Chelovek s Kinoapparatom
USSR,
1929, 66 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Dziga Vertov
- cam
-
Mikhail Kaufman
- editor
-
Elizaveta Svilova
- source
-
George Eastman House
-
COMMENTS
Shown at the Castro Theatre with Alloy Orchestra performing its rendition of Vertov's recently discovered "music scenario" for the film.
OTHER
Released in 1929, at the end of the silent era, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera is the epitome of machine art, the grand summa of the Soviet futurist-constructivist-communist avant-garde. This kaleidoscopic city symphony, conjoining Moscow, Kiev and Odessa into one meta-metropolis, is at once a Whitmanesque documentary-portrait of the Soviet people, a reflexive essay on cinematic representation and an ecstatic ode to human labor as a process of transformation. More than any movie I know, The Man with the Movie Camera celebrates the sensory bombardment of 20th-century urban life. You can never step into the same river twice nor, given its exhilarating tempo, can you see the same The Man with the Movie Camera. The split screens and superimpositions, shock cuts and variable-motion aside, the editing is so dense that there are never fewer than a half-dozen things going on. The rhymes and conceptual jokes are so intricately cross-referenced that the placement of each involves multiple chains of meaning.
—J. Hoberman, Village Voice
FACTOID #210
When Ginger Rogers appeared for a tribute at the SFIFF in 1984 (’sporting hair with the color and richness of whipped butter,’ wrote the Examiner), she shocked the packed Castro Theatre crowd at her 1984 tribute when she griped, ’The filthy mouths we’re hearing in films today’I won’t pay to see these movies. I’d rather stay home and make jam.’
