Man With A Movie Camera (U.)
Directed by Dziga Vertov. 1929. Black and White. 68 mins.
Every ten years the film magazine Sight and Sound isolates the world's top film critics and academics on a remote island and asks them to choose the list of the best films every made. It's a fraught ordeal, – removing these fabled, special beings from their protected environment, even if it is just to a different protected environment – is a procedure filled with danger. Despite every effort being made by the H&E executive to conceal sharp edges, cover up hard surfaces and make the place as safe as possible, every time there are fatalities, with eminent film academic electrocuting themselves while attempting to make a cup of tea, or getting garroted by a hoover cord. At the end of three days of intense discussions they emerge from their conclave to announce Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made.
Except last time it all went terribly wrong. Not only did Hitchcock's Vertigo come top, but a film cracked the top ten that nobody (least not any real people) had ever heard of. The appearance of Man With a Movie Camera, a silent era Soviet documentary, in with a bullet at No 8, was surely the biggest shock chart entry since Althia and Donna's Up Town Top Ranking stormed to the top of the pops in 1978.
Nominally a documentary, Vertov's film is an expression of egalitarian film theory, a rejection of bourgeois emotionalism and of narratives featuring prominent individuals. At the start it proudly lists all the things it doesn't have – a script, actors, sets or surtitles. The film will capture the daily life of an unidentified city. Doesn't sound like much but there's a catch – the film will also capture the cameraman who is out capturing the daily life of an unidentified city. Watching him, filming them. See, that's the stuff that gets you in the top ten films of all time.
Sounds dull but the film whips through its brief running time in a breathless montage of events. No cut lasts more than ten seconds and we riffle furiously through the events of the city – the trams, the bustle, the sewing, the machines and the people on the beach. Often this is a Man With A Rather Intrusive Movie Camera, capturing marriage, birth, divorce, a funeral and one man being treated for what looks like a very serious, maybe life threatening head injury. We see him (played by the director's brother Mikhail Kaufman) buzzing about town, trying to get a good shot, a nifty little angle. He's so breathlessly keen he's like a figure from a Harold Lloyd movie, always busy cranking the camera handle. The film is restless, it throws ever trick it can at the subject – there is animation, slow motion, speeded up motion, split screens, freeze frames, shots of reflections, dissolves and super-impositions. The frequent close ups of eyes put you in mind of Bunuel/ Dali's Un Chien Andalusia. The version being shown for an extended run at the BFI comes with a magnificent score by the Alloy Orchestra which, based on notes left by Vertov, compliment and enhance the images perfectly. There is a version with a Michael Nyman score knocking around but, although I wouldn't normally disregard a Nyman score, this is definitley the version to see.
The film's reputation grew slowly. At the time other Soviet film makers were sceptical and in Britain the documentation Paul Rotha remembers that it was “regarded rather as a joke, you know …. it was all trickery, and we didn't take it seriously.” And they had a point, it is somebody throwing the kitchen sink at it. A couple of time the image is manipulated so that the cameraman is a giant figure, a Godzilla, towering over all he surveys. I'm not saying this negates the egalitarian ambitions of the film but it does suggest that, rather than reflecting the life around it, that life becomes subservient to the camera, and the cameraman's need to capture a telling image. In that sense it is just like many a modern Hollywood blockbuster that focus purely on spectacle over any other concern. When you look back at the film, you may feel that actually you haven't really had any insight at all into life in the Soviet Union at that time. (That life seems indistinguishable from that in the West was apparently Vertov's little bit of anti-Stalin subversion.)
It is definitely an original and innovative film, one that has done wonders for expanding film language. It is a mystery though why lists like the Sight and Sound one gives such due to being the first to do something. So Citizen Kane would triumph because it is full of things which had never been done before, and that is amazing, but does that put it above all the films made by people who took those inventions on and made more interesting use of them. Man With a Movie Camera is a notable piece of history but in the realms of non narrative documentary making, well, it's no Koyaanisqatsi.
