Review - “Man with a movie camera”

I was lucky enough to visit an ODEON cinema where for the first time of my life I experienced watching a silent film. The whole atmosphere – black and white picture supported by familiar music written by soviet composers, made a great impact on me. I really enjoyed the movie, even though I think it was a bit long. However, I couldn’t find a lot of people who got the same impression. From what I heard the majority of students considered “Man with a movie camera” to be very boring. I think it is because those students have an extremely limited knowledge of the USSR’s history and that’s why they were not able to refer events taken place in the movie with a political situation of the USSR in 1930s.

As I am from Ukraine I am going to give my own opinion based on knowledge of historical events of those period.

The main purpose of “Man with a movie camera” is to show an everyday life of such cities as Odessa, Kiev, Kharkov and Moscow and nothing more, because censorship didn’t allow showing anything, which can influence people’s opinion. In this film there are two main characters – the set of people and the city and “man with a movie camera”, who is filming this totality. On the one hand there is an object, on the other – “a movie-eye”. The relationships between them define the contents of the film. A man with a movie camera showing to the viewer how the city wakes up, lives during the day and goes to sleep. He is in the heart of life - breathing, hearing, catches the rhythms of the city and people. Camera in the hands of a man is not only a device of fixation of life, but also its main member.

I was amazed by Vertov’s montage; his kaleidoscope of shots birth-wedding-death was literally leading myself to epilepsy. After a premier in 1929 a lot of people criticized him for really speedy shots. But as for me, being a part of a new generation growing by watching MTV shows nothing can be faster. I think there was a perfect combination of slow and fast speed shots in the film. While watching a movie I could recognize the street in Kiev where I live and I saw some architectural pieces which are now gone, as they were destroyed during the World War II.

If to review this movie from historical point of view, I must say that it is full of lies and fake. David Kaufmann (also known as Dziga Vertov) as many other writers and directors didn’t have a freedom of speech; he wasn’t allowed to show a real situation, as he was watched by the Russian government. The film is showing a daily life, people seem to be happy and everything is making viewers to believe that they live in a perfect country. However, in Ukraine 1929 is known as a “year of a great change”. In 1929 the forced collectivization of agriculture was launched which lead to impoverishment of dozen millions of people which followed by repressions and the Holodomor (great famine of 1932-1933) when 4 millions of Ukrainians where dead. In 2006 Ukrainian government officially recognized the Holodomor as genocide against Ukrainian people.

However, “Man with a movie camera” will forever remain in art as an example of unquenchable enthusiasm of the creator and, finally, for viewers it will never lose its topicality.