It's really a bittersweet feeling to know that I will never be able to truly understand what it must have been like to sit in a theater and watch one of the first screenings of Man with a Movie Camera. As enchanting as the images and editing techniques are to today's audience, I try to imagine how much more mindblowing such revolutionary concepts would be in 1929 and I fall far short. It's a virtual encyclopedia of techniques, performed with bravado and a certain show-offiness, but redeemed by the fact that it pulls off the act to perfection. How close to magic this must have been (frankly, it still seems as much), and how much more exhilarating and frightening the…

Part of the 30 Days in May challenge, 2014 edition

USSR

I’m positively gob-smacked.

Completely unexpectedly I’ve witnessed the birth of pure visual and emotional storytelling. Now, you can’t be completely caught off guard as director Dziga Vertov states the fact conclusively right at the start of the picture, but even that stern warning doesn’t prepare you for what is to immediately follow.

Man with a Movie Camera joyously bursts onto the screen like an invigorating swim at the break of dawn. It’s alive; its buzzing; it’s jubilant. Watching it is like being swept along by a coursing current twisting and turning through mountainside gorge; you’re helpless to resist it.

This is far more than simply telling a story visually;…

Sinegang Weekly Pick #19
By Ivan Arcena

”An excerpt in the diary of a cameraman: This film presents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events. Without the aid of intertitles, scenario, or theater.”

Gorgeous. Exhilarating. Half documentary, and half magical cinematic art. Watched this with Josh Augustin’s score, which I later on compared to the Cinematic Orchestra’s, and I much prefer the former’s emotional and glorious motion to the latter’s soaring sophisticated mix of progressive, lounge, and jazz.

” This film presents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events.”

The Man with a Movie Camera scales factories, picture theaters, taverns! He gauges through the lyrical pandemonium of busy streets and rush-hour traffic. He sees the beauty…

SINEGANG WEEK #19, picked by ivan
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I haven’t seen a lot of silent films and the ones I’ve watched so far are City Lights (1931), The Epic of Everest (1924), and Shiraz: A Romance of India (1928), but there’s something so incredibly perplexing and mesmerizing with this experimental silent documentary that made me want to explore more of its genre.

The title is what you get in this one-hour visual treat–a footage of a man with a moving camera–and, despite being boringly described as such, every single shot was dizzyingly remarkable and captivating. The obscure camera angles, the split-screens, the slow-mo, the sped up shots, the stop-motion, and the trick shots…

I've watched this film twice today. At first watch, I wasn't really feeling it, mainly because I was too sleepy to care so. I initially rated it 3 stars. But I was willing to give this film a second chance after I took a very quick nap. It was only during my second watch that I was able to fully immerse myself on its beauty, and boy, it was actually a wonderful experience. I found myself in awe most of the time, grinning at certain moments in the film, and getting turned on by its fascinatingly beautiful musical score (The Cinematic Orchestra 2003).

Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental silent documentary film that follows a city in the…

Film reviews in 22 sentences (or less)
Today: Man with a Movie Camera

"I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it..."
(Dziga Vertov)

Hi everybody, in 1929 the world economic crisis may have ruled the world, but not the revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose highly experimental portrait of Moscow is in retrospect clearly decades ahead of its time.

We have watched thousands of movies and found our favorite directors in Kubrick, Hitchcock and Tarkovsky, we thought that these men had invented the cinema like we know it today, but we were wrong. This documentary right here is a prove that many camera techniques were already invented right in…

Man with a Movie Camera shows us the potential of cinema. It is an experiment in cinematic communication; a wordless, story-less experience. Dziga Vertov thought this would be the future of cinema but he was sadly mistaken. Man with a Movie Camera is a look into a frontier that has barely been explored, cinema is still essentially what it was in 1930 (focused on narrative and escapism). It is a film about being a film and an extremely watchable, meta look at what cinema and the world can be. Man with a Movie Camera is the purest form of cinema, images of reality cut together to create something more.

Man with a Movie Camera is just one long montage, but it has such…