th e Meta-Data Editor allows the user to annotate media fi les in two distinct ways. Firstly, with structured metadata which later on evolved into classes for a domain-specifi c ontology: a data-model utilised in the retrieval of database items by the Template Population functionality of the tool. Secondly, with relationship metadata: a functionality that enables the sequential ordering of database items, extremely useful for generating cause-and-eff ect narratives. Double-clicking on the thumbnail of a media item in the Media Bin window will enable the Mark-up View for the selected database item. Here, all the available structured metadata fi elds are displayed. Certain data can be logged au-tomatically (duration), but most have to be registered manually, by either typing key phrases or by ticking boxes for embedded or user-defi ned categories. Architect Media Tool is an authoring tool, not a statistical package. Accumulated metadata had to be exported into XML format for further proces-sing with software, such as Microsoft Excel and SPSS. Th is is also true for charts, bars and tables.

29 One can change the order of scenes in the Template Editor, however, during Template Popula-tion, scenes playback in a predefi ned order: from top to bottom.

Dziga Vertovs man with the movie camera 63

Figure 07. Programme templates represent tree-like structures, whose main building blocks are: a. Combiners (Sequential, Random, Either/Or and Repeat); b. Filters (Equals, Not Equal, Contains, Greater-than and Less-than); and c. Funnels. Funnels are used for setting the maximum number of media items and Combiners describe the succession of media objects. Th e use of Filters is what con-nects a programme template to the database items. Filters can be set to correspond to diff erent values for classes, subclasses and their corresponding categories. In brief, Filters determine which database items are summoned, Combiners describe their ordering and Funnels specify how many of them will play back. Diff erent combinations of these three structural elements can produce very complex narra-tive structures, capable of eff ective storytelling. Th is functionality was utilised to check the annotation process for inconsistencies and to reproduce Man with the Movie Cameras formal structure. Th e latter aided the part of the analysis that focuses on understanding Man with the Movie Cameras formal structure and linking stylistic patterns to the structure of the movie.

4. Discussion and Future Developments

Creating programme templates and previewing the results, in order to test the consistency of the annotation, functioned for this research as a mechanism for what we have named the process of disambiguation. Th is did not involve cases

Starvros Alifragkis/Franois Penz64where aspects of style were misidentifi ed (counter-clockwise rotation for clock-wise rotation). Once traced, those mistakes were corrected without requiring the implementation of changes that would aff ect the analytical process as a whole. Dis-ambiguation primarily concerned instances where subclasses were not developed well enough or categories were not defi ned clearly enough to distinguish between events that appeared identical, but were in fact slightly diff erent. A characteristic example is subclass characters movement (qualitative, non-ordered variances). Th e corresponding categories (a. screen left; b. screen right; c. forward [away]; d. back-ward [towards]; e. up; f. down; g. rotate clockwise; h. rotate counter-clockwise) are not mutually exclusive (a. a character can move both screen left and away from the camera; b. there can be more than one character moving in diff erent directions). Creating a programme template for subclass characters movement and category screen left and previewing the assembled clips revealed that, among the numerous clips that met the predefi ned requirements, there were a few that in this new con-text, appeared to be out of place (i.e., clips where a characters screen left movement was countered by a second characters movement in the opposite direction). Th is was not simply a matter of correcting the metadata, rather it required sharpening (refi ning) subclasses and categories so as to be more sensitive in detecting such phenomena. Th us, the notion of prominent movement was introduced to aid dis-criminating between what appeared to be the main movement and, correspond-ingly, character (although, these two did not always coincide) and less dominant activities. In addition, issues of prominence are also considered in relation to issues of association. Th e initial analysis of Man with the Movie Camera suggests that cer-tain scenes and sequences are constructed by eliciting analogies in the form (shape, movement, etc.) between consecutive shots.

