Man with a Movie Camera

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For other uses, see Man with a Movie Camera (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Man with a Camera.

Man with a Movie Camera
Still from Man with a Movie Camera
Directed byDziga Vertov
Written byDziga Vertov
CinematographyMikhail Kaufman
Edited byDziga Vertov
Yelizaveta Svilova
Production
companies
Release date
  • 7 January 1929 (1929-01-07)
Running time
68 minutes
CountrySoviet Union
LanguagesSilent film
No intertitles

Man with a Movie Camera[1] (Russian: Человек с киноаппаратом, romanized: Chelovek s kinoapparatom) is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Kaufman also appears as the eponymous Man of the film.

Vertov's feature film, produced by the film studio All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU), presents urban life in Moscow, Kyiv and Odesa during the late-1920s.[2] It has no actors.[3] From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters", they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film.

Man with a Movie Camera is famous for the range of

split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion
animations and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

Man with a Movie Camera was largely dismissed upon its initial release; the work's

in the 2022 poll, and in 2014 it was named the best documentary of all time in the same magazine.[5] The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre placed it in 2021 at number three of their list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema.[6]

In 2015, the film received a restoration using a 35mm print of the only known complete cut of the film. Restoration efforts were conducted by the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam, with additional digital work by Lobster Films. While the film is in the public domain, this restored version was licensed to Flicker Alley for release on Blu-ray.[7]

Overview

The complete 68-minute film

The film is divided into six separate parts, one for each film reel on which it would have originally been printed. Each part begins with a number appearing on screen and falling down flat. The film makes use of many editing techniques, such as superimposition, slow motion, fast motion, rapid cross-cutting, and montage.

The film has an unabashedly avant-garde style, and the subject matter varies greatly. The titular man with the movie camera (Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov's brother) travels to diverse locations to capture a variety of shots. He appears in artistic images such as a superimposed shot of the cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, and another superimposed shot of the cameraman inside a beer glass. General images include laborers at work, sporting events, couples getting married and divorced, a woman giving birth, and a funeral procession. Much of the film is concerned with people of varying economic classes navigating urban environments. On occasion, the film's editor (Svilova) is shown working with strips of film and various pieces of editing equipment.

Despite claiming to be without actors, the film features a few staged situations. This includes some of the cameraman's actions, the scene of a woman getting dressed, and chess pieces being swept to the center of the board (a shot spliced in backwards so the pieces expand outward and stand in position). Stop-motion is used for several shots, including an unmanned camera on a tripod standing up, showing off its mechanical parts, and then walking off screen.

Vertov's intentions

In this shot, Mikhail Kaufman acts as a cameraman risking his life in search of the best shot

Vertov was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s. He belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks, or kino-oki (kino-eyes). Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making, a radical approach to movie making. Most of Vertov's films were highly controversial, and the kinok movement was despised by many filmmakers.

Vertov's crowning achievement, Man with a Movie Camera, was his response to critics who rejected his previous film,

Communist newspaper Pravda, which spoke directly of the film's experimental, controversial nature. Vertov was worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public.[citation needed
] Upon the official release of Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov issued a statement at the beginning of the film, which read:

The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.

This manifesto echoes an earlier one that Vertov wrote in 1922, in which he disavowed popular films he felt were indebted to literature and theater.[8]

Stylistic aspects

Working within a

industrialization, and the achievements of workers through hard labor. This film is in keeping with modernist thoughts in how it challenges art both conceptually and in practice, incorporating industrial life and technology as featured subjects of the film and implementing new editing techniques.[9] In utilizing these techniques, the artist creates a modern interpretation of city life. [10]

Some have mistakenly stated that many visual ideas, such as the quick editing, the close-ups of machinery, the store window displays, even the shots of a typewriter keyboard are borrowed from

