Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 210: Thu Aug 1

Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929): Castle Cinema, 7.30pm


This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of classic film.

Chicago Reader review:
Dziga Vertov's 1929 Russian film amounts to a catalog of all the tricks the movies can perform. As a newsreel cameraman travels through a city (actually an amalgam of Moscow and Odessa), Vertov transforms the images captured by his camera through a kaleidoscope of slow motion, superimposition, animation, and wild montage effects. Vertov's motives were impeccably Marxist-Leninist—he wanted to expose the materialism behind an illusionist medium—but his film set off a storm of debate among his colleagues, who accused him of the bourgeois crime of “impressionism.” The film's real influence did not emerge for another 40 years, when it was taken up by American structuralist filmmakers on one side of the Atlantic and by French neoleftists on the other. The film remains a fascinating souvenir, though its flourishes are now fairly familiar.
Dave Kehr

 
Here (and above) is an extract.

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