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A Level Film Studies - Focus Film Factsheet
Man with a Movie Camera
(1929, Dziga Vertov, USSR)
Component 2: Global Filmmaking
Perspectives (AL)
Core Study Areas:
Key Elements of Film Form
Meaning & Response
The Contexts of Film
Specialist Study Area:
Critical Debates (AL)
Rationale for study
Dziga Vertov is described by S.M. Eisenstein as
a ‘film hooligan’ producing ‘unmotivated camera
mischief’. He made Man with a Movie Camera as
‘a visual symphony’, a self-reflexive film about
the making of the film. As a self proclaimed
‘experiment in the cinematic communication
of visible events’ it is an exhilarating, dynamic,
collective experience about the life and rhythm
of a city, in which the spectator plays an
active role as both subject and audience.
STARTING POINTS - Useful
Sequences and timings/links
Life and work: an accident, ambulance, fire engine,
manual work, cleaning, sewing 0:31:53
Leisure: activity, watching 0:45:44 - 0:55:58
CORE STUDY AREAS 1 - STARTING
POINTS - Key Elements of Film
Form (Micro Features)
Cinematography
• Vertov used many cinematic techniques
and effects that emphasized the contrived
nature of the film. These included double
exposure, superimposition, animation,
speeded up action, freeze frame, reverse
motion, overlapping motion, split screen
techniques, slow motion, stop motion.
• The film consists of approximately 1,775
separate shots, average shot length 2.3 seconds.
Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman is the
man with a movie camera who goes to great
lengths to get his shots recording life in the
Soviet Union climbing, riding in cars and on
a motorcycle, lying under the railway tracks.
• The stress on film as a constructed artefact
starts with an empty cinema and ends with the
cameraman rushing the film to the projectionist.
We constantly see the shots being reproduced
by a camera with its lens as an eye and it also
becomes animated fitting itself together,
putting itself on a tripod and walking around.
Mise-en-Scène
• A ‘city symphony’ but not just one city but a
mixture of Odessa, Moscow and Leningrad.
The film begins with morning, the city wakes
up. People go about their daily tasks, traffic
fills the street. As the day progresses all
aspects of human life are covered birth,
marriage, divorce, death, work, leisure.
• Images of hands performing various tasks:
cleaning, sorting, folding, editing the film.
Parallel sequences: woman washing herself,
washing a window paper, newspapers flowing
from a printing press, water flowing over a dam.
• Children eagerly watch performances, we see
their participation and then stills, photographs of
their participation. Cinema brings them to life.
Editing
• The film jump cuts between action and watching
action. Freeze frames on a strip of celluloid
are examined by editor Elizaveta Svilova.
• Dissolves, split screen: hands playing
piano, dancers. Double exposure of
the Bolshoi the bourgeois home of pre-
revolutionary ballet and opera which splits
into two and collapses in on itself.
• End of the film 90 shots at 2 frames each -
eyes, train, crowd, metronome, traffic signal.
