The Man with a movie camera: fragments from a cameraman's diary

The film’s protagonist is a cameraman travelling through the city involving himself in its daily dawn-to-dusk activities and observing all walks of life through the eye of his camera. Although Vertov’s film has been linked with the so-called ‘city symphonies’, Vertov is not concerned with the abstract formalism of films like Berlin but with a philosophical reflection on the power of the camera over ‘reality’. Vertov rejected the contemporary fiction film in favour of recording unstaged ‘reality’, what he called ‘instants of life’. Yet his concern was also with the nature of cinematographic illusion. He constantly reminds the audience of the camera’s presence and of the film being edited and screened. As such his influence extends across the filmmaking spectrum from cinema verite’s preoccupation with unstaged reality to experimental self-reflexiveness and the preoccupation of filmmakers like Godard with the ideology of representation. Also available on 16mm and VHS.

Credits: Director, script, Dziga Vertov ; photographer, Mikhail Kaufman.