The Man with the Camera (1929)

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Movie
German title The man with the camera
Original title Человек с киноаппаратом
(Tschelowek s kinoapparatom)
Country of production USSR
original language Russian
Publishing year 1929
length 68 minutes
Age rating FSK without age restriction
Rod
Director Dsiga Wertow
camera Michail Kaufman
cut Yelisaveta Svilova

The man with the camera ( Russian Человек с киноаппаратом ) is a poetic documentary by Dziga Wertow from 1929 that uses experimental means. Except for the title text board at the beginning, the film does not have any subtitles .

The official premiere was in Moscow on April 19, 1929 (preview in Kiev on January 8, 1929), the official German premiere was in Berlin on July 2, 1929 (preview on June 3, 1929 in Hanover).

content

The film shows the day in a large Soviet city (it was shot in Kiev , Moscow and Odessa ), starting with activities in public space, parallel to this in the private sphere. The fast-cut scenes cover the entire period of the events of public life and the working reality of the individual during a day until the evening, when the hustle and bustle slows down and for the average person the end of the day begins with his leisure activities and extends to the amusements of the people falling night. A filming reporter is part of many scenes . In addition, turning points in human existence - marriage, divorce, birth, death - are highlighted.

After the camera “dance” on the tripod's legs, all the important settings of the film are repeated in a summary . There are several reminders of the work in the editing room, which first brought about the film as such.

context

The 1920s marked a time of upheaval for Russian society. The February and October revolutions of 1917 had fundamentally changed Russian rule. The former tsarist Russia turned into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . The revolutionary decrees of the Bolsheviks led to the expropriation of private property and the nationalization of industry. The Marxism was basic philosophy of political and social decisions.

During this time of social upheaval, Russian filmmakers were aware of their image-making power. They used the medium of film to stage the socialist construction of society, and even considered this to be the actual intention of film and cinema. Among other things, Dsiga Wertow's writings on the film consistently testify to this intention of a socialist functionality of the cinema.

Wertow and Ruttmann

“The man with the camera” is often compared with the film Berlin: The Symphony of the Big City by Walther Ruttmann , which was published two years earlier. Since one finds similarities, Wertow's film is sometimes referred to as a " plagiarism " of the Ruttmann work.

Parallels in content are obvious. Both films depict the typical daily routine in a modern metropolis in the first third of the 20th century, which largely defines the course of the content. Ruttmann, however, refrains from expanding the day's events to encompass human existence and remains in the course of the hour. Furthermore, the means of self-portrayal or self-irony (Wertow makes himself an object of documentation) is alien to him. Wertow also represents a kind of "framework" (cinema hall, film orchestra, projectionist) and also provides information about the making of the film in the editing room.

In addition to thematic similarities, there are also stylistic related features. According to Siegfried Kracauer "[Wertow like Ruttmann] cuts his documentary recordings according to their own rhythm" and "wants to compose optical music". The starting point for the “quick cut” method was different.

At Ruttmann it resulted initially from the “insatiable greed” of his cameraman Karl Freund , who was “hungry for reality” because he was tired of the studio. Wertow, on the other hand, was shaped by the format of the newsreels he had been producing since the end of the Russian civil war by complying with Lenin's demand that "the production of new films, permeated by communist ideas that reflect Soviet reality, must begin with newsreels." quoted from Kracauer). On the basis of this style, he then created full-length films from 1926 before Ruttmann.

According to Kracauer, the life that Wertow captures in his films is “Soviet life” after a “victorious revolution”, while Ruttmann's film portrays a society that “successfully evaded the revolution” and is just a “insubstantial conglomerate of parties and ideals was ”.

Accordingly, Ruttmann uses the representation of social contrasts only as a formal stylistic device, as an outside observer. In Wertow's film, however, the cameraman is part of the “revolutionary process” in that he is part and participant in the reality presented, which also faces dangerous situations (steel mill, mining, facade climbing) - even if he only digs his camera under the rails and did not post himself there to document the passage of the train.

Just as Ruttmann's camera looks into the unreal world of window dressing, the director himself looks at the reality of the big city - isolated, indifferent, with a “lack of concern”. The birth scene shown by Wertow would seem out of place with Ruttmann.

While the Weimar Republic made practically no ideological demands on the film industry, they were also high in the Soviet Union - so high that even a film that was politically active from Kracauer's point of view was sharply criticized in its country of origin "as a manifestation of formalism in the art of film." because he “conveys a picture of the work of a film cameraman, but not a picture of life [in] the Soviet Union at the end of the twenties”.

At Ruttmann, Kracauer cannot see any social demands either. Ruttmann's collaboration with the composer Edmund Meisel , who created a soundtrack for the film, reinforces its formal tendencies. In his writings, Wertow only gives instructions on setting that modern composers try to take up.

At best, Wertow took small suggestions from Ruttmann (the “dance of the typewriter keys” and other smaller settings are mentioned again and again). He made a new, in many ways (also using new technical means such as double exposure, cross-fading , reverse motion, freeze frame, slow motion, image division, image oscillations, time-lapse , macro shots , trick montages) more modern and also more human than Ruttmann.

