December 9 movie: Man with a Movie Camera. Yes I know, this makes the 4th viewing this year. I had the DVD and wanted to show it to my folks. I think they enjoyed it. We talked about the fact that, as I have heard, the movie was so far ahead of its time it put the director, Dziga Vertov, on the outs with the Soviet government. Although my dad pointed out that might have been due also to the images of homeless people early in the film, in the segment on the city waking up. After all, street people aren't supposed to exist in the workers' utopia.
We also talked about how much more difficult it must have been to create the split screen and superimposed image effects in 1929, with no computers or Final Cut Pro, and how effectively these techniques were used. Not just to look fancy but to add meaning to the film. There's one segment in particular which shows major and minor events of life -- a birth, a divorce, a marriage, people riding in a car, a wounded man in an ambulance, etc -- cut back and forth with a close-up of the camera lens, and the cameraman's eye superimposed over it. The first couple times I saw the movie, I thought I was actually seeing his eye through the lens but eventually I realized that it was two separate images. The eye flickers back and forth frantically like the cameraman is trying to capture all these moments, not miss out on anything. Which is a pretty interesting visual comment on the movie as voyeurism.
(Trivia note: searching on The Man with a Movie Camera turns up the 1929 film in imdb.com, but Man with a Movie Camera returns a 2005 horror film in production. You'd think that with such similar names, they'd give you both results on either search and let you pick the one that was appropriate.)
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