Film: Man With A Movie Camera
Director: Dziga Vertov
Country: Ukraine
Released: January 1929
Runtime: 68 minutes
Genre: Documentary
Studio: VUFKU
Influenced: Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Pedro Costa, Béla Tarr, Joshua Oppenheimer
All of Ukraine, all of humanity is here. As Vertov explains in the film's opening credits, the film has no intertitles, no story, no "theatre", instead he wants to create an international visual language, which moves cinema away from its roots in theatre and literature. His ambition is matched by his skill and innovation – the wide variety of special effects used in Man With A Movie Camera includes slow-motion action shots of male and female athletes, as well as double-exposure shots that give the illusion of the man with the movie camera (played by Vertov’s brother, Mikhail) looming giant-sized over the crowd or rising suddenly with his tripod from a pint of beer.
Vertov had a Marxist, humanist concern with the lives of ordinary people. We see couples going to an office to register their marriages and divorces. The divorce scene is interspersed poetically with a shot of two trams at 90 degree angle to each other (Dutch angles), and travelling in different directions, to symbolise the fracture in their relationship. In the footage from a football match, Vertov liberally uses jump cuts to show the goalkeeper saving the ball or a player leaping salmon-like in the air to head it.
At one point near the end of the movie, Vertov even uses stop motion animation to give the sense of a robotic tripod and movie camera assembling itself. It's jaw-dropping cinema. As remarkable to me as the avant-garde innovation is how graphic the film can be at times. There are shots of a woman putting on her stockings, a woman in the throes of childbirth, as well as women on the beach rubbing mud over their bodies and another of women dancing in revealing dresses. We also see women lifting weights and working on the factory line. This is cinema free of censorship and any notions of traditional gender roles.
My DVD copy that I picked up second hand in a Norwich charity shop has The Cinematic Orchestra providing the soundtrack. Having watched the film with and without the soundtrack, I would say the music definitely enhances the experience of this astonishing movie. Like Metropolis and The Crowd, Man With A Movie Camera immerses us in the chaos and struggle of modern city life, but what Vertov achieves here is something less alienating and more celebratory.
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