45. Man With A Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom) (1929)

Directed By Dziga Vertov

Synopsis

Man With a Movie Camera Films Stuff Happening.

Review

This film is more than anything an encyclopedia of movie making techniques available to the 1929 director and editor. It is pretty amazing at that. The editing, camera movements, and even use of stop-motion animation are brilliant.

Man With A Movie Camera is at the same time a documentary style silent film, with no intertitles and a dig at the idea of documentaries. The so called kino-eye that Vertov defended, the imparciality of the camera etc.. is actually disproved by his own film. The power of the editing, and what the camera chooses to film show how the kino-eye is anything but imparcial. And who is the cameraman filming the cameraman? Who watches the watcher?

This seems however to be too self-conscious not to be intended. Nothing happens in the city where the film is set until the man with the movie camera gets in a car and starts filming. Events exist because they are being documented. As the very good bfi introduction on the DVD's sleevenotes says, the fact that the film producing aspect is at the forefront of the action (the camera man, the editor) shows how this is a manufactured artefact and not a neutral fly-on-the-wall viewpoint.

Anyway, the film is great, fast, frantic and beautiful. And if you've seen Koyaanisqatsi or the Ray Of Light Madonna video, this is where they come from. Buy it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia


From Wikipedia:

With Lenin's admission of limited private enterprise through his New Economic Policy, Russia began receiving fiction films from afar, an occurrence that Vertov regarded with undeniable suspicion, calling drama a "corrupting influence" on the proletarian sensibility ("On 'Kinopravda,'" 1924). By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in 1925. Potemkin was a heavily fictionalized film telling the story of a mutiny on a battleship which came about as a result of the sailors' mistreatment; the film was an obvious but skillful propaganda piece glorifying the proletariat. Vertov lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, possibly as a result of criticizing a film which effectively preaches the Communist party line.

Vertov says in his essay "The Man with a Movie Camera" that he was fighting "for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature." By the later segments of "Kino-Pravda," Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés (and receiving criticism for it); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of Man with the Movie Camera. Some have criticized the obvious stagings in Man With the Movie Camera as being at odds with Vertov's credos "life as it is" and "life caught unawares": the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot which films Mikhail Kaufman riding in a car filming a third car.

However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera. (16:04 on the commentary track). This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera." All of these shots might conform to Vertov's credo "caught unawares."

Well, that explains it...