Haringey Independent Cinema

Man With a Movie Camera

Dir: Dziga Vertov | 1929 | 68 Mins | USSR | Cert U |

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

With live musical accompaniment from Giles Leaman on percussion and various other instruments, and the string trio ‘Barrel’: Alison Blunt, Hannah Marshall and Ivor Kallin.

The recent popularity of the film The Artist has shown how enjoyable it can be to watch a film with music and no dialogue. HIC decided to take things a stage further by screening this 1929 Russian classic to the accompaniment of live improvised music. Man with a Movie Camera is a real piece of cinema history, one of the most radical and unique films to come out of the early experimental phase of Soviet cinema.

Vertov was a pioneer member of the revolutionary avant garde; he felt film was locked into the tradition of stage plays and it was time to discover a new, specifically cinematic, style. Films could move with the speed of our minds as we free-associate or the speed of a musical composition, they did not need any dialogue. Indeed, at the opening of the film Vertov pointed out that it had no scenario, intertitles or characters. It was a series of images, and his notes specified a fast-moving musical score.

Set over 24 hours in the life of a city, it is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast and slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, and stop motion animations. There are no characters, only the un-named cameraman and editor. Man with a Movie Camera is not a conventional film in any sense of the word. It is a hymn of praise to the life of the city and the transformative power of film.

Doors open at 7pm and the film starts at 7:15
£4 waged or £3 for unwaged people