Dziga Vertov's Man with a movie camera is considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era. Startlingly modern, this film utilises a ground-breaking style of rapid editing and incorporates innumerable other cinematic effects to create a work of amazing power and energy.
After his work on The Commissar vanishes, a multi-media art event of 1999, composer Michael Nyman continued researching the period of extraordinary creativity that followed the Russian Revolution. This artistic inquiry resulted in the celebrated score for Man with a movie camera, performed by the Michael Nyman Band on 17 May 2002 at London's Royal Festival Hall.
This dawn-to-dusk view or the Soviet Union offers a montage of urban Russian life, showing the people of the city at work and at play, and the machines that endlessly whirl to keep the metropolis alive. It was Vertov's first full-length film, and it employs all the cinematic techniques at the director's disposal - dissolves, split-screens, slow-motion, and freeze-frames - to produce a work that is exhilarating and intellectually brilliant.
Special Agent Matti
*
G
68 minutes (1:08 hours)
Film: 1 December 2005
DVD retail: 15 February 2006