The Man With a Movie Camera

Man with a Movie Camera is a 1929 experimental silent film by Dziga Vertov that's considered one of the greatest films ever made: Innovative camera techniques The film uses a variety of creative camera techniques, including superimpositions, in-camera effects, stop-motion, and slow-motion. Realism The film creates a sense of realism by showing a day in the life of Moscow, capturing routine activities, recreation, and emergencies. Unique style The film's distinctive style and content make it interesting to watch even decades later. Metatextual The film is full of ironies and references to aspects of cinema and filmmaking. Avant-garde The film is exhilarating, witty, and defies attempts at explanation. Contradictions The film wrestles with contradictions, such as the total aesthetic freedom of the silent era while not rendering itself into nonsense. Skillful composition The film features symmetrical, tightly composed shots, such as a car that's perfectly square to the camera. Skillful focus manipulation The film skillfully manipulates focus, such as placing the merry-go-round and the people riding on it into focus while blurring the spectators. Different heights and angles The film films from different heights, often from rooftops, and from different angles.

Dziga Vertov was part of the ‘kinok' movement of film-makers. He wished to abolish fictional cinema, and move away from films that looked like stage plays. In their place, he wanted documentary-style movies that were more free-ranging and cinematic in style. Nowadays we would consider this to be far too narrow a scope for making a movie. Indeed audiences at the time did not like the work either. Sergei Eisenstein called Man with a Movie Camera ‘pointless camera hooliganism'. A few years later the unfortunate Vertov was reduced to the role of anonymously editing film reels. Time has been kinder to Vertov's work, and many film critics include Man with a Movie Camera in their lists of the best movies ever made. The ‘kinok' movement may not have many followers today, but Vertov's greatest achievement in the field is a remarkable testament to the innovation and fluidity that the movement could achieve at its best. What Vertov produced is partly a city symphony, a popular medium of the time (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City being the best-known one up to this point). However it is also a work of art that is as much about the craft of film-making as it is about the life of a city. Vertov uses the film as a chance to show what the camera and cinematic techniques could achieve, and we can view the film as a celebration of its powers. In line with his cinematic philosophy, Vertov includes almost no intertitles, no ‘characters' except the eponymous man with a movie camera, and no narrative. "This film in an experiment in cinematic communication of real events," an opening intertitle informs us, the last one we will see. While Vertov's work was produced in Communist Russia at a time when most of its cinema, even some of its best works, were marred by the need to promote the prevailing ideology, Man with a Movie Camera has no overt political intentions. Vertov chooses to focus on city settings, but the film shows none of the slavish admiration for images of iron and steel that can be found in other Russian films of the time. The factories and chimneys are there, but only as a part of everyday life. They do not overwhelm the film. While the film portrays a day in the life of a Russian city, it is also a day in the life of the cameraman, Mikhail Kaufman. In a self-reflexive gesture, Kaufman frequently appears on screen, captured by a second cameraman (perhaps Vertov?). Some of the shots of Kaufman are playful, such as the opening shot, which shows a miniaturised version of the cameraman resting his tripod and camera on top of an even larger camera. At other times he is superimposed onto scenes, as if he is a giant looming over the city and seeing everything with his camera, or as if he is a transparent ghost unseen by the passing citizens. Despite the seeming realism of Vertov's film, he is not overly obsessed with producing life as it actually was. A few of the scenes are staged for the camera. Such methods are common to all documentary makers of course, but Vertov takes this further. He directs in an experimental and avant-garde way, and mixes realism with surrealism. Along the way, Vertov throws in a large number of cinematic techniques that have been widely-used since, but which were less common during the infancy of cinema. Scenes are shot in slow-motion, speeded up, held in freeze frame, or reversed. Out-of-focus images are gradually brought into focus. The camera may spin round, use tracking shots or engage in extreme close-ups. It may tilt on one side in a Dutch angle. Vertov employs rapid cuts, match cuts and jump cuts (many years before Jean-Luc Godard made the technique famous). Split screens and multiple exposure are used, so that two images may be placed on the screen at the same time, perhaps in a split screen set at an angle, or perhaps superimposed on one another. Man with a Movie Camera is a film about filming, a chance to glory in the many techniques that are specific to cinema, and which separate it from other art-forms. Soon the talking pictures would emerge and change cinema again, but Vertov's film existed at a time when it was possible to concentrate purely on what the camera could do, and his film was important in providing the groundwork for later moviemakers. I wrote a longer appreciation of Man with a Movie Camera on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/man-with-a-movie-camera-1929/

Perhaps the greatest experimental film of all time. Crazy angles, slices of life, and camera tricks galore.

