Man With A Movie Camera

DVD Features:

Additional Release Material:

• New Score by Michael Nyman

Interactive Features:

• Scene Access
• Interactive Menus

Text/Photo Galleries:

• Biographies

Product Description:

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 devices 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.

Plot Synopsis:

This landmark silent masterpiece from Soviet avant-garde director Dziga Vertov stylishly highlights the buzz of everyday city life as seen through the eyes of a roving cameraman.

Plot Keywords:

Big City | Drama | Silent | Vintage

Exerpts:

"This film presents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events without the aid of intertitles, without the aid of a scenario, without the aid of theater (a film without sets, actors etc.). This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature." -- from the introduction Manifesto

"We felt that we were intellectual engineers; that we were constructing thought out of figurative material." -- Mikhail Kaufman, the film's director of photography, on the making of MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

Production Notes:

• Mikhail Kaufman, the director of photography, was also Vertov's brother.
• A second episode of MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA was created by Kaufman without Vertov, as the brothers had a falling-out shortly after MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA's premiere and never worked together again.
• The film's editor, Elizaveta Svilova, was also Vertov's wife.
• Vertov, Kaufman, and Svilova formed the core of a group of experimental communist filmmakers who called themselves Kino-Eye, attempting to forge a new language of film that did not depend on capitaslist-dominated fictional conventions.

Cast and Crew: