Customer Reviews

Man With A Movie Camera [VHS]

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Vertov's _Man with a Movie Camera_ is not only the hallmark of Russian Constructivist film but one of the greatest films ever made, no hyperbole intended. Vertov's main premise was to create a new city, an Utopian ideal, through montage and editing. The scenes in the film are taken from footage of the three Russian cities of Kiev, Moscow and Odessa.

Unlike many of the other reviewers, I would have to suggest watching the film with the sound off (at least once.) The music, although originally composed by Vertov, has been adapted more recently by the Alloy Orchestra, and can have the tendency to be a distraction. Indeed, Vertov stated that film should be a medium that stands alone, not muddled by the addition of psychology, romance, or music. He placed tremendous value on the camera's ability to distill truth from visual "garbage," with what he termed "Kino-Eye" or "Truth-Eye."

Additionally, I would recommend reading Vlada Petric's meticulous still-by-still dissection of the film---_Constructivism in Film : The Man With the Movie Camera : A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge Studies in Film)_, as well as Andrei Bely's novel _Petersburg_, which Nabokov cited as one of the four most important literary works of the 20th century and deals in part with a similar urban improvement motif, and of course Vertov's own theoretical writings _Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov_.

I love silent movies. The grammar of the cinema has been invented during this period. It's amazing to discover that what seems to us truly original or personal in most of our today geniuses was already there in these black and white movies, even in a better way. I am conscious that it demands a peculiar effort to the 1999 movie fan, but the reward is great.

THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA is a 1929 russian movie directed by Dziga Vertov. A breath-taking musical score has been recorded for the reissue of this movie a few years ago. I still have this music in my head three days after having seen the picture ! You will also find in this DVD a really instructive commentary which is absolutely necessary if you want to appreciate all the subtleties of THE MAN OF THE MOVIE CAMERA.

This motion picture is a kind of manifesto, without screenplay. It could have been a documentary but it's not. Certain moments are not so far from the surrealism one can find in the movies of Luis Bunuel shot at the same period. Other scenes of the movie are lessons of cinema that could have been given by, let's say, a Jean-Luc Godard. For instance, Vertov films a train coming with great speed towards the camera, then the man with the movie camera shooting the scene, then the audience watching the train coming on the screen. At this moment, one remembers that one of the first movies ever filmed was, in 1896, the entrance of a train in a french railway station. The audience screamed and left the room in a hurry, 35 years later no one moves.

If you are curious about cinema, if you definitely consider it as an art, if you like to have images haunting your mind during days, then you really should consider THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA as

A DVD for your library.

The Man With The Movie Camera is an excellent piece of work by Dziga Vertov who directs this film with lots of artistic quality. The idea is to essentially provide viewers with a slice of life as it existed at the time in The Soviet Union. The Man With The Movie Camera uses fantastic camera and cinematography techniques to make this movie stand out as a very good one.

This slice of life movie runs a full 68 minutes without any intertitles, plot, or actors. The people we see in the film are real, everyday people of different classes and backgrounds. I know; the former Soviet Union was to be a classless society; but it's abundantly clear in this movie that some people were so poor they had to sleep in the streets while others clearly enjoyed life at the beach or very modern clothing for their outings and social gatherings. In addition, we see the effects of Communism in the various social halls and a passenger freighter all named after Lenin. The newspaper is a union run newspaper; and except for the wealthy most people do wear essentially the same style of clothing.

The film brilliantly starts with a movie theater filling up with moviegoers and the projectionist and orchestra pit begin the performance; thus there is a movie within a movie. Very impressive! The footage also includes quite a bit of time filming the director as he goes all over a city, towns and beaches trying and succeeding at capturing this precious slice of life.

We see happy people, sad and depressed people, storekeepers, mail carriers. As the film goes along the day begins and we see the people of a city rise from their beds to start what becomes an incredibly busy day; and this is documented very well in this film.

Overall, I highly recommend this film for those of us interested in looking at the past and people who like sociology will also appreciate this movie. The musical score for this silent movie is also excellent. The only extra feature is a commentary; but I think the film stands quite well on its own.

Enjoy!

THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA is a film you're either going to love or hate, and it's unlikely you'll find a comfortable mid-ground. It's silent, Russian made, experimental. It opens with a manifesto rejecting inter-title cards, and an affinity to or reliance on theater and literature. It won't reject any of the tricks of cinema, though - including stop-action animation, slow motion, and at times dizzying, machine fire montages. It uses documentary footage to tell its story.

Although it doesn't tell a traditional story the movie does have a structure. It opens in an empty movie hall, records a projectionist queuing up reel one. Cuts to the hall, stop-action animates chairs unfolding. Cuts to the orchestra - conductor's baton is raised, the orchestra is readied and suspended. Enter audience. Love it or hate it, this movie never forgets it's a movie. I loved it. And I loved when the projector started and the real movie started.

