With these Dogme-style constrictions in mind, what can audiences expect from Man With a Movie Camera, a documentary portrait depicting daily life in a Russian city? Driven by a lively new score composed by Michael Nyman (Six Days, Six Nights), Vertov's 'excerpt from the diary of a cameraman' emerges as a stylistic tour-de-force that positively brims over with original ideas.
His is a restlessly inventive narrative, obsessed with polar opposites such as work and play, birth and death and other beginnings and endings (see the registry office wedding, swiftly succeeded by a series of divorce rituals). The film delights in modern technology too - not only that of the moviemaking process but also of the city's myriad trams, machines and communication devices.
Vertov's picture is driven by a delicious sense of playfulness that some viewers may be surprised to find in an early Russian silent. One of the filmmaker's many post-modern games comes early on, as we see a packed cinema audience settle down to view the same movie we are in the process of watching.
A spectacularly successful experiment, Man With a Movie Camera presents an extraordinary array of images, from the travails of worn-out washerwomen to the beach pursuits of holidaymakers, the athletic feats of chiselled high-jumpers and the magic tricks of an old wizard (a parallel, surely, to Vertov himself).
One of the most memorable characters is the dynamic, beret-sporting cameraman - a figure who appears to be equal parts documentarian, dramatist, daredevil and peeper.
Chris Wiegand
The editor seen working on the film within the film is Vertov's wife, Elizaveta Svilova.
