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DESCRIPTION: \nvideo review by Grant Tracey  
 \n\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\nPublisher's 
 Note: Man With a Movie Camera is part of a new five-cassette video series 
 from Kino on Video, called "The Soviet Avant Garde." The score was recorded 
 by the Alloy Orchestra using Vertov's precise instructions for musical and 
 non-musical 
 accompaniment.\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\nDziga 
 Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is a stunning avant-garde, 
 documentary meta-narrative which celebrates Soviet workers and filmmaking. 
 The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to 
 portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn't just 
 recording reality, he transforms it through the power of the camera's 
 "kino-glaz" (cinema eye). Vertov's rich imagery transcends the earth-bound 
 limitations of our everyday ways of seeing. \nVertov was a working-class 
 artist who desired to link workers with machines. His film opens with a 
 manifesto, a series of intertitles telling us that this film is an 
 "experiment," a search for an "absolute language of cinema" that is "based 
 on its total separation from the language of literature and theater." This 
 manifesto echoes an earlier one that Vertov wrote in 1922, in which he 
 disavowed the films of D. W. Griffith and others as psychological 
 dramas--cliches, copies of copies, films overly indebted to novels and 
 theatrical conventions. Vertov desired to create cinema that had its own 
 "rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of 
 things." For Vertov an emphasis on the psychological interfered with the 
 worker's "desire for kinship with the machine." And as a peoples' artist, 
 Vertov felt that the peoples' cinema must "introduce creative joy into all 
 mechanical labor" and "foster new people." \n  \n \n \n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n 
 \n \n \n \n  \n\n \nThe kino-eye in Dziga Vertov's\nMan With a Movie 
 Camera.\n(©1997 Kino on Video. All rights reserved.)\nAnd foster he does. 
 The Man With a Movie Camera is divided into nine orchestral-type movements, 
 and several of them use rapid-fire editing, wild juxtapositions (e.g. 
 blinking eyes with shutter blinds) and multiple exposures to mesh workers 
 with machines in a simultaneity of reverence and celebration. Levers and 
 wheels turn and workers synchronously turn with them. Later, Vertov reveals 
 more mechanical reality as he juxtaposes a woman getting her hair washed 
 with another washing clothes, and then shows a barber shaving a man, and 
 sharpening a razor's edge. The sequence ends with newspapers rifling along 
 a printing press, and a young woman packing cigarettes, watching the 
 machine's quick slap pressing, while smiling at her labor. \n\nAs Vertov 
 revealed the joys of work, the rhythm of workers and machines, he also felt 
 that filmmaking (as a largely technological medium) was also a component of 
 that mechanical reality. In the aforementioned sequence of a cigarette 
 worker and her machine, Vertov also splices into the mise-en-scene his wife 
 and editor, Yelizavela Svilova. As shoes are shined and a woman gets her 
 hair cut and fingernails polished, an edit reveals Svilova rubbing emulsion 
 off the film strip, suggesting that polishing the beauty of cinema is 
 synchronous with the peoples' visit to the beauty salon. More importantly, 
 Svilova's appearance stitched into another montage (a woman sews, fabric 
 linked with thread, while Svilova edits, film threaded through a splicer) 
 strongly suggests that filmmaking is workmanlike, the perfect analog to the 
 worker's life. \n\n\n \nVertov's camera finds mechanical \nimagery in the 
 beauty salon.\n(©1997 Kino on Video All rights reserved.)\nBesides 
 celebrating workers, machines, and filmmaking as constituting Soviet 
 reality, Vertov uses kino-eye to transcend the very reality he celebrates. 
 In a 1923 manifesto, Vertov wrote "I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye, I, a 
 machine, show you the world as only I can see it." And he boldly asserted: 
 "My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world I 
 decipher in a new way a world unknown to you." Again this ground-breaking 
 film brings to fruition Vertov's earlier vision of what cinema should be. 
