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Print"I am continual motion."
-- Dziga Vertov
"Man With a Movie Camera" is breathlessly brilliant proof of it.
The Three Rivers Film Festival closes its stellar 2009 edition tomorrow night with a properly spectacular finale: director Vertov's groundbreaking 1929 masterpiece, a dazzling ode to cinema and Soviet life -- and one of the most influential films of all time.
Audio icing on the visual cake will be the live musical accompaniment of Boston's acclaimed Alloy Orchestra, whose terrific original scores for silent films have graced screenings thereof for lo these past 20 years. Alloy is also responsible for acquiring the gorgeous new print to be shown here from Moscow.
The avant-garde "Man With a Movie Camera" -- all 68 tight minutes of it -- is a bursting pinata of surreal images and free-associative montages. It's simultaneously a playful day-in-the-life documentary of the U.S.S.R., a documentary of the filming of the documentary, and a documentary glimpse of audiences watching that documentary.
Even the editing is documented in this tour-de-force meditation on how movies are made, the artificial nature of art in general, and the cinema's infinite capacity for lying in particular. Vertov, the eccentric innovator, had been much inspired by Lenin in declaring that "the old motion pictures -- romances, theatricals, etc. -- are leprous." He set out to define a whole new medium of communication and "an international new language of cinema" completely separate from the language of theater and literature.
Vertov's goal was not only to showcase the new technology's capabilities but also to produce truer accounts of life. He wanted stories without actors or fictitious plots -- life caught unaware. "My road leads to a fresh perception of the world," he said.
In search of that, he took to the streets of Moscow, Kiev and Odessa for an exhilarating vision of industrialized Soviet society on the rise, journeying through the nooks and crannies of life at work as well as at play.
The only real "characters" are the cameraman, of course -- and the modern Soviet Union itself. The real "stars" of the film are its images, rendered with Vertov's incredible range of cinematic tricks, a virtual synthesis of all cinema techniques to that point in time: double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, tracking shots, time-reversed footage played backward, stop-motion animation, superimpositions ... The list is almost endless.
You'll find the cameraman inside a beer glass, a woman giving birth, chess pieces swept to the center of the board but then expanding outward into their correct positions.
Vertov shot everything non-sequentially, dumped it all in labeled batches, and left it to his talented wife Elizaveta Svilova to put in some coherent order. The "narrative," if any, was her job to invent in the editing. She did it. And typically, the brilliant woman behind the brilliant man rarely gets credit for "his" exclusive genius. (His equally brilliant brother, Mikhail Kaufman, was the cinematographer, by the way.)
Vertov (1896-1954) and "Man With a Movie Camera" -- with their revolutionary vision of capturing "film truth" (Kino-Pravda) -- paved the way for the celebrated French and Italian cinema verite style decades later; the idea that fragments of quotidian reality, assembled and arranged, can reveal a deeper truth. Some of Vertov's work was so experimental that critics called it "insane." Others gave him credit for being a master of "optic jigsaws" but said his strength for details left him too weak to shape the whole.
"His fugues destroyed every melody," was the most poetic of the put-downs -- to some extent true. His and Svilova's "hyper-editing" (no shot in the movie lasts longer than about five seconds) was four times faster than that of a typical 1929 feature. But how astonishingly fresh it still is -- especially when enhanced by Alloy's live score, which was written with the aid of Vertov's own composer notes.
Just be warned that the film's 1,775 separate shots can feel dizzying enough -- for some -- to take a hit of Dramamine before viewing.
(P.S. Don't forget the second Alloy live-score gem on tap tomorrow: "The Black Pirate." The Johnny Depp of 1926 was Douglas Fairbanks, whose timeless swashbuckler was the first grand epic shot entirely in Technicolor. Doug plays the sole survivor of a ship pillaged by pirates -- determined to rescue the treasure, the ship and the damsel in distress. "Black Pirate" screens at 4 p.m., "Man With a Movie Camera" at 8 p.m. tomorrow in the Regent Square Theater.)
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