Man with a movie camera

Ok, i cheated and watched a musically-supplemented version of this silent, story-less Russian film from 1929 (the Ninja Tunes label added a good, if not always suitable, jazz-funk-"orchestra" soundtrack - which at least keeps the A.D.D. generation happy eh? )

Basically, this film contains marvellous naturalism of subject matter combined with "state-of-the-art" 30s camera trickery. It's a bizarre mixture. One minute the filmmakers are transporting you with their finely crafted shots, the next they're showing you a cameraman amongst the scene. One minute they're creating a hypnotic tempo with their editing, the next they're showing you the editor at work, splicing the shots.

And the playfulness and contrasts continue....We are reminded of the "magical" abilities of the camera (by slowing events down to single shots, playing with time, entrancing the viewer in various ways)...only for this miraculous output to be used to extol the magical abilities/effects of modern tools around us, as the editor is compared to a woman using an industrial sewing set-up etc.

From dancing stop-motion cameras to crowd montages, the ingenuity brings to mind the experimental masterpiece Metropolis. Altho these guys are trying to tell a different tale. They're mainly observing. Couples getting married. Babies being born. A bruised and broken man being put into an ambulance. There's something refreshing about seeing real scenes amongst their sheeny mastery of the filmmakers tools. And indeed, they remind us, with the reflection/transposition of an eye onto a camera's lense, hungrily staring at all the scenes, that as much as the camera can disect, it can also bend and distend.

I think they really just wanted to extol Russia and Russian filmmaking skills. I think they did a good job, and ended up doing a little bit more too.

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Sounds interesting... thanks...

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I remember seeing this film in class and as a piece of film history it is quite extraordinary. The soviet filmmakers were very ahead of their time and their lust for experimenting is obvious when you look at this one. On swedish public service television the image of Vertov and his camera is the logotype for documentaries made by the channel.

Nice review, Golgot!

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

i saw it a while back on turner classic movies with a score by the alloy orchestra which i thought suited pretty well, i recommend that version if it's not the same one you're talking about. [on a side note i really dig the alloy orchestra, even got one of their cds recently - also planning on seeing the classic keaton film 'steamboat bill, jr.' with live musical accompaniment by the very same, so nyah].
i thought it was pretty a pretty fun experiment. but if you think about it, the movie is really about at least two men with cameras.

Hey, don't ruin the magic

Good to see you around again lines