The highy influential and imaginative Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov's incredibly influential 1929 silent Man with a Movie Camera is a pleasure to watch, one stunning b/w image after another, every shot imaginative and beautifully composed, and the whole working together to give a portrait of Soviet urban life from the era and for that matter a portrait of urban life in an developed city a century, actually a little less than a century, ago. The film is a mix of odd angles (many shots of trains rushing at us, or streetcars criss-crossing their way across a city square) and of imaginative and whimsical uses of the movie camera, as well as a playful examination of the art of movies in their infancy. For example, the movie is both a moving-picture image of the city and a documentary account of the making of this very movie. Vertov often cuts back and forth between city scenes and shots of the man with the movie camera making these scenes: we see, in one sequence, a car rushing along a city street, shot from a slightly elevated vantage and moving along with the car. Today that would be done pretty easily with a dolly or a mounted camera - but here we see not only the scene but, from another moving car, the same scene being shot - with the man with the movie camera (always on a tripod) perched precariously on a fast-moving car. Anotehr great sequence shows the man w/ the camera photographing a rushing spillway from high above on a very rickety cable tramway. Others: digging a hole under railroad tracks to capture the image of the rushing train; climbing a handgrip ladder on a smokestack to get an aerial view of the city. Then there are shots of pure whimsy: the camera on tripod walking along and becoming much like a Disney animated character (evidently done through many stop action shots). And some truly beautiful sequences: some faces in the crowd in still shots that are extraordinary portraits worthy of museum display in themselves, and then we see them in a moving image and realize that these portraits are single frames from the moving picture. Which is better? No answer to that. We see many scenes of Soviet industry and factory work - of course - but it's also hard to believe the film won any Soviet approval, as workers are not exactly glorified - and we see scenes of revelry on the beaches in Odessa, extremely crowded and looking very unsanitary. The film was extremely bold for its day in openness about the human body: some young women, topless, soaking themselves in mud for some kind of spa treatment, and footage of an actual in-hospital birth, with a shot of the baby emerging from womb into life. It's not a narrative film, at least not in any obvious way, but, as Vertov had hoped, more poetic and based on development of mood and style rather than a day in the life or work v play or rich v poor. Interestingly, I also recently watched Vigo's A Propos de Nice, a similar (though not quite so inventive) b/w silent documentary about the city of Nice. Only quibble with Man with a Movie Camera was the horrendous musical soundtrack on the print available with Netflix streaming, and I recommend muting for a more pleasurable viewing.