day five - Soviet Experimentalism

The Man With the Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929

This film was really very interesting (I wish I had a better word than interesting, it's one of the least interesting words in the English language) and it held my attention well for most of the time, actually. I tried to watch it with a very open mind because of the explanations in the opening titles that it was meant as an experiment with no story or anything. So I tried very hard to look at it mainly in terms of the imagery and experimental techniques.

It seemed to me like Vertov's main visual interests had to do with movement - mechanical things versus living things. He seemed to like to juxtapose contrasting images. For example, in the first part of the film, I felt like I was watching a slidehow of still photographs, because most of the images focused on things that are important for making interesting photography - leading lines, patterns, strong contrasts, uncommon angles, and abstract shapes. Later, once everyone begins to "wake up" those stills are shown once again but with action moving through them, or the objects themselves are shown to be moving parts. I think he was exploring the difference between a still camera (photography) and the movie camera (film).

Vertov seemed to be interested in mechanical things and figuring out how they worked, then playing with them. I liked the scenes where he used overlapping images to make the cameraman look like a giant, and I was very interested in the couple of scenes that used stop-motion animation of the rolling wood pieces and then the walking tripod. I'm curious how those were filmed because I've done a little bit of that with my brother and we took stills on a (crummy) webcam and then put them together for only a few seconds each using computer software (something called monkey jam...worked well for our little projects but may have infected Zach's computer - not reccommended for that reason). I'm not sure how a similar technique could have been employed in the 20's, since film was on reels and needed to be patched together, it must have been a lot of work to even finish those few seconds.

Another thing I really liked was the multiple images at once technique, especially with the building that began to fold in half, it made me think of the dream scene in Inception where the whole city bends in half. Well, like a very early version of that, I guess. The moving streetcars were also interesting to look at in that sort of kaleidoscope mode. Some of the other shots were cool because the footage would be seen, and then the cameraman would be shown filming that scene. I liked seeing how it was done. Those under-the-train shots looked really dangerous!

The mannequin images I found very creepy, and at first I wasn't a big fan of the eyes that flash in and out like subliminal messages, but I think it was meant to symbolize the cameraman's eye looking at the world differently, because there were also repeated images of the cameraman reflected in the lens, and his eye looking through the lens as well. I liked seeing the mechanical bits narrowing down the focus on the lens, call me weird but when I first got my zoom lens on my dSLR camera I watched all the pieces move for like 5 minutes to make sure it all worked, and thought it was super cool.


RANDOM AND KIND OF UNRELATED!!
If you are interested in my brother's stop-motion animation projects, click here.
The top one is him shooting a Barbie out of an air cannon, but the rest are animations. I helped mostly with the Easter one.

I listen to this band called Gogol Bordello, and I've been listening to them the whole time I've been typing this. They call themselves "gypsy punk" and are basically really awesome. 3 of their members are originally from the USSR...look them up if you enjoy different music.

The mention of Odessa so much yesterday and today makes me think of the book I'm reading right now, Everything Is Illuminated, set in and around Odessa, which is also a fantastic movie (I dicovered them backwards). I reccommend them both.