"Man With a Movie Camera" - Film Review

Man With a Movie Camera is less a film and more an experiment. Director Dziga Vertov and fellow contemporary Soviet filmmakers (including Sergei Eisenstein) throughout the 1920's experimented with the ways in which films can be shot and the ways they can convey meaning (Vertov invented and used a number of unusual, still frequently used film techniques including double exposure, Dutch angles, parallel shots, and tracking shots). Man With a Movie Camera style doesn't make for the most easy viewing experience; it's not really telling a story but testing out a bunch of theories and ideas about films within the constraints of Soviet Realism.

It's part portrait of a city, part slice of life, part thought project. Vertov takes time to juxtapose imagery in seemingly random and confusing ways to try to get us to think about the underlying meaning. He also shows us the filmmaker filming the film and gives glimpses of the very film we're watching get edited as well as watched by other people. It's makes for a somewhat surreal, somewhat meta film experience and commentary.

It's a documentary in that it's all footage of actual real life events but there's no seemingly overt message to takeaway like we might expect from a typical documentary. There's not a story (there are no inter-titles to lead us along) though there are little reoccurring scenes we keep coming back to. Of bustling city streets, of busy factories and mines, of mundane daily activities. 

It's avant-garde to a point of almost distraction, but it also remains thoroughly energetic. It's not the film you're going to pop in for entertainment any time soon but it's an important film that broke ground at a time when movies were still figuring out what they were. Man With a Movie Camera seemed to suggest there was something there that set films apart from all the other arts. And there's certainly much to set the film apart even from the movies of today.