Issues of association highlight concerns about the actual process of logging metadata. Th ese concerns mainly have to do with whether shots should be anno-tated individually (out of context) or in sequential order (in context). Th is research experimented with both approaches: the manual analysis dealt with shots in the order they appear in the movie, while the computer-aided analysis handled shots in random order. Evidently, the latter is bound to miss out on aspects of style, such as time, certain aspects of prominent movement/shape (by association) and, of course, editing. In general, annotating shots in sequential order enables more informed decisions about mise-en-scne. Conversely, annotating shots randomly privileges subclasses (with their corresponding categories) that succeed in spotting what one might call inherent characteristics as contrasted to derived features of a shot and are generally associated with mise-en-cadre. Th ese metadata appear

Dziga Vertovs man with the movie camera 65to be more consistent and less open to subjective interpretations. Nevertheless, if shots can be manipulated as easily as Kuleshov suggests in the descriptions of his infamous series of experiments that led to the formulation of the same-name ef-fect, any attempt to assign fi xed meaning to an individual shot and attempt to tran-scribe this meaning to a metasystem (annotation with metadata) can be seriously undermined.30 A lot of devices considered typically Vertovian, like his idiosyncratic usage of the long take (intercutting diff erent long takes), the emphasis on short duration and the elaborate structure of sequences (intertwining several activities/actions) might suggest that modes of progression, rather than individual shots, are more signifi cant in cueing audiences.

Th e graphical representations of the annotated media and the segmentation of the plot aided the detection of certain recurring stylistic and formal patterns. One of the most widely used ones involves constructing micronarratives sequences within themed episodes by interweaving two or more activities (driving an am-bulance and a fi re brigade down the streets of the fi ctional city). In essence, what Vertov achieves is to fuse diff erent locations of his composite city.31 Kuleshovs concept of imaginary, artifi cial landscapes that exist only in celluloid creative geographies describes the theoretical framework for the fi lmic reconstruction of Vertovs city: a creative manipulation of the urban terrain where disparate physical locations construct a composite cinematic space.32 Boa and Reid suggest that the fi nal eff ect of the fugal novel as compared with linear novel is of a spatial network of relationships rather than a temporal succession of states and events, adding that the more fugal a novel becomes, the more spatial it will be.33 Th e initial interpre-tation of the analysis of Man with the Movie Camera suggests that the movie exem-plifi es the structure of fugal narration, insofar as it constructs a network of spaces, whose storytelling ability hinges on the act of interlocking; which could very well constitute a spatially-arranged narrative. Punctus-contra-Punctum (counterpoint) montage is introduced here to describe a technique that emphasises the interweav-ing of two or more activities/locations in a single montage sequence. Th e interlaced

30 Lev Kuleshov, Kuleshov on Film: Writings by Lev Kuleshov, ed. by Ronald Levaco, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: Univ. of California Press 1974, p. 52; Vsevolod Pudovkin, Pudovkin on Film Tech-nique: Th ree Essays and an Address by V.I. Pudovkin, trans. & annot. by Ivor Montagu, London: Vic-tor Gollancz 1929, pp. 164165.

31 Roberts suggests that the movie features fi ve diff erent locations: Moscow, Kiev, Yalta, Odessa and Donbas (Roberts, Man with the Movie Camera, p. x).

32 Kuleshov, Kuleshov on Film, pp. 45.33 Elizabeth Boa/J.H. Reid, Critical Strategies: German Fiction in the Twentieth Century, London:

Edward Arnold 1972, p.16.

Starvros Alifragkis/Franois Penz66activities which correspond to diff erent locations construct a fi lmic terrain, which, unlike the continuous spaces of continuity editing, remains coherent despite its fragmentation. As the analysis suggests, Vertov constructs a dialectical argu-ment for the ideal socialist city of the future through the creative manipulation of images of industry, infrastructure, public space and novel architectural types such as the workers club.

So far, the interpretation of the initial results of both the manual and the com-puter-aided analysis of Man with the Movie Camera suggests that the construction of a domain-specifi c ontology can provide the necessary tools for the unearthing relevant to formalist fi lm analytical concepts. Th e proposed method expands from the statistical stylistic analysis to the study of recurring stylistic patterns and the reconstruction of the movies formal structure. Comparing the method, the tools and results of this analysis against other analytical approaches, such as the one proposed by Digital Formalism, can determine how eff ective and relevant the pro-posed concepts in describing and communicating shared knowledge are within the domain of non-acted, montage-based moving image works about urban cinematic landscapes in particular, and the works of Dziga Vertov in general.