Man With A Movie Camera is an experimental 'city symphony' style montage made in 1929 by Dziga Vertov documenting soviet urban life. Without sets, actors or story it is left to the heroic cinematography and the rhythmic power of the editing to keep the viewer transfixed. Vertov makes his intentions clear at the start of the film with titles that state:
This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of Cinema based on its total separation from the language of Theatre and Literature.
He credits himself as the film's Author-Supervisor of the Experiment.
Clip 1 shows the relationship between the Film & the Editor as the action freezes and we cut to the film strip hanging in the cutting room as the Editor (Vertov's wife Elizabveta Svilova) pieces it together.
Clip 2 shows off some of Svilova's virtuoso editing with a dizzying sequence that intercuts an extreme close up of an eye with various POV shots using single frame edits; something rarely seen in the days before digital editing systems.
Clip 3 is the last 3 minutes of the film. As an audience watch the same film we are watching the images build to a crescendo. Again the editor is seen in the cutting room, the movement of the crowds, trams & trains intercut with her eyes as the film flows through the steenbeck. This sequence shows a few examples of the pioneering use of optical FX used throughout the film; split screens, dissolves, superimpositions & retimes.
Man With a Movie Camera - clip 1
Man With a Movie Camera - clip 2
Man With a Movie Camera - clip 3
These clips are taken from a version of the film released in 2008 with a new score by Michael Nyman.
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