Director: Dziga Vertov

Summary: A silent film showing the people of Moscow at work and at play, and the machines that keep the city moving. Film pioneer Dziga Vertov uses all the cinematic techniques available at the time - dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze frames. Music by Michael Nyman.

Not merely a cinematic portrait of a day in the life of a city, cinema pioneer Dziga Vertov's MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA is an experimental manifesto of vision. Controversial when it was created in 1929, the film still pulses with the unruly energy and innovation of Vertov's genius. Subverting and criticizing the conventions of capitalist fiction filmmaking that he so despised, Vertov and his revolutionary Kino-Eye crew (including his wife as editor and his brother as cameraman--both of whom appear in the film) created a plethora of filmic devises in order to comment on vision, life, Marxism, and modernity. Differing film speeds, superimposition, evocative and manipulative editing, and rhythmic graphic composition all blend seamlessly in a magic show of life above and below the city. Shooting shops, traffic, children, coal miners, workers, human bodies, and nature, Vertov creates visual rhymes and graphic portraits of the structure of life and the explosion of perception. MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA took part in the city symphony genre that was popular at the time (BERLIN: SYMPHONIE OF A GREAT CITY is another example) but transcended it in its critical distance, sheer innovation, and sublimely fluid vision of man, machine, and society.

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As you might guess from the rather impertinent possessive in the title, Michael Nyman's Man with a Movie Camerais a re-release of Dziga Vertov's 1929 experimentalist classic provided with a score by Michael Nyman. Those who know and love Nyman's music--and come to that, those who know and dislike it--will know pretty well what to expect: fluent orchestral minimalism turned out by the yard. The mood and the tempo scarcely vary, no matter what Vertov's showing us or how fast or slow the rhythm of his cutting. The effect is to tone down the excitement and audacity of Vertov's ideas and render them safe and even a touch bland.

If you're a Nyman fan, this is definitely for you. Otherwise, the earlier BFI release of the same film has not one but two alternative scores: a pounding, heroic, forward-with-the-Soviets affair from the Alloy Orchestra, closely based on Vertov's own notes of the kind of orchestral accompaniment he wanted for his film; and a second from the progressive group In the Nursery, gentler and more expressionist, drawing on state-of-the-art music technology. (As a third option, the BFI release includes a well-informed voice-over commentary from film historian Yuri Tsivian.)

On the DVD:Michael Nyman's Man with a Movie Cameracomes to DVD packed in a hinged square metal tin reminiscent of the ones that hold small Dutch cigars. There are printed biogs of Vertov and Nyman, the latter rather cloyingly fulsome ("a man of impeccable musical credentials"). The transfer is excellent and pretty well complete; a few minor blemishes where the original nitrate stock had deteriorated scarcely detract. --Philip Kemp

Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Biographies Of Vertov And Nyman, Original Posters, Tin Box
Year:	1929
Release Date:	July 22, 2002
Runtime:	68 minutes
Certification:	Exempt.
Catalogue Number:	B F I V D 538
Keywords:	With, Man, Camera, Movie, Box, General, Tin, Edition, Entertainment, Michael, S, Documentaries, Biographies, Collector's, Nyman's, Chelovek, Kinoapparatom
Genre:	Documentaries & Biographies