And Now For Something Completely Different

Title: Man With A Camera

Rating: 5 Stars

Number nine on the Sight and Sound greatest film list is a silent film. Given that, your first reaction could very well be, OK, which Chaplin film made the cut? Gold Rush? City Lights? Well, then you learn that the film is not by Chaplin. You will probably then next think that it must be a Buster Keaton film. The General, right? Well, no. If you were given a hint that it was actually a Soviet era film, then you’d say, of course, it must be Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein.

Well, those are all great guesses, but they’re all wrong. Number nine on the list was a film called Man With A Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it either.

To make you question the list choice even more, what if I were to tell you that the film has no intertitles (ie cue cards), no actors, no plot to speak of, and is over an hour long? Does that make you run screaming from the room cursing the elitist pretentious critics that make up the Sight and Sound poll?

I was kind of in that frame of mind. Now having watched it (it’s available on youTube), even if I don’t quite believe that it’s the ninth greatest film ever made, I have to admit that it was a pretty amazing film.

First of all, the film is technically amazing. It’s as if someone from the present dropped into 1929 equipped with modern filmmaking techniques. Quoting now from its wiki page, the film uses, and in some cases, invents (deep breath): multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals. It has something like 1,775 shots. The technical complexity of the film is, quite simply, astonishing. It’s worthwhile just to watch the film maker’s mastery.

Although, as I said, there’s no plot to speak of, visually it appears to me to be the day in the life of a city. It starts in the morning with people waking up, eating, catching a tram, and starting their day. As the day progresses, people work at various jobs or run errands. At the end of the day, people take trams home or go out for the evening. There you see people lying at the beach, playing at a carnival, at a soccer game, or at a track and field tournament.

You see people across their entire life span. There are newborns at a hospital. There is a open casket funeral. There are couples in various states of agitation lining up to get their marriage certificate. There is a woman prostrate with grief in front of a tombstone. There is a woman giving birth. When I mean giving birth, you quite literally see the baby being born. Especially for a 1929 film, there are surprising instances of natural nudity.

You see people at a variety of jobs. The mass manufacturing of the mechanical age is well represented here. You see people doing what appears to be quite dangerous jobs. The camera closes in to capture the danger. You also see jobs of mind-numbing drudgery. At the cigarette factory, you see a woman endlessly form cigarette boxes as the assembly line moves along at inexorable, breathtaking speed. There are several scenes of banks of telephone operators furiously connecting phone calls at a breakneck pace.

To me, especially surprising was the film highlighting obvious class distinctions. You see desperately poor people sleeping on park benches or scrabbling around for food. At the same time, you see what appear to be women of leisure sitting at a spa getting their eyebrows done.

Considering the fact that this was 1929, when Stalin was, if not quite in totalitarian dictator mode yet, certainly on the ascendant, I think that this film makes a bold political statement. It belies the Soviet myth of a classless society. There are rich people and poor people. There are people living hard lives of toil while others have lives of leisure. There are several wide shots that show masses of people scurrying around as if they are ants in a colony. As I watched, I wasn’t sure if I was viewing a Stalinist vision of a city on its way to socialist perfection or some kind of oppressive Kafkaesque nightmare.

I did a quick bit of research on the director Vertov. Although he doesn’t ever appear to get into serious trouble during the Stalinist regime, by the time Soviet Realism had completely taken hold he had taken a step back and was no longer in active film making.

Another interesting aspect to the film was that it was seemingly meta, if not actually postmodern. The film starts with an audience coming into a movie theater to take their seats. At various times, the film cuts to the audience watching this very film.

I said that the film has no characters. That’s kind of a lie. The actual cameraman (you know, the one with a movie camera), Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman, appears in the film. Yes, the cameraman filming the movie appears in the film itself. Usually it shows him going to fairly extreme efforts to get a shot. You see him filming from a moving car. You see him taking wide, panoramic shots perched at the top of a bridge. You see him laying down on tracks as a train goes over him.

The question of course is, if that’s the cameraman, then who the hell is filming him? The scenes of the cameraman standing in a moving car filming the occupants of another car must have been filmed by yet another cameraman in yet another moving car.

Hence my claim that this film has postmodern elements. As it is creating its art, it is exposing the work behind its creation.

For me, the key to enjoying this film was coming into it understanding that this was going to be an unconventional film. If you come in expecting a typical film, you’ll probably stomp out in anger. However, if you do just a bit of research before to understand where the film is coming from, I think that you’ll appreciate it.

Several years ago, I watched La Jetée (which is, incidentally, number 67 in the Sight and Sound poll). I primarily watched it because it served as the inspiration for the odd but enjoyable time travel film starring Brad Pitt / Bruce Willis called 12 Monkeys. La Jetée is a 28 minute long film that is composed almost entirely of still photos. Accordingly, it was an odd viewing experience.

With films such as these, understanding what you’re in for, at least for me, makes it a much more accessible and enjoyable experience.