Man With A Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)

Dziga Vertov, after watching his incredible Man With A Movie Camera, seems to be somebody who I need to look into more. I’d read about MWAMC a while back and had always had the mental note in the back of my head to see it.

The film is silent but modern versions of it have been put to various kinda of musical soundtracks. While I thought the particular soundtrack ours had was pretty engaging some of the time, we all felt that we wanted to view the film how it was originally intended, and hit the mute button for the final forty minutes.

Reading of Vertov’s fascinating philosophical and artistic intentions made the context of this film come to life. He was a “cinematic theorist” and the beginning of his film notes to the viewer of its experiment: to create a universal language of film, bringing together all persons in its state of non-characters and focus on the camera and the viewer. Vertov often described human beings as “seeing machines.”

The most common running theme in this film is the comparison of humans to machines. We see, through everyday shots of Odessa and other Soviet cities, people working in factories and using transportation and riddling the streets with crowded footsteps. Some of the most impressive shots and uses of editing in the movie involve the human eye interspersed with images of blinds and machines at work, really punching the point while still maintaining an extremely pleasing aesthetic instillation. This is the major reason for my love of Vertov’s film. It feels important in so many different ways and can be enjoyed on several different levels of profundity. It has, on the simplest plane, a historical and social context of everyday Soviet life. It’s simply fascinating to get direct feeds of this. However, as mentioned before, it also employs Vertov’s personal philosophies and experiments, with comparative shots of the human condition and our motoric and newly-industrialized lifestyles. Still yet, I was absolutely in awe of the sheer amount of versatile camera tricks. This feels like an important film in cinema history. Incredible hyper-editing, split-screen shots, slow motion, fast motion, stop motion… it all seems to be far ahead of its time but it also seems so natural for Vertov. It feels like this is an experiment on many different levels, and it works beautifully.

Overall, the images and the shots are tasteful and often times emotional (I can think of one off the top of my head of a man getting run over by a train). I’ve read that this is the first real avant-garde film, and I love that it’s not gimmicky, and that it seems so passionate and evolutionary. When you watch older movies, that seems to be the case. I love watching a natural progression in ideas, and this seems to be a very bold step for Vertov to have taken with his artistic integrity.

It’s beautiful to watch and enjoy and think about, and it makes for two amazing movies (see my M review below) in two nights.