And that journey - the one the movie takes - is well described by the second American title, `Living Russia.' We seem to spend most of the movie following a man with an old, hand-cranked, tripod supported movie camera as he travels through some Russian city or other. We, over his shoulder, seem to go everywhere and observe everything - a young woman sleeping in bed, people sleeping on park benches, store-front mannequins at rest. Eventually the woman and bench sleepers awake, the mannequins are animated, and we travel in time through the work and recreational life of a city. Then it's to the foundry, the cigarette packing plant, the beach, the volleyball court....

Some people will find this art house movie terribly self-absorbed and its lack of a conventional narrative frustrating. If you only like movies that throw a good story at you probably won't care much for this film. If you're not sure give this one a try - beneath it's lack of `story' is a fascinating story written on celluloid, vibrant, wry, and witty.

I was curious to see "Man With the Movie Camera" ever since reading 'Kino-Eye', the director's rather bombastic manifesto about the virtues of nonfiction film making. Soon after the DVD was released, I ordered it online. I was not at all disappointed upon satisfaction of my curiosity.

The film is all montage, not story or lecturing, and makes a fetish of modernization and industrialization. It derives its power from the pure artistry of editing, from the rapid justaposition of images and of snippets of action from everyday life.

There's something about the total effect of Dziga Vertov's film, its zestful "sense of life", its manic energy, that may especially (and very surprisingly) appeal to fans of Ayn Rand, the anti-Soviet novelist who left the USSR for the USA during the mid-1920s and who went on to eventually write Atlas Shrugged.

It's interesting that Vertov is considered one of the trailblazers of cinema verite, the recording of the quotidian as-it-happens, whereas his film is actually a collage of kinetic images symphonically woven into an architechtonic whole of visual and spirtual unity. A product of organizing intellect, not mere assemblage, his documentary does not so much 'document' as utterly transform -- it is not so much true-to-life as true-to-vision.

Dziga Vertov's _Man With a Movie Camera_ stretches the Soviet theories of montage to the breaking point. Like most Stalin-era films, it appears propagandistic at first glance. But in its relentless exposure of the cinematic phenomenon, the film compels viewers to think for themselves, and reconsider what they see on the screen. It's clear that Vertov thought himself a good Communist for attempting to make his audience more self-aware, but Stalin's apparatchiks loudly disagreed; after all, nothing was more dangerous for them than a free-thinking proletariat. In addition, the film shows just enough of Soviet urban squalor to give the lie to official visions of a workers' paradise.

With the support of the George Eastman House, video preservation guru David Shepard has restored Vertov's documentary-manifesto with loving care, even insisting on a 1.20:1 aspect ratio (which is slightly narrower than the average television set, hence a small black bar on the side of the screen). The musical score, by the Alloy Orchestra, follows Vertov's surprisingly detailed instructions to the letter.

What really makes this edition impressive is its sole special feature: an audio essay by Yuri Tsivian that may be the best DVD commentary I've ever heard. We need more commentaries like this one, with true film scholars explaining the images in terms which are neither too technical nor too vague. A must-own.

Dziga Vertov's Man With the Movie Camera (1929) is a narrative-free silent film plucked right from Stalinist Russia. In it, Vertov envisions a world as seen from the lens of a camera...marriages, divorces, deaths, accidents, transportation, daily work, sports, beach-going...everything is seen from the camera's eye view. The film is edited using a number of innovative techniques, and throughout the 68 minute assault on your visual sense, you as viewer basically BECOME the Man with the Movie Camera, but because we frequently see a man with a movie camera, it becomes multi-layered. We are the camera filming the filmer. Vertov believed that film would triumph as a medium free of the narratives of literature or the standards of the other arts, that it could be truly an exquisite tool of the proletariat. Interestingly, he was not given approval from the Stalinists who felt that his commitment to aesthetics went beyond his commitment to ideology.

One of Vertov's key themes is the comparison of human labor with machines. He wrote, ""I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye, I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you."

Incidentally, a collection of Vertov's writings called The Kino Eye does exist in the world (1984).

