46: Man with a Movie Camera

Chelovek's kino-apparatom

USSR  68m  Dir: Dziga Vertov

Documentary

Man with a Movie Camera is a unique film. It doesn't have a story or even any kind of narrative. It's described as a documentary but it doesn't really have a theme, doesn't focus on any individuals for more than a few seconds and doesn't even have the intertitles you'd expect from a silent theme. Filmed over four years of the late 1920s, it shows the daily life of four Soviet cities (Kharkiv, Kiev, Moscow and Odessa). 

Director Dziga Vertov believed cinema should only be used for documentaries and that fiction film was a new 'opiate of the masses'. What he creates here is a million miles away from a fiction film; it's truly high-class art. 

The film uses a huge range of cinematic techniques. I'm no expert on these and I'm rather glad of that fact because I think it would have lessened the experience if my main thought was 'what a great Dutch angle'. There's freeze frames, slow motion, reversed footage, split screens, stop-motion and so much more. It endlessly explore how cinema can be made. Of course, most of these these techniques can be done fairly easily in the modern world but doing it so effectively in the 1920s is remarkable. 

The film runs at about four-times the pace of a typical 1929 film. There are about 1,775 separate shots over the 68 minute run time. I had mixed feelings about this because at times it worked wonderfully, especially when we see bustling city streets with crowds of people, horse and carts, trams and cars zooming around. But it's really hard to focus on anything when it appears so quickly and it does make your attention start to wander. 

Another way that cinema is explored is the way the film lets us go anywhere. We see a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed and see lots of close-ups of people which were shot using hidden cameras. Using a hidden camera in the 1920s was no easy feat given the sheer size of the cameras and the noise they made so Vertov had to distract those they were filming with noises even louder than the camera. At one point in the film we even see a completely uncensored shot of a woman giving birth which surprised me in a film of it's time. Vertov shows us that there are no limits in what can be filmed. 

Interestingly, we get unusual glimpses behind the scenes here. Every now and then we see the cameraman, Vertov's brother Mikhail Kaufman, setting up shots and filming. It's yet another unexpected idea used in the film. I couldn't help wonder how Kaufman survived filming given the way he precariously stood on the doors of moving cars, positioned himself in the narrow gaps between tram lines and even filmed under a moving train. We also see one step further than the filming itself and see Vertov's wife Elizaveta Svilova editing the film with a pair of scissors. 

Like most films of it's era music would have been played live in the theatre but the version I watched had a stunning soundtrack. There have been many soundtracks recorded but the one I heard was the 1983 new composition where Electronic sounds, ambiences, voices were mixed to a fifteen-piece orchestra. It really helps to make the film more engaging and emphasis it's frantic pace all the more.

I enjoyed the film from a historical perspective. Every other Soviet era film I've seen has been blatant propaganda but this is the social history of everyday life- we get a bit of everything from birth, to wedding registration, ambulances, fire brigade, factories and a funeral. Whilst there's a hint of Lenin and Marxism in the background, it's very much focused on the day to days lives of normal people rather than grand themes.

Man with a Movie Camera is not the sort of film I would rush to watch again but I found it fascinating for it's historical insight and the infinite ways it explores what cinema can do.