Dziga Vertov (1896 - 1954)
Biography
Dziga Vertov (January 2, 1896–February 12, 1954) was a Russian documentary film and newsreel director. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dziga_Vertov [Oct 2004]
Man With the Movie Camera (1929) - Dziga Vertov
Man With the Movie Camera (1929) - Dziga Vertov [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Man with the Movie Camera (Chelovek s Kinoapparatom) is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film by Russian director Dziga Vertov. The film follows a cameraman around various cities, intercutting his footage with footage of him filming and footage of a woman editing, and includes a number of cinematic techniques such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme closeups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, and a self-reflexive storyline (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).
The film has an unabashedly art film bent and emphasizes that film can go anywhere, for instance superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera; or superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass; or filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed; or even filming a different woman giving birth, the baby being taken away to be bathed.
Vertov's message about the prevalence and unobtrusiveness of filming was not yet true--cameras might have been able to go anywhere, but not without being noticed; they were too large to be hidden easily, and too noisy to remain hidden anyway. To get footage using a hidden camera, Vertov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman had to distract the subject with something else even louder than the camera filming them.
The film also features a few obvious stagings such as the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed (cameras at the time were fairly bulky and loud, and not surreptitious) and the shot of the chess pieces being swept to the center of the board (a shot which was spliced in backwards, causing the pieces to expand outward and stand into position). The film was criticized for both the stagings and its stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director's frequent assailing of fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses."
The film, originally released in 1929, was silent, and accompanied in theaters with live music. It has since been released a number of times with different soundtracks: One release, in 1996, had a new soundtrack performed by the Alloy Orchestra, based on notes left by Vertov. It incorporated sound effects such as sirens, babies crying, crowd noise, etc.
In 2002, a version was released with a soundtrack performed by the British jazz and electronic outfit The Cinematic Orchestra. In the same year, a DVD edition by the British Film Institute had a score by Michael Nyman. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_the_Movie_Camera [Oct 2004]
Pravda (1969) - Jean-Luc Godard and Dziga Vertov group
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With this film, clandestinely shot in Czechoslavakia
after the Russian occupation, Godard moves yet another
step towards realizing his concept of "Revolutionary Cinema".
Aesthetically, the distance between this film and Weekend
is as great as that between Weekend and Breathless, yet
the same radical impulse motivates all three. Godard is
moving towards a visually minimal cinema, with the sound-
track assuming ever greater importance. Pravda consists of
an imaginary discussion between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg,
the German revolutionary; clearly influenced by Maoist ideology,
it simultaneously attacks the "revisionist" Russians for invading
Czechoslavakia and the "revisionist" Czechs for opening the doors
to Western imperialism via Pan-Am, CBS, Hertz, American-owned
hotels, and Playboy. This bitter and dogmatic work reveals
once again the restless originality of its creator; but as it is
designed to advance the cause of revolution, it must be judged
in terms of ideological relevance, efficacy, and truth. Here its
indictment of the Czech reform movement seems particularly
untenable, while the visuals have lost all resonance and
no longer display the sophistication of early Godard. --Film As a Subversive Art (1974) - Amos Vogel
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