 His camera, in the hands of brother Mikhail Kaufman, is never static; it 
 travels where we can't--up smokestacks, under train tracks--and through 
 continuous explosions of cinematic trickery--variable camera speeds, 
 dissolves, split-screen effects, the use of prismatic lenses, and tightly 
 structured montage--Vertov transforms not only reality, but traditional 
 narrative cinema. He moves outside of Hollywood storytelling (three-act 
 structures, goal-oriented characters), and closer to an absolute language 
 of cinema that he seeks. \n\nThe film's middle section captures some of the 
 absolute language of the kino-eye. The sequence begins with a low-angle 
 canted shot of a traffic light turning. Then from on high, the camera 
 visible frame right, kino-eye overlooks a busy Moscow street. Cut to a 
 joyous couple walking into a municipality, where they sign a wedding 
 registration. Kino-eye then returns to the previous establishing shot, as 
 the camera pans the street, and then cuts to the traffic signal reversing. 
 This switch cues a shift in mood which is reinforced as next cut shows the 
 camera, frame right, spinning around and portraying a darker side to life's 
 dialectics. Kino-eye now shows a disconsolate couple entering the 
 municipality to fill out a divorce registration. Their pending separation 
 is foregrounded in kino-eye's shot selection: an occasional two-shot mixed 
 with six separate shots of the woman, chin in her hands, and four separate 
 shots of the man, looking weary and angry. Kino-eye follows this with a 
 prismatic image of streetcars crossing in V-shaped diagonals and then 
 offers more dialectics: a crosscut sequence of automobiles heading to a 
 funeral and an agonized woman, awaiting the birth of her child. The 
 sequence concludes with the cameraman superimposed over a prismatic street, 
 buildings leaning at weirdly oblique angles, and in a graphic punctuation, 
 a baby born from kino-eye's doctorly point-of-view. In three minutes, 
 Vertov's kino-eye has ordered material reality in fresh, original ways, 
 revealing a range of motion (high/low compositions and stunning taboo 
 images of the baby's birth) and emotion (marriage/divorce; death/life). 
 \n\nThe film's conclusion is aesthetically beautiful and ideologically 
 committed. Oddly, in the 1930s the Stalinists didn't think so. Vertov fell 
 into disfavor with their regime and this film and others were accused of 
 formalist error, of placing aesthetics ahead of ideological commitment. 
 It's unfortunate that a man who wanted to link the cinematic machine with 
 the people could be so mistrusted, because Man With a Movie Camera has a 
 wonderfully rousing coda that links spectators within the theatrical 
 diegesis to their onscreen counterparts (the film within the film). And as 
 they watch their images everything coalesces: machines (typewriter keys, 
 spinning wheels, mechanical spinners, streetcars) and people (walking the 
 streets, driving cars, resting at the beach) in rhythm, and in kinship. But 
 perhaps the cameraman riding above the sea of prismatically coalesced 
 imagery bothered the Stalinists. Perhaps they saw in that cameraman not 
 formalist error but a brilliant representation of the powerful kino-eye to 
 not only see and know all then (1929), but to possibly further see and 
 expose a darkening future threatened by totalitarianism. \n\n  
 \n\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\n 
  \nMan With a Movie Camera is part of a new five-cassette video series from 
 Kino on Video, called "The Soviet Avant Garde." Other films in the series 
 include Vsevolod Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia and Deserter, Victor Turin's 
 Turksib, and Lev Kuleshov's By the Law. Suggested retail price: $29.95 
 each. For more information, we suggest you check out the Kino Web site: 
 http://www.kino.com. \n\n  \n \n \n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/06/18605939.php
SUMMARY:Man With the Movie Camera, 1929 Soviet Cinema Verite by a working-class artist
LOCATION:Revolution Cafe \n22nd St and Bartlet\nin between Mission and Valencia
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/06/18605939.php
DTSTART:20090707T020000Z
DTEND:20090707T040000Z
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