Directed by Dziga Vertov. 1929. Black and White. 68 mins.
Every ten years the film magazine Sight and Sound isolates the world's top film critics and academics on a remote island and asks them to choose the list of the best films every made. It's a fraught ordeal, – removing these fabled, special beings from their protected environment, even if it is just to a different protected environment – is a procedure filled with danger. Despite every effort being made by the H&E executive to conceal sharp edges, cover up hard surfaces and make the place as safe as possible, every time there are fatalities, with eminent film academic electrocuting themselves while attempting to make a cup of tea, or getting garroted by a hoover cord. At the end of three days of intense discussions they emerge from their conclave to announce Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made.
Except last time it all went terribly wrong. Not only did Hitchcock's Vertigo come top, but a film cracked the top ten that nobody (least not any real people) had ever heard of. The appearance of Man With a Movie Camera, a silent era Soviet documentary, in with a bullet at No 8, was surely the biggest shock chart entry since Althia and Donna's Up Town Top Ranking stormed to the top of the pops in 1978.
Nominally a documentary, Vertov's film is an expression of egalitarian film theory, a rejection of bourgeois emotionalism and of narratives featuring prominent individuals. At the start it proudly lists all the things it doesn't have – a script, actors, sets or surtitles. The film will capture the daily life of an unidentified city. Doesn't sound like much but there's a catch – the film will also capture the cameraman who is out capturing the daily life of an unidentified city. Watching him, filming them. See, that's the stuff that gets you in the top ten films of all time.
Sounds dull but the film whips through its brief running time in a breathless montage of events. No cut lasts more than ten seconds and we riffle furiously through the events of the city – the trams, the bustle, the sewing, the machines and the people on the beach. Often this is a Man With A Rather Intrusive Movie Camera, capturing marriage, birth, divorce, a funeral and one man being treated for what looks like a very serious, maybe life threatening head injury. We see him (played by the director's brother Mikhail Kaufman) buzzing about town, trying to get a good shot, a nifty little angle. He's so breathlessly keen he's like a figure from a Harold Lloyd movie, always busy cranking the camera handle. The film is restless, it throws ever trick it can at the subject – there is animation, slow motion, speeded up motion, split screens, freeze frames, shots of reflections, dissolves and super-impositions. The frequent close ups of eyes put you in mind of Bunuel/ Dali's Un Chien Andalusia. The version being shown for an extended run at the BFI comes with a magnificent score by the Alloy Orchestra which, based on notes left by Vertov, compliment and enhance the images perfectly. There is a version with a Michael Nyman score knocking around but, although I wouldn't normally disregard a Nyman score, this is definitley the version to see.
The film's reputation grew slowly. At the time other Soviet film makers were sceptical and in Britain the documentation Paul Rotha remembers that it was “regarded rather as a joke, you know …. it was all trickery, and we didn't take it seriously.” And they had a point, it is somebody throwing the kitchen sink at it. A couple of time the image is manipulated so that the cameraman is a giant figure, a Godzilla, towering over all he surveys. I'm not saying this negates the egalitarian ambitions of the film but it does suggest that, rather than reflecting the life around it, that life becomes subservient to the camera, and the cameraman's need to capture a telling image. In that sense it is just like many a modern Hollywood blockbuster that focus purely on spectacle over any other concern. When you look back at the film, you may feel that actually you haven't really had any insight at all into life in the Soviet Union at that time. (That life seems indistinguishable from that in the West was apparently Vertov's little bit of anti-Stalin subversion.)
It is definitely an original and innovative film, one that has done wonders for expanding film language. It is a mystery though why lists like the Sight and Sound one gives such due to being the first to do something. So Citizen Kane would triumph because it is full of things which had never been done before, and that is amazing, but does that put it above all the films made by people who took those inventions on and made more interesting use of them. Man With a Movie Camera is a notable piece of history but in the realms of non narrative documentary making, well, it's no Koyaanisqatsi.
