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| A colorful original poster with English text over it for Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera |
QUICK REVIEW:
Man With a Movie Camera is an experimental avant-garde silent B/W documentary of 68 minutes, a film without inter-titles, actors or a plot. Instead, it is an abstract work in cinema and a portrait of a Soviet city.
The film is a technical montage of fast-cut images and movement. It varies between depictions of sufferings in a modern metropolis, - perhaps an implicit criticism of the economical policies of the USSR? - with an intense fascination and excitement concerning everything new, (which rather annuls any inherent critique, I should think.) It was filmed in Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev. Movie Camera features an endless display of Soviet industrial excellence and mechanical strength (through fire trucks, for instance.)
The film is made by Dziga Vertov (Kino Eye/Kinoglaz (1924)), born in Bialystok in what is Poland today but was part of the Russian empire then, and in his statement at the beginning of Movie Camera, he asserts that the film "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 theater and literature."
The radical idealism behind Vertov's endeavor here comes off to me as more of a nationally-motivated show, and I think it was the same brand of extreme idealism that led the Soviet Union to some of its most detrimental and humanly disastrous policies. - Which is one reason that I am not full of groveling admiration for the film, (as many other film scholars seem to be.)
Watch the entire film with English subtitles (for the opening titles) here
Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Unknown
[The film had a difficult time upon release because of its radical structure and lack of formal content, but apart from this, I have not been able to ascertain whether or not it was a flop commercially. It took 3 years to make and bolsters a variety of advanced cinematic visual and editing techniques, which it remains notorious and respected for: The film was listed as the 8th best film ever by the 2012 critics' Sight & Sound poll and in 2014 was named best documentary ever (again by Sight & Sound). - Phew...!!]
What do you think of Man With a Movie Camera?
If you have insight into Dziga Vertov and/or any of his other films, please, enlighten us about him/them
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