Man with the Movie Camera

**Starring** | Mikhail Kaufman

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## The Man with the Movie Camera

The Man with The Movie Camera is a 1920's montage documentary about every day life in the Soviet Union from day to night. The film has no dialogue and the camera follows a passionate cameraman (Mikhail Kaufman ) who will go to any length to get the desired camera shot. You can watch The Man With the Movie Camera on Russian Film Hub.

## Overview

Part documentary and part cinematic art, this film follows a city in the 1920s Soviet Union throughout the day, from morning to night. Directed by Dziga Vertov, with a variety of complex and innovative camera shots, the film depicts scenes of ordinary daily life in Russia. Vertov celebrates the modernity of the city, with its vast buildings, dense population and bustling industries. While there are no titles or narration, Vertov still naturally conveys the marvels of the modern city.(source)

## Themes

Themes to consider for research:

* The camera as a character
* Montage and journalism in Soviet documentary film
* The use of sound and music in Soviet film
* Everyday Soviet lifestyle according to propagandists
* The camera as man
* The body as man

## Film Criticism

**"There are, in fact, so many scenes of a cameraman mounted on a vehicle that one is tempted to stretch the title of the film to the impermissibly long but nonetheless accurate Man with a Movie Camera Mounted on a Motorized Vehicle. Be that as it may, for the purposes of the present discussion it is important to make note of the privileged place motorized vehicles have in Vertov's masterpiece. This is not a gratuitous fact, tied as it is to one of the most distinctive aspects of the film: its construction from moving takes and perspectives in motion rather than from the static point of view favored in documentaries contemporary to the work of Vertov."**

- Sergio Delgado's Dziga Vertov's 'Man with a movie camera' and the phenomenology of perception.

**"In the case of Man with a Movie Camera, I consider the film - in its completed version - as the system. The elements of this system invariably include the camera, the subject, the editor, and the cameraperson - in general all those involved in the creation of the film - and, finally, each frame of the film. The frame as an element can be further distilled into properties - for example intertitles, stills, and montage."**

- Melody MacKenzie's Tektology, Russian Constructivism, and "Man with a Movie Camera"

**"Series editing is the method of compressing time by the way of only showing the important things which happen in sequence to quickly show a progression and carry on the story. This editing was prevalent throughout the movie and served its purpose well. Many times it would show the man carrying the camera then it would quickly progress to the point where he finds his perfect spot for filming things. Film theorist Sergei Eisenstein argues that series editing is "merely one possible particular case" of editing. "**

-A review of Man with the Movie Camera on CSFilmAnalysis

**"If Man with a Movie Camera remains an outlier in Dziga Vertov's oeuvre, it is rivalled in interest (if not in sheer aesthetic brilliance) by a number of more rarely seen and more overtly political films. The ideological structure of Vertov's Shestaia chast'mira (1926), for example, a visual paean to Gostorg (the State Trade agency), with its attempt to link visually the fates of the "backward nations" incorporated into the Soviet world with the fate of industrial capitalism, reminded me of nothing so much as Eisenstein's unrealized project of filming Marx's Capital."**

- Anne Nesbet's Understanding Man with a Movie Camera

**"There is a remarkable sequence somewhere near the end of Man with the Movie Camera in which the movie camera, having enjoyed a staring role throughout the film, performs an encore. Emerging on its own onto a bare stage, the camera proceeds to walk about on its tripod like a human being, carefully displaying its limbs to the appreciative audience within the film and almost bowing to the audience in the process."**

- Malcolm Turvey's Can the Camera See? Mimesis in "Man with a Movie Camera"

## Watch the Film Here

The Man With the Movie Camera is available on Russian Film Hub.