Posted by Gravecat at 5:40 am under Movie Reviews. Comment?
Today I’m going to be looking at something fairly different from the usual simple-minded gore and explosions that usually tend to grace the movie reviews section of my blog: Человек с киноаппаратом (Man With a Movie Camera) is a silent documentary film made in 1929 by Russian director Dziga Vertov. While originally accompanied by live music, the score has been long-since lost, replaced instead by various iterations over the years — the version I saw over on Google Video features an original soundtrack by The Cinematic Orchestra, which seemed to fit the mood and theme of the film perfectly, aside from a minor quibble I’ll elaborate on below.
While I’m not nearly enough of a hipster to elaborate upon the more complex aspects of this film, allow me to at least cover the basics: In a nutshell, the film shows the people of the 1920s Soviet Union at work and play, the eponymous man with the movie camera making appearances everywhere from beneath moving trains to a hospital where a woman is giving birth, from a coal mine to a beach, and many other locales both mundane and exotic. Perhaps on its own, this wouldn’t be enough for a compelling experience, but the addition of numerous and varied film editing effects, many of which must have been highly original and advanced for their time, as well as the relaxing-yet-eerie soundtrack — which I know wasn’t part of the original, yet seems to compliment the experience so well — combines to produce something quite unlike anything I’ve seen before.
One aspect I found both surprising and intriguing was the fact that — aside from the occasional snippets of Russian language on signs and whatnot — it’s easy to mistake many of the people and places as being something from a similar era in America or Britain, and in a way, that struck me as being almost the ultimate anti-propaganda, the realization that regardless of geographical location, people really aren’t all that different at all.
My only real complaint was that after being absorbed into the somewhat dream-like atmosphere of the uniquely-edited scenes, a scene near the end drags the viewer out of this comfort zone with a disquieting abruptness almost reminiscent of something one would expect from Videodrome; attributable both to the original film and the soundtrack in equal measure, a camera assembles itself, ‘looks’ and moves around in a stop-motion animation sequence while accompanied by a quirky, electronic soundtrack — something I found vaguely unsettling for reasons that escape me — followed by a harsh discord of notes and a blur of black and white lines. It doesn’t fit at all with the rest of the film’s theme and feel, especially due to the vaguely menacing overtones.
Nontheless, an overall unique experience, one that I’d recommend to the curious, though be warned that the meandering pace, lack of commentary or cohesive theme may be offputting. I’d recommend watching the first fifteen minutes or so, at the least — if you’re not strangely hooked by that point, then perhaps it’s not for you.