Review: Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera on Kino Lorber Blu-ray

The marvel of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, close to 100 years after it was made, is how increasingly democratic its appeal appears to be to each new generation of cinephiles. In stark contrast to many landmark silent films whose legacies in the eyes of incurious modern audiences seem to be a reflection of the things that filmmakers eventually learned they shouldn’t do with the medium, Man with a Movie Camera sparks something different, but just as revelatory, in just about everyone who sees it for the first time. Working backwards through film history, you can sense Vertov’s masterpiece lurking in the genealogy of the avant-garde, the essay film, the nationalist agitprop, and direct cinema. It outlines the language of the film edit as a form of dance, lays the groundwork for the centerless structure of landscape features, foregrounds the clash of the modern and the antique at the heart of self-devouring pop-cultural osmosis.

To wit, the film has thousands upon thousands of edits and still perversely feels, in its speciously non-narrative emphasis on the rhythms and rituals of an average workday over the inner lives of the people living them, predictive of the durational concerns of current-day slow cinema. Small wonder it scored its highest-ever position on the decennial Sight & Sound film poll in the most recent edition. (Two years later, the magazine would declare it the best documentary of all time, in a Top 10 list overflowing with the sort of experimental takes on the form as Sans Soleil, Chronicle of a Summer, and Night and Fog.)

After Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin formed a filmmaking collective in the late 1960s and named it after Vertov, they produced a series of confrontational works that broke down the by-then evidently corrupted language of film in order to unload a kind of Marxist polemic, sullying the collective spirit of Vertov’s output and narrowing the language of film expression into one dogmatic point of view. Man with a Movie Camera, to say nothing of Vertov’s other works, didn’t seek to break down film language so much as distill it into its most essential components. Or, as Slant’s Jake Cole wrote in 2015, “As much as the film celebrates the virtues of modern Soviet society, it also argues for cinema’s crucial role in spreading the word of socialism as the art form most inextricably tied to issues of production and shared labor.”

Beyond unabatingly juxtaposing objects that, in the sense of the literary narrative tradition, aren’t inherently congruent, Vertov uses just about every analog device imaginable to bend the “reality” of his documentation into a topography of film expressions. Man with a Movie Camera is both a refutation of and an expansion upon Lev Kuleshov’s editing theories. Vertov speeds action up, slows it down, and halts on individual frames. He runs footage forward and in reverse, cants his angular perspective, and creates in-camera split-screen effects and superimposes images atop one another (including what’s likely the film’s most famous one—or at any rate its most evidently self-referential—of the camera operator’s eye cutting across the lens of the camera itself). Roughly one-third of the way through, the film stops down entirely to cut away to Vertov’s wife, Svilova, splicing pieces of the film together. Which is to say, to Cole’s point above, the movie is both a lot of fun and a lot of work, interchangeably.

Image/Sound

Regrettably, those persons behind the scenes bringing Man with a Movie Camera to Kino Blu-ray didn’t expend nearly as much effort as they could’ve had they really been tapped into the Vertovian ethos of work-as-fun and fun-as-work. Does it look as good as any high-definition transfer yet distributed in North America? Well, the short answer is “depends,” and the long answer is “probably not.” Flicker Alley’s transfer from roughly five years ago boasted a surprisingly bright, clean-looking restoration that seemed to bring the already modern-feeling silent into the present day. By that standard, the Kino release is a major step back. It has a rather baldly unrestored image, riddled with flecks, dirt, and scratches. It’s also a great deal darker than Flicker Alley’s transfer. However, there’s undoubtedly something to be said for its much more tangibly textured feel, at least among those who resist the pull of digitally Windex-ed alternatives. And I’m personally not much more a fan of Michael Nyman’s score than I was of the older Alloy Orchestra’s; I’m more aligned with the Letterboxd reviewer who argues that Vertov’s rhythms align well with Three 6 Mafia, to be quite frank.

Extras

Stacked against other Blu-ray releases of the film, Kino’s edition is the most paltry when it comes to bonus material—not that the ones included on this disc are in themselves unworthy. Flicker Alley and Eureka’s Masters of Cinema releases both feature other entries from Dziga Vertov’s filmography, and the latter also comes with a truly packed supplemental booklet. BFI’s Blu-ray includes not only some of the Vertov films that the other two also boast, but is the only set that includes One-Sixth of the Globe, from 1926, along with its own booklet. Kino offers the same extraordinarily informative commentary track from critic Adrian Martin that Masters of Cinema included, but also two featurettes from that release: a 45-minute life-and-times feature built from an interview with critic Ian Christie, and a 20-minute video essay from critic and filmmaker David Cairns. None of the three Kino bonus features aren’t worth the watch, but if you have any of the other previous Blu-ray editions, save your time.

Overall

Man with a Movie Camera is still an intoxicating gateway drug for cinephiles, but Kino’s warmed-over Blu-ray feels considerably less potent than necessary.