Cast:
Mikhail Kaufman (The Cameraman) Written and Directed by Dziga Vertov.
Review:
"My film therefore signifies: The struggle between everyday vision and cinematic vision, the struggle between real space and cinematic space, the struggle between real time and cinematic time."
The story of the director behind the film is basically the entire review, if you think about it. Born as David Abelevich Kaufman, he was a pioneer documentary film and newsreel director that was raised in the Russian Empire (in Bialystok, Poland, which at the time was in the Empire) born to Jewish intellectuals. After a childhood spent at the Białystok Modern School, he studied music theory before he began studying at the Psychoneurological Institute, as operated by psychologist Vladimir Bekhterev. His family fled to Moscow when the German armies made their advance during World War I. He eventually changed his name to be referred to as Dziga Vertov, with both names roughly translating from phrases about spinning (the former is the Ukrainian word for spinning top while the latter comes from the verb vertit’sia). The Revolutions of 1917 served as his guiding point to becoming a filmmaker, as he (aged 21) began as a newsreel camerawork during the Russian Civil War. He developed an idea involving film truth with Kino-Pravda, a series of newsreels directed by him alongside Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman in 1922. His Kino-Glaz theory, as he would put it, would propose that the camera is an instrument like the human eye that is suitable for seeing the happening of real life without the need for artifice like studio staging. In the next decade, he would direct various features with A Sixth Part of the World (1926) or Enthusiasm (1931), a sound feature with mechanical sounds that he called a "complex interaction". His last film with artistic control was Lullaby (1937), for which afterwards he was relegated to newsreels, as the age of Stalin did not favor his methods in the Soviet Union. His methods of filming have proven influential to several film movements, most notably with cinéma vérité. His two brothers Boris and Mikhail Kaufman became filmmakers in their own right, the former being a cinematographer on esteemed features such as On the Waterfront (1954). Vertov died at the age of 58 in 1954, but his legacy as a filmmaker grew in the next couple of decades, ranging from a group being named in his honor to the dawn of various cinema movements that all had some relation to his style, such as Direct Cinema, for example.
The resulting film is a documentary in numerous formats: it documents a day in the life of the Soviet Union, it documents the audience watching said film and it documents the editing of the film. There exists pages that visualize Vertov's intent with shooting the camera, whether that involves a camera lens that filmed like a gun. The best way to watch a movie that is just 68 minutes long is to just allow the images to sift through your mind to see how the rhythm moves on a visual level, where it isn't so much just describing things that happen more so than seeing how sincere Vertov is in actually wanting to make a movie that is just a camera in motion. Sure, movies would absolutely never get rid of actors or artifice, but the film is still sincere enough in its visual curiosity for the ordinary. People are born, people die, but the images endure all the same. It never comes off as pretentious for what it wants to show within the space of the camera, balancing the fine line of showing wonder without overextending oneself. It shows the magic of what can be shown in a camera alone without making it a novelty that can be exploited like cattle. It experiments even when showing a camera "moving", much in the same way an artist experiments when doodling. As such, seeing shots captured when the camera is strapped somewhere that isn't just a static shot or the use of montages is something that still looks far more than just ordinary when it is used in a film like this.
The reputation of the film at the time was not particularly favorable. Sergei Eisenstein called it "pointless camera hooliganism". It alienated those who believe it was more of a case of trickery or alienating. However, the reputation of the film has improved greatly in the next nine decades, to the point where some have called it one of the greatest movies ever made. As the movie is in the public domain, it is readily available, although there have been several soundtracks that have been released in the last 40 years (the original film was accompanied by live music), whether that involved Un Drame Musical Instantané, or British jazz with The Cinematic Orchestra, or even with multi-theremin ensembles. As a whole, Man with a Movie Camera is all of the things you would think could come from a film without actors and plenty more, one that endures for what it says on and off the camera about ourselves.
Overall, I give it 10 out of 10 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment