Man with a Movie Camera

''Man with a Movie Camera'' is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Kaufman also appears as the titular Man.

Vertov's feature film, produced by the film studio All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU), presents urban life in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa during the late 1920s.
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It has no actors. 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 cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film.

''Man with a Movie Camera'' is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

''Man with a Movie Camera'' was largely dismissed upon its initial release; the work's fast cutting, self-reflexivity, and emphasis on form over content were all subjects of criticism. In the British Film Institute's 2012 ''Sight & Sound'' poll, however, film critics voted it the 8th greatest film ever made, the 9th greatest in the 2022 poll, and in 2014 it was named the best documentary of all time in the same magazine. The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre placed it in 2021 at number three of their list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema.

In 2015, the film received a restoration using a 35mm print of the only known complete cut of the film. Restoration efforts were conducted by the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam, with additional digital work by Lobster Films. While the film is in the public domain, this restored version was licensed to Flicker Alley for release on Blu-ray.

Overview

The film is divided into six separate parts, one for each film reel on which it would have originally been printed. Each part begins with a number appearing on screen and falling down flat. The film makes use of many editing techniques, such as superimposition, slow motion, fast motion, rapid cross-cutting, and montage.

The film has an unabashedly avant-garde style, and the subject matter varies greatly. The titular man with the movie camera (Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov's brother) travels to diverse locations to capture a variety of shots. He appears in artistic images such as a superimposed shot of the cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, and another superimposed shot of the cameraman inside a beer glass. General images include laborers at work, sporting events, couples getting married and divorced, a woman giving birth, and a funeral procession. Much of the film is concerned with people of varying economic classes navigating urban environments. On occasion, the film's editor (Svilova) is shown working with strips of film and various pieces of editing equipment.

Despite claiming to be without actors, the film features a few staged situations. This includes some of the cameraman's actions, the scene of a woman getting dressed, and chess pieces being swept to the center of the board (a shot spliced in backwards so the pieces expand outward and stand in position). Stop-motion is used for several shots, including an unmanned camera on a tripod standing up, showing off its mechanical parts, and then walking off screen.

Vertov's intentions

Vertov was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s. He belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks, or kino-oki (kino-eyes). Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making, a radical approach to movie making. Most of Vertov's films were highly controversial, and the kinok movement was despised by many filmmakers.

Vertov's crowning achievement, ''Man with a Movie Camera'', was his response to critics who rejected his previous film, '' A Sixth Part of the World''. Critics had declared that Vertov's overuse of "intertitles" was inconsistent with the film-making style to which the "kinoks" subscribed. Working within that context, Vertov dealt with a lot of fear in anticipation of the film's release. He requested a warning to be printed in the Soviet central Communist newspaper ''Pravda'', which spoke directly of the film's experimental, controversial nature. Vertov was worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public. Upon the official release of ''Man with a Movie Camera'', Vertov issued a statement at the beginning of the film, which read:

A real film represents

AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION

Of visual phenomena

WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES

(a film without intertitles)

WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO

(a film without a scenario)

WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE

(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)

This new experimentation work is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.

This manifesto echoes an earlier one that Vertov wrote in 1922, in which he disavowed popular films he felt were indebted to literature and theater.

Stylistic aspects

Working within a Marxist ideology, Vertov strove to create a futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This artificial city's purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. The kino's aesthetic shone through in his portrayal of electrification, industrialization, and the achievements of workers through hard labor. This film is in keeping with modernist thoughts in how it challenges art both conceptually and in practice, incorporating industrial life and technology as featured subjects of the film and implementing new editing techniques. In utilizing these techniques, the artist creates a modern interpretation of city life.

Some have mistakenly stated that many visual ideas, such as the quick editing, the close-ups of machinery, the store window displays, even the shots of a typewriter keyboard are borrowed from Walter Ruttmann's '' Berlin: Symphony of a Great City'' (1927), which predates ''Man with a Movie Camera'' by two years, but as Vertov wrote to the German press in 1929, these techniques and images had been developed and employed by him in his Kino-Pravda newsreels and documentaries during the previous ten years, all of which predate ''Berlin''. Vertov's pioneering cinematic concepts actually inspired other abstract films by Ruttmann and others, including writer, translator, filmmaker and critic Liu Na'ou (1905–1940), whose ''The Man Who Has a Camera'' (1933) pays explicit homage to Vertov's ''Man with a Movie Camera''.

''Man with a Movie Camera''s usage of double exposure and seemingly "hidden" cameras made the movie come across as a surreal montage rather than a linear motion picture. Many of the scenes in the film contain people, who change size or appear underneath other objects (double exposure). Because of these aspects, the movie is fast-moving. The sequences and close-ups capture emotional qualities that could not be fully portrayed through the use of words. The film's lack of "actors" and "sets" makes for a unique view of the everyday world; one that, according to a title card, is directed toward the creation of a new cinematic language that is " eparatedfrom the language of theatre and literature".

Production

It was filmed over a period of about three years. Four cities — Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa — were the shooting locations.

Reception

Initial

''Man with a Movie Camera'' was not always a highly regarded work. The film was criticized for both the stagings and the stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director's frequent assailing of fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses".

Vertov's Soviet contemporaries criticized its focus on form over content, with Sergei Eisenstein even deriding the film as "pointless camera hooliganism". The work was largely dismissed in the West as well. Documentary filmmaker Paul Rotha said that in Britain, Vertov was "regarded really as rather a joke, you know. All this cutting, and one camera photographing another camera – it was all trickery, and we didn't take it seriously." The pace of the film's editing – more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots – also perturbed some viewers, including ''The New York Times'' reviewer Mordaunt Hall

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