Customer Reviews

Man With The Movie Camera (Enhanced) (1929)

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*NOTE: This review is for the 2008 "(Enhanced)" version of the film, produced and distributed exclusively by amazon.com

I think amazon hunted for the WORST print of this movie in existance to distribute! The picture goes in and out of focus as the dark levels jump all over the place. The speed of the projection even shifts all around. Also there is no score to accompany the picture so it is truly and literally a silent movie. Do yourself a favor and purchase the Kino version of a few years ago. I have and it is wonderful. This is now one of my favorite movies but it never would have been so if I had tried to deal with the presentation on this item. I will be very suspicious of any movie posted with an enhanced tag as amazon appears to be trying to make a quick buck and doesn't really care what they are passing off to movie lovers.

Sorry about the weird title for the review. I couldn't come up with anything else at the moment.

On to `Man With a Movie Camera' which is certainly among the top silent films of all time. Not so much for its content, as its use of such a wide range of cinematic techniques. Dziga Vertov invents, deploys or develops techniques 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 style.

His message was simple and concise. The camera could go anywhere and do anything. It's almost as if Vertov could see the future. At the time, camera's where big and loud and could not be hidden but Vertov could see that it for what it was.

A well designed film by Dziga Vertov's that looks like a documentary than show the man and the city. We are constantly looking at fictional city where it is compared to the man with a camera. This film shot in black and white in 1929 is often compared to "Berlin: symphony of a great city" however this film is much more.

The real interest in the movie is how it is cut, and the choices of what to film. Every time you turn around you will see something not of other documentaries. What is real and what is film reality?

The voice over is just as good if not better than the original film as it describes how the film was made.

An added plus is just looking at the ancient technology. And then again how they are ahead of us in electric transportation.

The late 1920's were no doubt a strange time for most citizens of the Soviet Union. They were adapting to a new form of government after centuries of czarist rule, the entire world was on the precipice of an economic downturn and the whole nation had to get used to calling St. Petersburg `Leningrad.'

Dziga Vertov's 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera captures all of this turbulence, change and optimism in a montage of images that are at once random and perfectly connected. Much like the movie itself, individual opinions will feature a dichotomy of views. Some people will find the movie boring while others will find it engrossing. Some will claim that there was no point to the movie and others will claim that the absence of a point was the whole point itself. Most, however, will come away from this film thinking all of these things at once.

The complete lack of a storyline or clear point allows Vertov to use editing extensively in conveying his message. While it's uncertain exactly what that message is, tempo changes and scene placement precisely convey an overall feeling of change. Russia in 1929 was in as much a state of flux as possible, whether it be economically, politically, technologically, religiously or culturally. No one really knew what the end result would be, though they had theories, and this is exactly what Vertov conveys in his film. Industry was stressed extensively in Russia during this period. They had lagged behind the Western world following the Industrial Revolution, so the new Communist government instituted a strategy to catch up. Through the use of new machinery they could farm more efficiently and produce in greater numbers. These processes are highlighted in Vertov's film. He painted them in an optimistic light, though the overall fury of the film made it all seem overwhelming even to me, 70+ years later.

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-awareness 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 review pertains to the newely released Man With A Movie Camera (Enhanced Edition) 1929.

Man with a Movie Camera, sometimes The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film by Russian director Dziga Vertov.

Vertov's feature film, produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in Odessa 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.

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

An absolute must own!

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 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).