Man with a Movie Camera
Encyclopedia
Man with a Movie Camera , sometimes called The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia is an experimental 1929 silent
Silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

 documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, with no story and no actors, by Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n director Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov
David Abelevich Kaufman , better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov , was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist...

, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova.

Vertov's feature film, produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...

 and other Soviet cities. 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.

This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion
Time-lapse
Time-lapse photography is a cinematography technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured is much lower than that which will be used to play the sequence back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing...

, slow motion
Slow motion
Slow motion is an effect in film-making whereby time appears to be slowed down. It was invented by the Austrian priest August Musger....

, freeze frames
Freeze frame shot
A freeze frame shot is used when one shot is printed in a single frame several times, in order to make an interesting illusion of a still photograph....

, jump cut
Jump cut
A jump cut is a cut in film editing and vloging in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to "jump" position in a discontinuous way...

s, split screens
Split screen (film)
In film and video production, split screen is the visible division of the screen, traditionally in half, but also in several simultaneous images, rupturing the illusion that the screen's frame is a seamless view of reality, similar to that of the human eye...

, Dutch angle
Dutch angle
Dutch tilt, Dutch angle, Dutch shot, oblique angle, German angle, canted angle, Batman angle, or jaunty angle are terms used for one of many cinematic techniques often used to portray the psychological uneasiness or tension in the subject being filmed...

s, extreme close-up
Close-up
In filmmaking, television production, still photography and the comic strip medium a close-up tightly frames a person or an object. Close-ups are one of the standard shots used regularly with medium shots and long shots . Close-ups display the most detail, but they do not include the broader scene...

s, tracking shot
Tracking shot
In motion picture terminology, a tracking shot is a segment in which the camera is mounted on a camera dolly, a wheeled platform that is pushed on rails while the picture is being taken...

s, footage played backwards, stop motion animations
Stop motion
Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...

 and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

Overview

The film has an unabashedly avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

 style, and emphasizes that film can go anywhere. For instance, the film uses such scenes as superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass, filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed, even filming a woman giving birth, and the baby being taken away to be bathed.

Vertov was one of the first to be able to find a mid-ground between a narrative media and a database form of media. He shot all the scenes separately, having no intention of making this film into a regular movie with a storyline. Instead, he took all the random clips and put it in a database, which Svilova later edited. The narrative part of this process was her job. She had to go into that random pool of clips that Vertov filmed, edit it, and put it in some kind of order. Vertov's purpose of all this was to break the mold of a linear film that the world was used to seeing in those days.

Vertov's message about the prevalence and unobtrusiveness of filming was not yet true—cameras might have been able to go anywhere, but not without being noticed; they were too large to be hidden easily, and too noisy to remain hidden anyway. To get footage using a hidden camera, Vertov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman
Mikhail Kaufman
Mikhail Abramovich Kaufman ; ) was a Russian cinematographer and photographer. He was the younger brother of filmmaker Dziga Vertov and the older brother of cinematographer Boris Kaufman....

 (the film's co-author) had to distract the subject with something else even louder than the camera filming them.

The film also features a few obvious stagings such as the scene of a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed and the shot of chess pieces being swept to the center of the board (a shot spliced in backwards so the pieces expand outward and stand in position). 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."

Vertov's intentions

Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov
David Abelevich Kaufman , better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov , was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist...

, or David Arkadevich Kaufman, was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s. He belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks
Kinoks
The Kinoks were a collective of Soviet filmmakers in 1920s Russia, based most notably around film editor Dziga Vertov. In 1919 Vertov and his future wife, the talented film editor Elisaveta Svilova, plus several other young filmmakers created a group called Kinoks...