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), which predates Man with a Movie Camera by two years, but as Vertov wrote to the German press in 1929,[11] these techniques and images had been developed and employed by him in his Kino-Pravda newsreels and documentaries during the previous ten years, all of which predate Berlin. Vertov's pioneering cinematic concepts actually inspired other abstract films by Ruttmann and others, including writer, translator, filmmaker and critic Liu Na'ou (1905–1940), whose The Man Who Has a Camera (1933) pays explicit homage to Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.[12]

Man with a Movie Camera's usage of double exposure and seemingly "hidden" cameras made the movie come across as a surreal montage rather than a linear motion picture. Many of the scenes in the film contain people, which change size or appear underneath other objects (double exposure). Because of these aspects, the movie is fast-moving. The sequences and close-ups capture emotional qualities that could not be fully portrayed through the use of words. The film's lack of "actors" and "sets" makes for a unique view of the everyday world; one that, according to a title card, is directed toward the creation of a new cinematic language that is "[separated] from the language of theatre and literature".

Production

It was filmed over a period of about 3 years. Four cities – Moscow, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa – were the shooting locations.[2][13]

Reception

Initial

Man with a Movie Camera was not always a highly regarded work. The film was criticized for both the stagings and the stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director's frequent assailing of fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses".[14]

Vertov's Soviet contemporaries criticized its focus on form over content, with Sergei Eisenstein even deriding the film as "pointless camera hooliganism".[15] The work was largely dismissed in the West as well.[16] Documentary filmmaker Paul Rotha said that in Britain, Vertov was "regarded really as rather a joke, you know. All this cutting, and one camera photographing another camera – it was all trickery, and we didn't take it seriously."[17] The pace of the film's editing – more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots – also perturbed some viewers, including The New York Times' reviewer Mordaunt Hall:[18] "The producer, Dziga Vertov, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention."

Re-evaluation

Man with a Movie Camera is now regarded by many as one of the

Sight & Sound poll of the world's best films. In 2009, Roger Ebert wrote: "It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it."[19] The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre placed it in 2021 at number three of their list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema.[6]

On the

weighted average, assigned the film a score of 96 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[21]

Analysis

Man with a Movie Camera has been interpreted as an optimistic work.[22] Jonathan Romney called it "an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be".[23] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that the work "is visibly excited about the new medium's possibility, dense with ideas, packed with energy: it echoes Un Chien Andalou, anticipates Vigo's À propos de Nice and the New Wave generally, and even Riefenstahl's Olympia".[24]

Soundtracks

The film, originally released in 1929, was silent and accompanied in theaters with live music. It has since been released a number of times with different soundtracks:

