Chelovek s kinoapparatom

I've got a couple of days coming up where TCM is running a programming salute worth mentioning. Usually, I want to supplement the post simply mentioning TCM's programming with another shortish post on a short film. With two such days in close succession, I decided to do a post on an experimental film instead: Man With a Movie Camera.

There's no plot here, in part because the movie's director, Dziga Vertov, believed that cinema was a medium for something completely new, meaning among other things eschewing movies with traditional narrative plots. The narrative here, if you want to try to call it that, is documenting "a day in the life" of a modern Soviet city as it was in the late 1920s. Except of course that this is not one day, nor is it even one city. Vertov decamped from Moscow to Ukraine which wasn't under quite as tight reins as Moscow was, and filmed in part in Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov.

Also in terms of "narrative", the movie is divided into six chapters, which look sort of at different times of day as well as different parts of life. The first part, for example, is dedicated mostly to the morning. There's another section that juxtaposes a woman giving birth, another woman mourning her husband at a cemetery, and a man being taken by ambulance to a hospital. A third chapter looks mostly at sport.

But it's the juxtaposition if you will that's worth mentioning, because that's part of the main thrust of Vertov's work. Believing that cinema was a new art that should stand on its own, Vertov used all sorts of film techniques: slow motion, double exposures, time-lapse, running film in reverse, and on and on, to get the style he wanted. There's also a fair bit of breaking of the fourth wall as one of the two recurring characters in the movie is the man with the camera whom we see trying to get the shots while filmed by a second camera. This can include filming from a convertible, filming from the water, being suspended over a watercourse, and so on. This cameraman was in fact played by Vertov's younger brother Mikhail Kaufman, who was a noted cinematographer in his own right.

There are also several shots of the movie's editor, Vertov's real-life wife Elizaveta Svilova, as she engages in the editing process. The other self-referential part includes showing shots of what are various parts of a movie theater, presumably as the film that we are about to see is being premiered.

But do the avant-garde techniques in Man With a Movie Camera work? I can see people not liking it, and certainly critics of the day had issues with it. To be fair, however, Vertov's work was so new that contemporary critics had probably never seen anything like this before and wouldn't know what to make of it. Modern-day critics, on the other hand, go too far in praising Man With a Movie Camera solely (in my opinion) on the grounds that it is so different. Overall, it's mostly interesting although I can't blame anybody who finds Man With a Movie Camera a bit pretentious at times.