Man with a Movie Camera (1929) on Netflix
NR19291h 8mDocumentaryMusic
A cameraman carries his camera through Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa, recording a day of city life. He films citizens at work and at play, while an editor cuts strips of film.
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Plot summary
Filmed over about three years in Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa, the work follows a single day in the late 1920s Soviet Union. The cameraman records laborers at their jobs, sporting events, couples marrying and divorcing, a birth and a burial procession, while people of different economic classes move through city streets. The picture also shows how it is made: strips of film are cut and joined together, and an audience is seen watching reels on a screen. The film announces itself as having no actors, no sets and no intertitles, yet some moments are arranged in advance, including a camera that stands up on its tripod and walks out of the frame.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film opened as a silent feature in April 1929 with a musical framework approved by Sovkino for its premiere, but that original arrangement was lost for decades and later screenings used alternative soundtracks and reconstructions of the premiere score.
- A musicological reconstruction of the film's original April 1929 Moscow premiere score was completed by researcher Richard Bossons and composer Leo Geyer and premiered by the Kammerata Luxembourg in November 2024, using Dziga Vertov's handwritten archive notes and a typed Musical Conspectus discovered by Yuri Tsivian in 1994.
- Fearing the film would be destroyed or ignored by the public, Dziga Vertov had a warning about its experimental, controversial nature printed in the Soviet central Communist newspaper Pravda ahead of the release.
- The film used stop-motion for shots such as an unmanned camera on a tripod standing up, showing its mechanical parts and walking off screen, and made chess pieces expand outward and stand in position by splicing a shot in backwards.
- The pace of the film's editing is more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots.
- Dziga Vertov's pioneering cinematic concepts inspired other abstract films, including Liu Na'ou's 1933 The Man Who Has a Camera, which pays explicit homage to Man with a Movie Camera.
