MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
The titular man sets off to capture life in a city in this innovative and experimental silent film from 1929
1 Break the Silence
As part of the Calgary New Music Festival, the Voxare String Quartet is playing with an old movie. Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is a silent masterpiece by Dziga Vertov that is less documentary—though it was named the best one of all time by Sight & Sound in 2014—than an experimental art film. Vertoz wanted to capture 24 hours in a Soviet city but took four years in three cities to get it done.
2 The Michael Bay Connection
In a review written 80 years after the film’s release, Roger Ebert explained that Vertoz wanted to break from the slow-moving tradition of stage plays and take full advantage of the possibilities of the film medium. Other films released in 1929 had average shot lengths of about 11.2 seconds; Man With a Movie Camera’s average was a relatively schizophrenic 2.3 seconds—about the same as Michael Bay’s Armageddon released in 1998.
3 Two Thumbs Down
At least from the New York Times at the time. In the review, Mordaunt Hall complained that “the producer, Dziga Vertov, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention.” He’s probably glad he didn’t live to see Transformers. (Ebert gave Man With a Movie Camera four stars.)
4 Film Revolution
The rapid cuts aren’t the only thing that makes Man With a Movie Camera stand out from its era. Vertoz experimented with different film effects, including manipulating frame rates to create slow motion and using stop-motion, techniques which have since become ubiquitous. There are also plenty of double exposures, including a scene of the film’s city folding in on itself, to which Christopher Nolan paid tribute in Inception.
5 New Tunes
During its original screenings, the film was accompanied by a piano player, and there have been plenty of soundtracks written for it since, including music by Michael Nyman, the Cinematic Orchestra and Alloy Orchestra. The Voxare String Quartet’s score features works by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Mosolov.