Man with a movie camera is vertov's timeless masterpiece. The incredible music and editing amazed me. Watching it is a unique experience, there's nothing like this film.

This early documentary and experimental film is a fascinating portal back to an era so removed now and yet so familiar. I love social history and this film is filled with small moments of intimacy and beautiful images coupled with a playfulness from early filmmakers pushing what was possible with a then still relatively new medium. One reviewer here wrote "Ahead of it's time 100 years ago…. 1 star". Thanks man, that made me laugh….

Fascinating movie history viewing!

Man with a Movie Camera is a Soviet experimental film that documents the modern-day life of Soviet citizens in the late 1920s. It has no characters, except for the eponymous man behind the camera. It is mostly famous for its innovative camera and editing techniques that Vetov employed including fast and slow motion, jump cuts, stop-motion animation, split screens, and tracking shots, to name a few. Of course, the film is silent with the use of music to convey the general mood of the scene and many composers have since created their own scores for the film. My favorite is Michael Nyman's composition written in 2002 which is incredibly beautiful and haunting. If you want to see something that you probably have never seen before, check this one out!

A brilliant and groundbreaking film about life in the Soviet Union during this time. It features groundbreaking special effects and directing techniques.

As mentioned by the makers at the beginning of the documentary film 'Man with a Movie Camera,' this highly expressionistic or avant-garde documentary film is a classic example of an early experimental film, for which the whole purpose is to create a new cinematic language without using any traditional techniques (back then) like using intertitles, actors, screenplay or theatre. Dziga Vertov (aka David Kaufman), a Documentarian and a cinema theorist, directed this documentary, and this was filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman and edited by his wife, Yelizaveta Svilova. It was filmed and edited for over four years around the cities Odesa, Kyiv, and Kharkiv. In this film, Vertov wants to show "a slice of life" experiences of the soviet people basically from Dawn-to-Dusk. This film starts with a scene where people gather for screening while Musicians wait for their cue, then the film follows along with music which indicates that this film is about a film about itself. This film is considered a Reflexive mode of documentary, but it also has the nuances of poetic, participatory, and observational modes because of its unique style of making. At the time of its release in 1929, this silent film was accompanied by live music in theatre. Later, it got released at different times with different soundtracks over the years. One can say that this film is ahead of its time when it comes to editing and cinematography. Typically, most of the documentaries got their shape and style right on the editing table. For this film, it becomes more than true. Even with the random footage, the editor created meaningful scenes by using juxtaposition. The filmmaker tries to draw parallels between the shots throughout the film by showing death after birth, comparing rich with poor, marriage with divorce, etc. They also edited and shot in a way that the camera is also a participatory subject to drive the story. In a way, it seems like "God's-eye view" narration, just like the "voice of God" narrative style. It is one of the earlier documentaries that has an average shot length of 2 seconds, which was not the case in those days. In one of the particular sequences, the editor uses still images of people, real footage of the editor editing those images, and then shows the video footage of those images simultaneously. This final output results in editing at its best. With the help of close-up shots, reaction shots, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, and superimposition shots only, this film looks more attractive. In this documentary, Vertov mainly focussed on the form rather than content. Vertov used some of the archival footage (magician sequence) from his earlier works, like Kino-Eye in the Man with a Movie Camera documentary. The camera shots and moments he tried in this documentary had their roots in his earlier works. In his Kino-Eye documentary, Vertov used intertitles to narrate propaganda, and also this documentary had a proper screenplay. When it comes to Man with a Movie Camera, he left most of the content for interpretation on an individual level. Vertov ultimately rejected those traditional structures and made his mark even though people criticized his work back then. He is also critical of fictional cinema and believes that it was for elitists and kills reality. But the irony is, the same editing and camera techniques he developed are now more helpful for fictional movies than documentaries. This documentary focussed more on women's employment, and most of the characters shown were women. It shed light on every aspect of soviet women's life, from a hard laborer to the film editor herself. One of the exciting things about this documentary is its soundtrack. As we already know, they used live music in the theatre back then, and it got rereleased with different soundtracks over the years. The exciting thing is with each soundtrack; we can get a different kind of interpretation on an individual basis; even with no soundtrack also the understanding changes. This documentary is timeless because it attempted to create a universal cinematographic language and became successful in doing so. " Man with a Movie Camera " is a fascinating documentary for many reasons; the main reason for me is that I got engaged throughout the film, and after every rewatching, I got to find new interpretations from the storytelling, exiting editing techniques, and ideas for my documentaries.

I can't believe this movie was more entertaining than some I've seen that had a story with dialogue.