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MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
by Dziga Vertov
“A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention” – but, as always, it’s so much more than that…
Of all the cinematic trailblazers to emerge during the early years of the Soviet Union – Dziga Vertov was the most radical. Although the film has a premise of sorts, the true purpose was to simply capture scenes of daily life, as naturally as possible, and then to use editing and music to transform their meaning. He called for the creation of a new kind of cinema free of the counter-revolutionary baggage of Western movies. A cinema that captured real life.
At the beginning of his masterpiece Vertov announced exactly what that kind of cinema would look like:
“This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events without the help of inter-titles, without the help of a story, without the help of theatre. This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature.”
Enjoy the wonder of a gleefully experimental, groundbreaking piece of cinema history below.
REASONS TO WATCH
– Vertov’s stroke of genius was to expose the entire artifice of filmmaking within the movie itself. In A Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov shoots footage of his cameramen shooting footage. There’s a reoccurring shot of an eye staring through a lens. We see images from earlier in the movie getting edited into the film. This cinematic self-reflexivity was decades ahead of its time.
– Using superimpositions, slo-mo, split screens, jump cuts, stop-motion animation, double exposures, irises, and playing with pace unlike anyone else at the time – Vertov, along with his editor (and wife) Elizaveta Svilova, crafted a dizzying, impressionistic portrait of the newly industrializing Soviet Union.
– Included in Toronto International Film Festival’s ‘Essential 100 Movies Every Cinephile Should See‘, Roger Ebert’s ‘Great Movies’ list, included in ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’, voted as the 8th greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound’s critics poll…and on and on.
– The lengths to which Vertov goes to capture this “cinematic communication of real events” is startling: his camera soars over cities and gazes up at streetcars; it films machines chugging away and even records a woman giving birth. “I am eye. I am a mechanical eye,” Vertov once famously wrote. “I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.”
– Alloy Orchestra’s score for ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is as important a component to the film as anything else. Following Vertov’s own musical instructions, they crafted a rousing composition with a clear theme with plenty of room to interact with the image, utilising something like sound effects with their instruments (a “trick” we often see with composed – as opposed to accompanied – silent film scores).
– A portrait of Soviet urban life in its time, but so much more than that -it’s the yearning to express and the joy is expression. It’s wrestling with the physical means of production (factorial, governmental, societal, and cinematic) and fulfilling all the dreams one has in attempting to do so. It represents the total aesthetic freedom the of the silent era, complete abandon of plot or even narrative to the purpose of emotion, while not for a moment rendering itself into nonsense. It lacks all reason, yet makes complete sense. These contradictions are central to its lasting impression.
– It celebrates the infinite possibilities of film: full as it is of lasting images (many, like the man with a camera standing atop another camera, becoming full-on iconic), it’s the sensation of the images that lasts longer than any specific one, as this is a cinematic experience.
– Following up on the way his colleague Sergei Eisenstein experimented with montage, Vertov and his wife/editor Elizaveta Svilova cut together images sometimes due to their thematic connections, but just as often because they liked the emotional effect of the juxtapositions.
NOTES
– Vertov’s film is a classic example of what has been termed the “city symphony” form, in which elements of urban life are montaged impressionistically. His particular vision is at once musical, abstract (constantly caught between organic life and industrial modernist geometry), and surprisingly erotic, with Vertov showing a robust interest in lingerie and mud-bathing. It’s also a supremely self-reflexive film, showing how its own images are put together: Vertov’s wife and editor Yelizaveta Svilova, and his brother, cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, figure prominently, as does the fetishised paraphernalia of projectors, film reels etc. This is an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be.
– Whereas Eisenstein – as seen in ‘Battleship Potemkin‘ (1925) – used montage editing to create new ways of telling a story, Vertov dispensed with story altogether. He loathed fiction films. “The film drama is the Opium of the people,” he wrote. “Down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!”
– Although seemingly set in one city, the film was actually shot in Moscow, Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev, the latter three all now being in Ukraine over a period of three years.
– Concerned about how the film would be received, and indeed that it might be destroyed, Dziga Vertov took out messaging in Pravda to try to explain the film’s intentions and its anti-conventional stance against regular filmmaking. If anything, this created greater interest in the film.
– Vertoz’s cinematic self-reflexivity, was not only decades ahead of its time, but a key influencer of future experimental filmmakers as Chris Marker, Stan Brakhage, anticipates many of the techniques used 50 years later in ‘Koyaanisqatsi‘ (1982), and especially Jean-Luc Godard who in 1968 formed a radical filmmaking collective called The Dziga Vertov Group.
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Enjoy the film!