Man With a Movie Camera: Dziga Vertov's groundbreaking film
"Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera is considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era. Startlingly modern, this film utilizes a groundbreaking style of rapid editing and incorporates innumerable other cinematic effects to create a work of amazing power and energy. Film pioneer Dziga Vertov uses all the cinematic techniques available at the time - dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze frames."
(Moving Image Archive)
Fig.1 Dziga Vertov (1929). 'Man With A Movie Camera', VUFKU (The Ukrainian Photo and Cinema Administration).
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Lev Manovich: Database Logic
"In contrast to standard film editing which consists in selection and ordering of previously shot material according to a pre-existent script, here the process of relating shots to each other, ordering and reordering them in order to discover the hidden order of the world constitutes the film's method. Man with a Movie Camera traverses its database in a particular order to construct an argument. Records drawn from a database and arranged in a particular order become a picture of modern life — but simultaneously an argument about this life, an interpretation of what these images, which we encounter every day, every second, actually mean."
(Lev Manovich, p.210)
Manovich, Lev. 2000 The Language of New Media, , : The MIT Press. 0-262-63255-1
[Lev Manovich's commentary on new media, The Language of New Media discuses various key issues, making connections between contemporary new media discourse and Dziga Vertov's seminal work A Man With a Movie Camera (1929).One of his contentions is that the structure of Man with a Movie Camera follows a database logic (despite being created half a century before their invention). Manovich argues that the film uses a non-linear, ad-hoc logic to present its argument.]
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