"This film presents a experiment in the cinematic communication of visible event, without the aid of inter-titles, without the aid of a scenario." Such explannatory opening titles are the only ones you will see in this 1929 Soviet-made silent film. Thence begins the visual tour we are taken through by "The Man with a Movie Camera" as he literally takes us along for the ride as he chronciles the better part of a day's usual goings-on in an agglomeration of Soviet cities. Hence the scene index on this DVD segments up this film with the aid of such chapters labeled: "The beginning," "Workday begins," "Open for business," "Still life in motion," Emergency," "Coal, steel, silk & water," "Workday ends," Exercise," "Special effects," "The pace increases," concluding with "End credits." I've included the above to give you an idea how this film achieves what other reviewers herein have characterized it doing. Images are literally thrown at you at various speeds by Vertov, the director. "Workday begins," for instance, is a montage of images---alternatively moving and stilled---of folks waking up, streets coming alive, trams embarking out of their depots; with shots of cash registers, typewriters, parked cars, phones & such all waiting to be put in motion. Then the movie camera lens that just showed us a woman washing her face, itself occupies the screen. Then we see this woman's eyes. Then a window shutter. Then a window. Then the camera again. Then window blinds. Then the woman's eyes yet again. Then the blinds again, followed by the lens, etc. We don't watch this film from afar, in short. Rather, we become "The Man with the Movie Camera" ourselves, as if we were the one running across a threshold, between street trams, or up a bridge---as we see the actual camerman do in this film---before we ourselves get to take in the view of the camera lens from such vantage points. In this manner the director is hoping to wake us up to life as it is; to see life as if our eyes are but camera lenses. It's makes for an interesting viewpoint---pardon the pun---to say the least; and accounts for the fact that "The Man with a Movie Camera" merits inclusion among the best silent films ever made, if not of all films made, as well. Sure, "the factory of dreams" as Hollywood was known in Soviet Russia, is an art form in of itself. Less known is "the factory of facts" which this film purports to represent. You wouldn't think that a 68 minute storyless silent film (albeit it with a captivating score) would be actually entertaining, but it is; even with multiple viewings! I, for one, have watched it 3 times and---most likely, will do so some months hence again. I hope I have been of some help herein & that I have piqued your interest in seeing this film. (If so, do listen to the audio commentary on this DVD after your first viewing.) (05Jan) Cheers!

The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

The opening moments of the newly-restored edition of Dziga Vertov's most famous film, The Man with a Movie Camera, explain that the silent film contains no cards because Vertov was less interested in making a traditional movie than in creating a visual language. Thus, those who go into this looking for a traditional movie aren't going to get much out of it; there's no plot, no characters, no story, not much of anything, really. The idea behind Vertov's vision was to (a) document daily life in contemporary Russia, and (b) to use nothing but images to convey the ambient emotions. And in that respect, the film is a smashing success; if you allow it to simply wash over you, it's a wonderful piece of work.

Perhaps even more interesting than Vertov's attempt to create a visual language was the movie's sense of what is popularly called "meta" today; the documentary itself is framed with images of a movie theater where people are attending a screening of, you guessed it, The Man with a Movie Camera. If nothing else, these scenes alone-- unheard of at the time-- would cement Vertov's place as one of film's pioneers.

Its importance in the greater scheme of cinema would be hard to overstate; Vertov's little self-aware documentary was a direct influence on hundreds, if not thousands, of movies that followed (most importantly Triumph des Willens, which changed not only the face of filmmaking, but the face of the entire marketing industry as well). Eighty years later, The Man with a Movie Camera has as much power to impress as it did when it was released-- as long as you're willing to take it on its own terms. ****

This film has been aptly compared to Berlin: Symphony of a City, but what has interested me most about it is its portrayal of cinema as a universally accessible art form. While there are propagandistic moments -- celebrating the efficiency and lifestyle of the Soviet working class -- it easily transcends whatever purpose the authorities (or Vertov himself) may have had in allowing Vertov to film it. You have to remember that this film was composed for an audience that may have seen films but were certainly not film literate -- not many of us are now -- which is to say they had not likely been aware of the process of making films, or reflected much on the nature of film. What is so exciting about this film is that it presents both a portrait of a city, and of the life of its inhabitants, as well as a documentary (and self-reflexive) study of the art of filmmaking. There is much to learn from this film about the different ways of thinking about film, and I often show it in my film classes for this purpose.

There is the idea of film as a recorder of objective fact, that is potentially present anywhere though always located somewhere, suggested by the images of the filmmaker as a kind of eye towering over the city, seeing both the whole and the parts. There is also the idea of film as highly subjective, suggested in images that show the personal reaction of the filmmaker, and in images that show the personal dangers faced by the "man with a movie camera" in his effort to capture difficult shots. We see, in these shots, that film is not simply a passive recorder of events that unfold independently of the filmmaker but is also involved in the creation of these events. We see the editor, editing the very footage that we had just seen the filmmaker recording. We see that the filmmaker can be a kind of poet, making use of visual metaphors to suggest ideas: a train relay that suggests the intercutting of various scenes by the editor, a window and an eye that suggest the camera. We also see the capacity of the filmmaker to manipulate and create a new reality, when we observe animation (of the camera itself, seemingly taking on a life of its own without the cameraman), but we also see how this animation is achieved. We are even shown the audience itself, and by implication are included in the very picture we are watching. Some of these metaphors and ideas may seem heavy handed today, but that is only in my description of them. When you actually watch them they fascinate. The editing also is superb in this film -- always appropriate to the scene it is sometimes slow, and sometimes more rapid and kinetic than anything MTV produces.

All in all, I consider this an essential piece of cinema, well worth purchasing on DVD while it is still available. I hope it remains in print forever, but have a hard time believing it will, which is why I just recently purchased a personal copy -- when it was already owned by my campus library. (The picture on the DVD is quite fine, better than the VHS copy I have seen; the music that was re-created from notes left behind by Vertov is superb and fits the film quite nicely.)