, or kino-oki (kino-eye
Eye
Eyes are organs that detect light and convert it into electro-chemical impulses in neurons. The simplest photoreceptors in conscious vision connect light to movement...

s). Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making. This radical approach to movie making led to a slight dismantling of film industry: the very field in which they were working. Most of Vertov's films were highly controversial, and the kinoc movement was despised by many filmmakers of the time. Vertov's crowning achievement, Man with a Movie Camera was his response to critics who rejected his previous film, One-Sixth Part of the World. Critics declared that Vertov's overuse of "intertitle
Intertitle
In motion pictures, an intertitle is a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action, at various points, generally to convey character dialogue, or descriptive narrative material related to, but not necessarily covered by, the material photographed.Intertitles...

s" was inconsistent with the film-making style the 'kinoks' subscribed to.

Working within that context, Vertov dealt with much fear in anticipation of the film's release. He requested a warning to be printed in Soviet central Communist newspaper, Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....

, 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 eye. 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 – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – 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.

Stylistic aspects

Working within a Marxist ideology, Vertov strove to create a futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This artificial city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. The kino’s aesthetic shined through in his portrayal of electrification, industrialization, and the achievements of workers through hard labour. This could also be viewed as early modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 in film.

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 Walter Ruttmann
Walter Ruttmann
Walter Ruttmann was a German film director and along with Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling was an early German practitioner of experimental film....

's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis is a 1927 German film directed by Walter Ruttmann, co-written by Carl Mayer and Karl Freund....

, which predates Man with a Movie Camera by two years, but as Vertov wrote to the German press in 1929, these techniques and images had been developed and employed by him in his Kino-Pravda newsreels and documentaries for the last ten years, all of which predate Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Vertov's pioneering cinematic concepts actually inspired other abstract films by filmmakers like Walter Ruttmann.

Because of doubts before screening, and great anticipation from Vertov's pre-screening statements, the film gained great interest before even shown. Once the film was finally screened, the public either embraced or dismissed Vertov's stylistic choices. The pace of the film's editing—more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots—perturbed some viewers, including the New York Times' reviewer Mordaunt Hall:
"The producer, Dziga Vertof, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention."


On a technical note, Man with a Movie Cameras usage of double exposure and seemingly 'hidden' cameras made the movie come across as a very 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’s overall speed is fast moving and enthralling. The sequences and close-ups capture emotional qualities, which 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 "directed toward the creation of a genuine, international, purely cinematic language, entirely distinct from the language of theatre and literature."

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:
  • 1995 – New composition performed by the Alloy Orchestra
    Alloy Orchestra
    Alloy Orchestra is a musical ensemble based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, that performs its own accompaniments to silent films of the classic movie era. Percussionists Terry Donahue and Ken Winokur and keyboardist Caleb Sampson founded the group in 1990...

    , based on notes left by Vertov. It incorporates sound effects such as sirens, babies crying, crowd noise, etc. Readily available on several different DVD versions.
  • 1996 – Norwegian composer Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere
    Biosphere (musician)
    Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen , a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music. He is well known for his "ambient techno" and "arctic ambient" styles, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources. His track "Novelty...

    ) was commissioned by the Tromsø International Film Festival
    Tromsø International Film Festival
    The Tromsø International Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Tromsø, Norway.The inaugural Tromsø International Film Festival was held in 1991, and today TIFF is the largest film festival in Norway as considered by attendance figures; in 2010 there were 58 267 admissions. In 2006 TIFF...

     to write a new soundtrack
    Man with a Movie Camera (Biosphere album)
    Man with a Movie Camera is an ambient soundtrack by Biosphere for Dziga Vertov's 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, commissioned by the Tromsø International Film Festival in 1996...

     for the movie, using the director's written instructions for the original accompanying piano player. Jenssen wrote half of the soundtrack, turning the other half to Per Martinsen (aka Mental Overdrive). It was used for the Norwegian version Mannen med filmkameraet at the 1996 TIFF http://www.tiff.no/tiff1997/tiff1996.htmhttp://www.tiff.no/tiff1998/berlin.htm. Scored movie not available after the festival. The soundtrack was released in 2001 on Substrata 2
    Substrata 2
    Substrata 2, also written as Substrata², is a double album by ambient musician Biosphere which was released on 6 June 2001.The first disc is a remastered version of Substrata, and the second disc is a soundtrack for Dziga Vertov's 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, commissioned by the Tromsø...

