The Man with the Movie Camera

Director: Dziga Vertov

Released: 1929

The Man with the Movie Camera is an experimental documentary film with no actors and no story. Vertov shows the bustle of several soviet cities (Moscow, Odessa, Kiev) and how people interact with modern technology from dawn (a very bright dawn) to dusk. The characters of the film are mainly the cameraman, the editor, and the Soviet Union itself, as represented.

The film is littered with cinematic techniques. It was fun identifying them. My favorite, and probably the most avant-garde, was the split screen with two dutch angles. But the opening shot was also pretty nice:

There was a large emphasis on machines. Workers were shown to be in harmony with them; they are almost filmed as aesthetic objects as well as means of production. 

Propaganda Party! The propaganda and ideology in this film was both easier and harder to find. It is interesting juxtaposed next to Storm Over Asia, in which the propaganda was all a part of the story line and sort of jumped out at you. In The Man with the Movie Camera, it seemed as though you were just watching the real life of a city. It was so realistic, that the propaganda could of easily gone unnoticed. But it didn't: there were happy jolly workers, industry was shown as defining the identity, power, and potential of the USSR, there was a positive picture of the USSR economy, the film was designed to instruct the working class (NO DRINKING, beauty parlors are vain, devote time to education), and the very fact filmmaking was portrayed in such a utopian manner. 


Food for thought!