Man With a Movie Camera: unrivaled visual experience

Man With a Movie Camera is one of the most revolutionary visual experiences ever made in the form of film. Director Dziga Vertov sought to challenge various models fashionable in 1929.

One of these parameters is the average shot length (ASL), which measures the total duration of a movie divided by the number of shots. The silent films of that time had an ASL of 11.2 seconds, and the director's wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, achieved the feat of editing Man With a Movie Camera in 2.3 seconds, a mark similar to modern films.

Vertof also changes the theatrical form with which the movies were produced and bet on an alternative language, making a point of stating, at the opening of the film, that he had no scenery, no intertitles, and no actors. Just a succession of images and a fast-paced soundtrack.

The purpose of the film is to portray the 24 hours of a single day in a Russian city. That single day was shot in four years and showed images of three cities: Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. The work resulted in about 1775 different shots recorded by the cinematography of Mikhail Kaufman, director's brother, and perhaps the only character.

At the beginning of the exhibition, an image division presents the illusion of a giant movie camera with the cinematographer and his camera with a tripod on top. The scene changes to a movie theater where the seats, until then raised, begin to automatically swivel down to the entrance of the audience that will watch the movie, this one.

What follows is a beautiful metalanguage exercise. Images on various subjects are shown, and the cinematographer is showed himself filming, sometimes on top of a truck, sometimes in the depths of a coal mine and even being almost squeezed by two trams that cross.

The ending is a crescendo where the stages of editing the film are shown along with new images in cuts that "jump," the movement accelerates, the music becomes frantic until the shutter closes together with a human eye.

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