Thursday 30 May 2013
Dziga Vertov | USSR, 1929 | 68 mins
This month we are showing a silent film with live improvised musical accompaniment from our very own group of musicians – Giles Leaman and the “Barrel” string trio.
The first short will be Entr’acte by Rene Clair which has its own sound track (this is also a silent film). Then we will be showing the classic film Man with a Movie Camera with live accompaniment.
The recent popularity of the silent film The Artist has shown how enjoyable it can be to watch a silent film with music but without dialogue. We thought HIC would try to take things a stage further by screening this 1929 Russian classic to the accompaniment of live improvised music. This is a real piece of cinema history, one of the most radical and unique films to come out of the early experimental phase of Soviet cinema. Dziga Vertov was a pioneer member of revolutionary avant garde. He felt film was locked into the tradition of stage plays, and it was time to discover a new style that was specifically cinematic. Movies could move with the speed of our minds when we are free-associating, or with the speed of a passionate musical composition. They did not need any dialogue–and indeed, at the opening of the film he pointed out that it had no scenario, no intertitles, and no characters. It was a series of images, and his notes specified a fast-moving musical score.
Set in twenty-four hours in the life of a city, it is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, tracking shots, footage played backwards, and stop motion animations. There are no characters, only the un-named cameraman and editor. Man with the Movie Camera is not a conventional film in any sense of the word. It is a hymn of praise to the life of the city and the transformative power of film.