Rent Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
4.0 of 5 from 140 ratings
1h 7min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Voted the greatest documentary of all time in the 2014 'Sight and Sound' poll, Vertov's groundbreaking 'Man with a Movie Camera' uses an array of dazzling cinematic techniques to record the people of the city at work and at play, and the machines that keep the city going. Presented with Michael Nyman's celebrated score, this classic film is accompanied by an exciting selection of new extras, including Vertov's 'Three Songs of Lenin' and two of his radical mid-1920s documentary films, both of which feature equally radical new soundtracks by electronic experimentalists Mordant Music.
- Actors:
- Mikhail Kaufman
- Directors:
- Dziga Vertov
- Writers:
- Dziga Vertov
- Aka:
- Chelovek s kinoapparatom
- Studio:
- BFI Video
- Genres:
- Classics, Documentary
- Collections:
- A Brief History of French Poetic Realism, A History of Soviet Silent Cinema, A Brief History of Film..., Top 10 Films About Trains: Westerns and War Movies
- Countries:
- Russia
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 27/07/2015
- Run Time:
- 67 minutes
- Languages:
- Russian LPCM Stereo, Silent
- Subtitles:
- None
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Full Screen 1.33:1 / 4:3
- Colour:
- B & W
- BLU-RAY Regions:
- B
- Bonus:
- Nyman's celebrated score played by the Michael Nyman Band
- Audio commentary by Russian film scholar Yuri Tsivian
- Kino-Pravda No. 21 (Dziga Vertov, 1925, 36 mins): newsreel devoted to Lenin on the anniversary of his death, with a new Mordant Music score
- One-Sixth of the Globe: ETV version (Dziga Vertov, 1926, 84 mins): ideologically charged documentary, presented in its specially prepared UK distribution version, with a daring new soundtrack by Mordant Music
- Three Songs of Lenin (Dziga Vertov, 1935,61 mins): poetic propaganda film based on three songs of the Soviet East dedicated to the revolutionary leader
- David Collard on Three Songs of Lenin and W H Auden (2009, 7 mins)
- Simon Callow Reads W H Auden's Verses from Three Songs of Lenin (2009, 3 mins)
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Reviews (3) of Man with a Movie Camera
A Percussive Miracle - Man with a Movie Camera review by CH
Here is a chance to visit Ukraine. Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera took several years to film, and was released in 1929. It is an unmatched work of editing. Filmed without sound, and variously scored these past nine decades, it moves at an incredible pace by means of such cinematic devices as montage and split screen to create a view of Russian life a decade after the Revolution.
Railway trains, baths, bustling streets, an actual birth (perhaps the first on screen), one event follows another, the work gaining a unique logic as people and machinery vie for a place in the current scheme of things (one might think of Chaplin a few years later, but this is more of an Expressionist hue).
At seventy minutes, it is fuller than many an epic, and cannot be seen only once. The story is but scant - perhaps a day in the life – but that is not the point of a work which is energy incarnate. Here, too, is something of metafiction, with a cameraman in the frame every now and then, while his wife is seen editing the very film playing on the screen.
This is not the world of Five-Year Plans and exhortations to drive tractors across the land but something perennially human.
1 out of 1 members found this review helpful.
Brilliant but this is not the Nyman version. - Man with a Movie Camera review by DW
It’s absolutely stonking nonetheless, and I think I prefer it to the Nyman score. Still misleading, though.
0 out of 0 members found this review helpful.
Not what you'd expect, much better! - Man with a Movie Camera review by ND
This film is a masterpiece of editing with images changing rapidly and constantly. However, it's not as gormless as the Bollywood version, it just keeps the pace up, and this is a very fast-paced film.
It's also not what you'd expect from newly-communist Russia. There's laughter and fashion, childbirth and trams, a bewildering melange of all aspects of life in the 1920's.
Sadly, although the music is very good, it's not the Michael Nyman version which is outstanding and worth seeing/hearing.
Rent this film and be amazed and delighted.
0 out of 0 members found this review helpful.