Man With A Movie Camera [1929] [DVD]

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Two versions of Dziga Vertov's fascinating montage of life in Moscow are included on this tape. The first is the original silent version, with music by the Alloy Orchestra. The second version includes a commentary by Yuri Tsivian, Russian silent cinema historian. Vertov makes innovative early use of dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze frames in this fascinating document of life in Twenties Russia. The DVD also includes the option of watching the film with a new soundtrack, composed by the In the Nursery orchestra. From .co.uk ----------- "An experiment in the creative communication of visible events without the aid of inter-titles, a scenario or theatre "ing at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema," is how the inter-titles describe what is about to be seen. Bold cls indeed, but in its awesome sophistication The Man with a Movie Camera does live up to them, making it one of the most contemporary of silent movies. The subject, the life of a city from dawn to dusk, was not original even for 1928, but its was--the cameraman as voyeur, social commentator and prankster, exploiting every trick permissible with the technology of the day (slow motion, dissolves, split screens, freeze frames, stop motion animation, etc). A young woman stirs in her bed, apparently fighting a nightmare in which a cameraman is about to be crushed by an oncoming train. She wakes up, and the sequence is revealed to be a simple trick . As she blinks her weary eyes, the shutters of her window mimic her viewpoint, and the iris of the camera spins open. Self-reflexive wit like this abounds here--there's even a delicious counterpoint made between the splicing of film and the painting of a woman's nails. The film was the brainchild of the Moscow-based film-maker Dziga Vertov (real name Denis Arkadyevich Kaufman), a furiously inventive poet of the cinema who made innumerable shorts about daily life (such as the much-quoted "Kino-Pravda"), and played at candid camerawork and cinema vérité long before they became the clichés of the television age. The editing has a fantastic abandon that makes most pop videos look sluggish. --David Thompson P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); From the Back Cover ------------------- Man With A Movie Camera is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, a montage of urba Russian life showing the people of the city at work and at play, and the machines that keep the city going. It was Vertov's first full-lenth film, and he used all the cinematic techniques at his disposal - dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze-frames - to produce a work that is exhilarating and interllectually brilliant. This special Edition DVD features a choice of three soundtracks ro accompany the film: A soundtrack composed and performed by the Alloy Orchestra, who have closely followed Vertov's notes on music to accompany the film. A new score from In The Nursery, who successfully toured the UK with the film last year. Their score deploys the latest music technology to create a soundtrack reflects Vertov's own progressive filmaking techniques. A commentary by Yuri Tsivian, the leading historian of Russian silent cinema. HIs provocative and stimulating account makes this masterpiece of documentary cinema accessible as never before. See more ( javascript:void(0) )