Man with a Movie Camera   

 

In the Nursery: Man with a Movie Camera

Watershed, Bristol 19th April 1999

Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera remains one of   the least seen but most influential films ever made. Produced in Moscow in 1929, it represents a kind of swan-song for two epochs: the Soviet avant-garde experiment in the arts, and silent cinema itself. Now it has been released in a new BFI print which is being toured around the media centres of the nation together with a 'live' soundtrack specially comissioned from In The Nursery, the Sheffield-based electronic duo of Nigel and Klive Humberstone.
 That In the Nursery are brothers seems particularly apt, for the arts in the early Soviet era were notable for siblings such as the Vesnims, the Stenbergs, and Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner. For Man with a Movie Camera, the director's own brother, Boris Kaufman, played the title role. Improbable as it seems, Kaufman later became a celebrated cinematographer in Hollywood, shooting On the Waterfront for Elia Kazan.

 As a film, Man with a Movie Camera was both of its time and years ahead of it. A document of a summer's day in Moscow, it uses self-consciously theoretical montage to juxtapose separate settings, characters and moods, but it does so with such vigour and vim, and by employing so many tricks and special effects, that in many ways it's the foundation not only for subsequent 'creative' (i.e. untrue) documentaries such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, but the genres of pop and corporate video as well.

 In the Nursery's soundtrack can't help but emphasise the pop-video parallels. Comprised of relatively lush, 'intelligent' techno, the music adds a contemporary feel to a film whose joyous celebrations of modernity in all its forms still seems fresh. While Vertov's hymning of dams, trams and industrial machinery might have made it through the ideological filters into the era of Socialist Realism that followed, his democratic delight in bobbed hair-dos's and plus fours sadly didn't. Sun tan's as tawny as Coco Chanel's, remarkably advanced lingerie, disorientating points of view, and a playful delight in almost everything still communicate a powerful shock of the new. Seeing the film for the first time, I found it almost overwhelming. Although In the Nursery's techno is less 'industrial' than it could have been, its unashamed populism does Dziga Vertov proud.

Phil Johnson,
The Independent on Sunday
25th April 1999