Reelin' In The Years -- Man With A Movie Camera (1929), directed by Dziga Vertov

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "The Eye of Truth", by Driver

       If you take the words of the United States government at face value, the Soviet Union was a miserable place. A hellish wasteland, that was also a rigid police state, where people lived drab, colorless lives and things like creativity and joy were alien concepts. These statements are naturally quite ironic coming from a country with the largest imprisoned population on the planet, the same one where cops shoot children with repercussions and diabetic people regularly die because they can’t afford insulin, but beyond the blatant hypocrisy the simple fact is that the people of the Soviet Union were incredibly joyful and creative to boot. They had satirical magazines, cartoons and of course cinema. The Soviet people were quick to adopt this fledgling medium, realizing as much as everyone else the practical and creative possibilities such a technology afforded them,and indeed some of the earliest and best innovators in the world of film came from the U.S.S.R. Guess when your movie’s entire existence isn’t tied to the whims of money-hungry studio executives you’ve got room to do something different, huh? Anyway, today on our Reelin’ In the Years tour we’ve stopped in 1929; Probably not the best year of your life if you liked to play the stocks, but at least you had movies. Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, and of course the movie in the title. I think we’ll talk about that one.

Released in 1929 and directed by Dziga Vertov, Man With A Movie Camera (the word ‘The’ seems to be optional) is something of an experimental documentary. We follow our cameraman as he travels about the city doing what a camerman does, which is film. We start in the morning and gradually move across the day, and as we do so we watch people do the things that people do. We see them at work, we see them play, we see them being born and when they die, from huge bustling crowds to solitary souls. Sometimes we see our cameraman on a trolley, other times in a speeding car, even teetering high above the city on a bridge or some scaffolding. It’s the full breadth of the human experience here, on display for the world to see. Hell, we even get some scenes in a movie theater where we watch people watching the footage we were watching, in case you wanted to make a shitty Inception joke.

       Shitty Inception jokes aside, those scenes serve to highlight the crux of what I believe the film is about, and something I believe Vertov addressed in some of his other movies: The heightened reality, or perhaps non-reality, of film. We see glimpses of these people’s lives, occasionally very candid ones at that, and yet we aren’t seeing it through a human eye, but rather a camera eye. Indeed, much of the film is spent by Vertov showing us the world in ways that we as people could not; Freeze frames, slow motion, stop-motion, fade-ins, forced perspectives, montage, revealing the film strip itself and taking us into the editing room to see it cut, and so on. We take things like that for granted in movies nowadays, but there’s this energy with which Man With A Movie Camera leaps into these new techniques that makes you look at movies in a new light. It’s not just watching a novel or a play being adapted for the screen, as was the case for many films at this time, it’s showing the audience the foundation of a new visual language coming into being. Which, given Vertov’s work here, his peer Sergei Eisenstein’s development of montage theory (yes, that thing you so closely associated with 1980s American movies came from the U.S.S.R.) and filmmakers like him, was clearly their intention. I think it also exudes a feeling of… I guess I’d call it ‘modernity’, which I believe tends to be the major barrier of entry for casual moviegoers.

       Regarding the music, as far as I’ve there are two different scores depending on the version you’re watching: The Kino Lorber version features Michael Nyman, and the other by the musical ensemble Alloy Orchestra. I ended up with Kino Lorber, and I think Nyman’s bracing, exuberant orchestral score really amps up Man With A Movie Camera’s natural energy to a great degree. There are several instances where it felt like the score was incongruent with the context of the film, big boisterous crescendos where nothing active is happening or becoming almost menacing when it’s just people laughing at a park or what have you, but otherwise I thought it was perfectly serviceable. Given how important music has been to the enjoyment of these films however, you might want to check out the Alloy Orchestra version as well, get a feel for it. 

       Of course the crux of your enjoyment with this film comes down to your appreciation with this experimentation. There’s no real story to speak of beyond ‘life in this city’, no characters beyond the people being filmed, no dialogue, it’s a purely visual experience. Experimental movies aren’t everyone’ s cup of tea, and if what I’ve described to you in a woefully inadequate fashion didn’t light the spark of interest then there’s likely nothing here for you.. I on the other hand found myself engrossed with Man With A Movie Camera, this pioneer of cinematography and 20th century time capsule all in one, and so I can’t help but recommend it. If you’re a burgeoning cinephile or student of history, then I think you should make room in your queue for this one when you can. It’ll be worth it.