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.
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.
It’s absolutely stonking nonetheless, and I think I prefer it to the Nyman score. Still misleading, though.