    .
  • 1999 – In the Nursery
    In The Nursery
    In the Nursery are a neo-classical/martial electronica band, known for their cinematic sound. The duo has provided soundtracks to a variety of TV programmes and films, and is known for its rescoring of silent films.- Career :...

     version, made for the Bradford International Film Festival. Currently available on a few DVD versions, often paired with the Alloy Orchestra score as an alternate soundtrack.
  • 2001 – Steve Jansen
    Steve Jansen
    Steve Jansen is an English drummer, percussionist, singer and composer. He was educated at Catford Boys' School, Catford, South East London, where he failed academically, leaving at 16....

     and Claudio Chianura recorded a live soundtrack for a showing of the film at the Palazzina Liberty, in Milan
    Milan
    Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

     on 11 December 1999. This was subsequently released on CD as the album Kinoapparatom in 2001.
  • 2002 – A version was released with a soundtrack composed by Jason Swinscoe and performed by the British jazz
    Jazz
    Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

     and electronic
    Electronic music
    Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...

     outfit The Cinematic Orchestra
    The Cinematic Orchestra
    The Cinematic Orchestra is a British jazz and electronic outfit, created in 1997 by Jason Swinscoe. The band is signed to Ninja Tune independent record label. In addition to Swinscoe, the band includes PC former DJ Food member on turntables, Luke Flowers , Tom Chant , Nick Ramm , Stuart McCallum ...

     (see Man with a Movie Camera (album)
    Man with a Movie Camera (album)
    Man with a Movie Camera is a 2003 soundtrack album by The Cinematic Orchestra, released on 26 May, 2003 on Ninja Tune. The album contains re-workings and thematic reprises of some of the music from their previous album, Every Day, including the tracks "Man with a Movie Camera", and an instrumental...

    ). Originally made for the Porto 2000 Film Festival. It was also released on DVD in limited numbers by Ninja Tune
    Ninja Tune
    Ninja Tune is a London-based independent record label started by DJs Matt Black and Jonathan More, better known as Coldcut and managed by Peter Quicke. The label has a strong leaning towards mostly Electronic Music...

    . This DVD edition is currently very much in demand and goes for prices higher than the other DVD versions.
  • 2002 – A DVD of the film by the British Film Institute
    British Film Institute
    The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...

     was released with a score by Michael Nyman
    Michael Nyman
    Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...

    . This score is readily available on several different DVD editions. It has not been issued on CD, but some of the score is reworked from material Nyman wrote for the Sega Saturn
    Sega Saturn
    The is a 32-bit fifth-generation video game console that was first released by Sega on November 22, 1994 in Japan, May 11, 1995 in North America, and July 8, 1995 in Europe...

     video game Enemy Zero
    Enemy Zero
    is a 1997 video game for Sega Saturn, developed by WARP and directed by Kenji Eno. After its Saturn release, it was ported to Microsoft Windows. It was the second game to star the digital actress Laura.-Gameplay:...

    , which had a limited CD release, and Nyman performs a brief excerpt, "Odessa Beach" on his album, The Piano Sings
    The Piano Sings
    The Piano Sings is a 2005 solo album by Michael Nyman featuring personal interpretations of film music he wrote between 1993 and 2003. It is his second release on his own label, MN Records, and his 49th release overall...

