Man with a Movie Camera

“Attention viewers,” reads the intertitle introducing Man with a Movie Camera, “This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events.” What follows, we are lead to believe, is the cinema of the real…

Around New Year’s in 2007 I took my first trip to New York City. A lot happened in the two weeks I was there, but the parts relevant here include stops at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. At MOMA I remember watching a short film capturing a Rube Goldberg machine called The Way Things Go. I was transfixed by it. It was raw, but exuded so much ingenuity; “real,” despite it being a wholly constructed staging of events. Then, at the Guggenheim, I was witness to the “most comprehensive and significant exhibition of Russian art outside Russia since the end of the Cold War.” The reds. The blacks. The darkness of it all, aesthetically and thematically. Many of the paintings I saw only continued to exist because they were hidden away during times where creative works were being destroyed en masse. It affected me in a very distinct way, impressing upon me a respect for how much art was used in the country as a counter-narrative to tyranny. Fast forward about 12 years and everything I felt during those experiences would find their spiritual relative in the form of Man with a Movie Camera.

“When this began rolling I thought I was in for an hour of actual silence,” reads the first line of a recap I wrote after my initial viewing of the film in March of 2019. “‘A great way to fall asleep,’ I thought to myself. Then the flicker of light, the direction of the composer, and the introduction of the soundtrack by The Cinematic Orchestra. Granted, Man with a Movie Camera wasn’t intended to be viewed alongside a score by a British jazz fusion duo, but then again it also wasn’t meant to be watched on a big ass flat screen in my living room while I lay on my couch in sweatpants.” For good or bad, this was my introduction.

The film, itself, becomes more impressive when considering the story of its creator Dziga Vertov, but that isn’t what first captivated me. And this is where I might lose any film purists, but the symphony of motion on display in Man with a Movie Camera was brought even further to life by the soundtrack I heard accompanying it, as provided by the aforementioned Cinematic Orchestra. Initially commissioned to score the film for a live performance, the music’s celebrated reception led to a full-blown album and DVD release, issued in 2003 to blend the film and music in perpetuity.

After first watching it the way I did, I can’t now view Man with a Movie Camera in its silent form, or even with any other orchestration accompanying it. I’ve tried. To me, the film is tied to the music, and the music is now tied to me. For the next half-year following my first viewing, I watched the film monthly. And over the past five years since that first viewing, I’d wager that there isn’t an album I’ve listened to more than Man with a Movie Camera. I’m not much of a collector these days, but I do have the original Ninja Tune DVD. And this past January I bought a 20th anniversary special edition vinyl release of the album (signed, no less). I can’t think of a piece of music that has wormed its way into my life in recent memory quite the way this has.

One hundred years after the fact, we continue to find ourselves at odds with technology, much the same way I envision Vertov did in his day. A more recent struggle comes with the ambiguity surrounding how to define what a photograph even is, among an age of technological wizardry that can remove a rendered image so far away from its source that it no longer relates to the lifescape it purports to have captured. Man with a Movie Camera challenged not merely what reality is, but whether such a thing could even exist in celluloid form. All throughout the film, what is captured and related is three-fold: footage of events, footage of the events being filmed, and film of the events after being edited. The combination brings about an otherworldly presentation of every day life in a way I’ve never really seen before or since.

The editing truly was ahead of its time, and the collage of humanity on display was as brazenly avant-garde as anything that would follow in its footsteps for decades to come. I don’t fancy myself much of a movie critic, but when considering all the different aspects of Man with a Movie Camera‘s production, I can’t help but wager that it’s one of the most historically relevant pieces of cinema created. If it hadn’t existed, one can only imagine how long it would have taken for the film world to catch up, if it even would’ve. To quote the film’s Wikipedia entry, “Man with a Movie Camera is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals.” All of that was delivered unprecedented in this one single 68 minute long creative behemoth.

Vertov held an anti-fiction vendetta, hell-bent on creating a “real” work that would capture and dazzle with more creative imagery than any fictional work of its time ever could. The execution of this vision was immaculate, as was its soundtrack which followed some 70 years after the fact. What better compliment is there for a film score than to say it helps make the film itself better? Perhaps saying that without it the film has, for me at least, now become unimaginable.

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