Man With A Movie Camera (1929) - Video On Demand

Man With A Movie Camera - Movie Review

Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film by Russian director Dziga Vertov. This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, animations, and a self-reflexive storyline.

Vertov's feature film, produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in Ukraine 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 cameraman of the title and the modern Soviet Union he discovers and presents in the film.

Vertov was a working-class artist who desired to link workers with machines. His film opens with a manifesto, a series of intertitles telling us that this film is an "experiment," a search for an "absolute language of cinema" that is "based on its total separation from the language of literature and theater." The Man With a Movie Camera is divided into nine orchestral-type movements, and several of them use rapid-fire editing, wild juxtapositions (e.g. blinking eyes with shutter blinds) and multiple exposures to mesh workers with machines in a simultaneity of reverence and celebration.

Levers and wheels turn and workers synchronously turn with them. Later, Vertov reveals more mechanical reality as he juxtaposes a woman getting her hair washed with another washing clothes, and then shows a barber shaving a man, and sharpening a razor's edge. The sequence ends with newspapers rifling along a printing press, and a young woman packing cigarettes, watching the machine's quick slap pressing, while smiling at her labor.

Vertov saw documentaries as the only valid form of film. 'Man with the Movie Camera' is a statement of commitment to the documentary approach. It is also a 'box of tricks' which serves as an essential example of Soviet montage and a catalogue of the possibilities of filming technique. The Polish director belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks, or kinokis. 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. This being said, most of Vertov's films were highly controversial, and the kinoks movement was despised by many filmmakers of the time.

Man With A Movie Camera - Cast & Crew

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