    .
  • 2003 June – Boston-based multi-theremin ensemble The Lothars performed a semi-improvised soundtrack accompanying a screening of the film at the Coolidge Corner Theatre
    Coolidge Corner Theatre
    Coolidge Corner Theatre, a cinema in the Coolidge Corner section of Brookline, Massachusetts, is the "only operating not-for-profit Art Deco theatre in the Boston area and is one of the top ten arthouse film exhibition theaters in the county." Among recipients of this venue's annual Coolidge Award...

     in Brookline, Massachusetts. They repeated their performance three years later, in December, 2006 at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, New York.
  • 2007 November – France based group Art Zoyd
    Art Zoyd
    Art Zoyd is a French band formed in 1968, mixing free jazz, progressive rock and avant-garde electronica.Like other members of the Rock in Opposition movement, Art Zoyd fuses progressive rock and jazz with contemporary classical music. Like fellow RIO member Univers Zéro, they are also influenced...

     presented a scenic version of the film with addition video by artist Cecile Babiole. A studio recording of the soundtrack was released on CD in 2012: Eyecatcher/Man with a Movie Camera.
  • 2008 – Norwegian electronic jazz trio Halt the Flux performed their interpretation of the soundtrack for Man with a Movie Camera in Bergen International Film Festival
    Bergen International Film Festival
    The Bergen International Film Festival is a film festival held annually in October in Bergen, Norway since 2000, and is the largest film festival in the nation in number of films. The 11th edition of the festival in 2010 featured 150 films in the program, a new record...

    . The trio consists of Anders Wasserfall, Jørgen Vaage & Bjørnar Thyholdt.
  • 2008 October – London based Cinematic Orchestra undertook a show featuring a screening of Vertov's film, which preceded the re-issue of the Man With A Movie Camera DVD, in November.
  • 2008 November – San Francisco Bay Area
    San Francisco Bay Area
    The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

     based Tricks of the Light Orchestra accompanied a screening of the film on Sunday, November 30 at Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco.
  • 2009 July; Mexican composer Alex Otaola
    Alex Otaola
    Alex Otaola is a rock and jazz musician from the Mexican capital Mexico City. During his career he has been a member of bands such as Santa Sabina and La Barranca. In 2007 he started a solo career.-Santa Sabina:...

    performed live a new soundtrack for the film at Mexico's National Cinematheque. Aided by the 'Ensamble de Cámara/Acción' (Adrian Terrazas-bass clarinet, Daniel Zlotnik-clarinet/flute, María Emilia Martínez-flute, Luca Ortega-flute/piano, Carlos Maldonado-upright, Jose María Arreola-drums/percussion), which consists of members from The Mars Volta, Los Dorados, San Pascualito Rey, Klezmerson and LabA
  • 2009 The New York City based Voxare String Quartet performed music by Soviet Modernist composers to accompany a screening of the film.
  • 2010 August – Irish instrumental post-rock band 3epkano accompanied a screening of the film with an original live soundtrack in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin
  • 2010 July – Ukrainian guitarist and composer Vitaliy Tkachuk with his quartet performed his own soundtrack for the film "Man with a Movie Camera" on a first Ukrainian silent cinema festival "Mute nights" in Odessa, the city where this movie was made.
  • 2011: The French pianist Yann Le Long, the violoncellist Philippe Cusson and the percussionist Stéphane Grimalt perform for the first time the soundtrack written by Yann Le Long for the film (20 May 2011) at the Centre Culturel du Vieux Couvent, Muzillac, France.

Further reading

  • Annette Michelson ed. Kevin O'Brien tr. Kino-Eye : The Writings of Dziga Vertov, University of California Press, 1995.
  • Feldman, Seth R. Dziga Vertov. A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.
  • Devaux, Frederique. L'Homme et la camera: de Dziga Vertov. CrisnÈe, Belgique: Editions Yellow Now, 1990.
  • Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. The Oxford history of World Cinema. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Tsivian, Yuri. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. edited and with an introduction by Yuri Tsivian; Russian texts translated by Julian Graffy; filmographic and biographical research, Aleksandr Deriabin; co-researchers, Oksana Sarkisova, Sarah Keller, Theresa Scandiffio. Gemona, Udine : Le Giornate del cinema muto, 2004.
  • Manovich, Lev. "Database as a Symbolic Form". Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

External links

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