Thursday, October 16, 2008

Man with a Movie Camera at the Harvard Film Archive


Just got out of a free screening of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera at the Harvard Film Archives. An experimental film from 1929, Man with a Movie Camera has no plot or characters, but is just a series of scenes of a man (vertov's brother) filming people and machinery around Moscow. Although little happens thoughout, Vertov is able to keep things interesting. Vertov uses an assortment of camera tricks from double exposures, to sped up film, to split screens to capture the liveliness of Moscow and its inhabitants. From the opening scene of a man standing on a large camera and looking through his own smaller camera to the movie theater of people that seems to be watching the same movie as the audience, the Man with the Movie Camera is very self-conscious and very self referential. The Man with a Movie Camera celebrates all that cinema is capable of and Vertov stresses this with his constant references. Vertov wanted to push cinema to its limits and was able to create a film that is simply beautiful. As a side note, it does seem likely that with all the scenes of the proletariat working together with big Russian smiles, that Vertov was trying to push a commie agenda. But nobody's perfect!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want to see this one! It sounds great in your review.

mh said...

Nice write-up on a great movie. I've never had a chance to see it on the big screen.
It's funny, too, because I was just discussing this movie with a friend last Sunday after we saw Oshima's THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM. Oshima made the movie in 1970, when the Japanese radical left was disintegrating, and it almost feels like his pessimism is a direct response to Vertov's optimism about the power of film to change people...