See also

References

  1. ^ Also known as A Man with a Movie Camera, The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man with the Kinocamera, or Living Russia. See IMDB's list of alternate titles for Man with a Movie Camera.
  2. ^ a b Mordaunt Hall (17 September 1929). "Floating Glimpses of Russia". The Screen. The New York Times (review). p. 32. Archived from the original on 3 December 2017. Retrieved 29 August 2022. (facsimile)
  3. ^ Michelson 1995, ch. "Dziga Vertov. On Kino-Pravda. 1924, and The Man with the Movie Camera. 1928".
  4. ^ "Sight & Sound Revises Best-Films-Ever Lists". studiodaily. 1 August 2012. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
  5. ^ "Silent film tops documentary poll". BBC News. August 2014. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  6. ^ a b "ДОВЖЕНКО-ЦЕНТРТОП – 100Людина – з кіноапаратом" [Dovzhenko Centre – Top 100 – A Man with a Movie Camera] (in Ukrainian). National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre. 2021.
  7. ^ Lumbard, Neil (4 April 2020). "Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Newly-Restored Works". Blu-ray.com. Retrieved 9 February 2023.
  8. ^ "Images – Man With a Movie Camera by Grant Tracey". imagesjournal.com. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  9. ^ Fer, Briony. "Film Montage: The Projection of Modernity". Infobase. Open University. Retrieved 28 September 2023.
  10. doi:10.3828/extr.2018.15
    . Retrieved 28 September 2023.
  11. ^ Michelson 1995, ch. "Dziga Vertov. Letter from Berlin", p. 101.
  12. doi:10.1080/17508061.2015.1010303
    .
  13. ISBN 978-1-136-51206-3
    . Retrieved 14 August 2013.
  14. ^ Crofts, Stephen. "An Essay Towards Man with a Movie Camera" (PDF). psi416.cankaya.edu.tr. Retrieved 2 December 2017.
  15. ^ Feaster, Felicia. "Man With a Movie Camera". Turner Classic Movies, Inc. Retrieved 3 February 2017.
  16. ^ "Critics' 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time". British Film Institute. Retrieved 3 February 2017.
  17. ISBN 1860643949
    .
  18. ^ Roger Ebert (1 July 2009). "Man with a Movie Camera". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  19. ^ "Man with a Movie Camera (1929)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 11 February 2016. Retrieved 3 February 2017.
  20. ^ "Man with a Movie Camera". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved 18 February 2023. Edit this at Wikidata
  21. Fandom, Inc.
    Retrieved 18 February 2023.
  22. ^ Brady, Tara (30 July 2015). "Man with a Movie Camera review: power to The People". The Irish Times. Retrieved 3 February 2017.
  23. ^ Romney, Jonathan (2 August 2015). "Man with a Movie Camera review – pure cinema, still unparalleled". The Observer. Retrieved 3 February 2017.
  24. ^ Bradshaw, Peter (30 July 2015). "Man with a Movie Camera review – visionary, transformative 1929 experimental film". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 February 2017.
  25. YouTube
    .
  26. ^ "Un drame musical instantané, à travail égal salaire égal". drame.org. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  27. ^ "L'homme à la caméra" (work details) (in French and English). IRCAM.
  28. ^ "Orchestra Current Touring Repertoire". Archived from the original on 3 December 2009. Retrieved 13 November 2009.
  29. YouTube
  30. ^ "tiff1996". Tromsø International Film Festival (in Norwegian). Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 15 December 2005. Retrieved 1 October 2017.
  31. ^ "Man with a movie camera (Mini-album)". Mental Overdrive Bandcamp page. Bandcamp. Retrieved 1 October 2017.
  32. ^ Man with a Movie Camera" score by In the Nursery. Archived 24 March 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  33. ^ Eyecatcher/Man with a Movie Camera. Archived 13 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  34. ^ ["Featured Content on Myspace". Myspace. Archived from the original on 15 July 2012. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
  35. ^ O'Dwyer, Davin. "3epkano Cinema in the Park". The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 1 August 2010. Retrieved 7 August 2013.
  36. ^ vitgit. Retrieved 10 March 2016 – via YouTube.
  37. ^ "Koncertzālē "Baltais flīģelis" uzstāsies "Caspervek Trio"". www.sigulda.lv. Retrieved 2 January 2016.
  38. ^ "Bob Hund – Mannen med filmkameran". Cinemateket. Retrieved 23 August 2016.
  39. ^ "'See It Big' Film Series Features Twenty Classic And Contemporary Documentaries: January 29–February 21, 2016" (PDF). Museum of the Moving Image. 2016. Retrieved 1 August 2022.
  40. ^ "at.tension #9 Theaterfestival". www.attension-festival.de. Retrieved 22 October 2022.
  41. ^ Man with a Movie Camera #1929 1080p color - live Dj Soundtrack #DzigaVertov, retrieved 22 October 2022
  42. ^ "HOME Montopolis". 2023. Retrieved 14 May 2023.
  43. ^ "Tovar In Concert". Tovar Site. Retrieved 9 March 2024.

Sources

  • Michelson, Annette, ed. (1995). Kino-Eye – The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Translated by Kevin O'Brien. University of California Press.

Further reading

External links

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