Wertow's view of Hitler

One of the earliest foreign warnings about the person of Adolf Hitler and German fascism can be found in an inconspicuous place in this film. At 56m 59s (or 56m 41s, depending on the version) in a working-class amusement park, a girl is seen at a shooting range aiming at a tinny human figure with a hollow-cheeked face, mustache and black hair who is holding a dagger. The figure is wearing a cylinder to which a swastika is attached , for the avoidance of doubt .

After carefully aiming (the Hitler figure flashes briefly several times), the girl hits the center of the swastika. A sheet metal plate with the Cyrillic inscription Батько фашізмү (scientific transliteration: Bat'ko Fašizmu), which is reproduced in the English subtitle with The Father of Fascism (in older film versions with Uncle Fascism ), then opens up in the lower part of the figure .

A truly prophetic scene at this point!

The Kinoki

The Kinoki saw themselves as an opposition to the “cinematographists” and the economic, psychological and theatrical conception of the “film thing”. The inner circle of the Kinoki consisted of the "Council of Three", namely Dziga Wertow, his brother, the cameraman Michail Kaufman and Wertow's wife, the film editor Jelisaveta Swilowa. The film should break away from the classic stylistic devices such as literature or scenario and thus develop its own language. Real life and the unexpected, neither planned nor staged recording was the scenario of the Kinoki. In the manifesto "Kinoprawda" published in 1934, Wertow wrote:

“Not cinema glass for the sake of cinema glass, but truth with the means of cinema glass, that is Kinoprawda. Not the unexpected shot for the unexpected shot's sake, but to show the people without a mask, without make-up, to grasp them with the eyes of the device at the moment of not playing. To read your thoughts exposed by the cinema glass. "

- Dsiga Wertow

At the same time, Wertow assumed that the unvarnished photos could be assembled into an ideal that would influence society in its way of life. In Kinoki Revolution it says:

“I am cinema glass, I create a person who is more perfect than Adam, I create thousands of different people according to different, previously designed plans and schemes. [...] From one I take the strongest and most skilful hands, from another the slimmest and fastest legs, from a third the most beautiful and expressive head and through assembly I create a new, perfect person. "

- Dsiga Wertow

This principle can be found in Wertow's The Man with the Camera . By  condensing the images of three cities -  Kiev , Odessa and Moscow - into an ideal city, he approaches utopia. The awakening of this ideal city is to be equated with the awakening of the socialist revolution.

The whole movie

Significance for film theory

The man with the camera can be described as a poetic documentary, a cross-sectional film, a political agitation or a reflective documentary. All names are appropriate and it is precisely this that highlights the importance of The Man with the Camera for film theory. However, it is largely Wertow's reflective concept, the permanent depiction of the shooting situation and the cinematic construction, that make him appear ahead of his time.

Film music

After In the Nursery had released their own soundtrack for the film as part of their Optical Music Series in 1999, the British band The Cinematic Orchestra was asked by the organizers of the Festival of Porto (the European Capital of Culture of 2000) to produce a new film music and play them live during the film screening. This work differed from the other compositions of the band because of its live character, which did not allow for complex post-productions like the album "Motion". The Cinematic Orchestra went on tour with this project and a little later released an album and the newly set version of the film under the English name "Man with a movie camera". Many of the live compositions that were originally produced for The Man with the Camera were mixed up from the live form to the studio format. B. vocal and electronic elements were added, and were used for the next album "Every Day".

The most popular editions of the film today use the soundtrack by Michael Nyman (2002). In the Arte Edition of the film, in addition to the music by Nyman, the soundtracks of In the Nursery and Werner Cee (Bern 2005) are optionally available.

Another very well-known film score comes from the Alloy Orchestra. The French composer Pierre Henry has also composed a setting.

literature

  • Franz-Josef Albersmeier (Hrsg.): Texts on the theory of the film . 5th edition. Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-009943-9 .
  • David Gillespie: Russian Cinema: Inside Film . Longman, Edinburgh 2003, ISBN 0-582-43790-3 .
  • FT Meyer: Films about oneself: Strategies of self-reflection in documentary film . Transcript, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89942-359-3 .
  • Janina Urussowa: The new Moscow: the city of the Soviets in the film 1917-1941 . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-412-16601-4 .
  • Dziga Vertov: Writings on the film . Hanser, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-446-11794-6 .
  • Dziga Vertov: From the diaries . Vienna 1967.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dziga Vertov Collection of the Austrian Film Museum
  2. ↑ a b program booklet The man with the camera (PDF) Richard Siedhoff. Retrieved May 7, 2019.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler. A psychological history of German film. Trans. V. Ruth Baumgarten u. Karsten Witte. 3rd edition Suhrkamp 1995, chap. Montage , pp. 192–198.
  4. ↑ a b Jerzy Toeplitz: History of the film. Volume 1: 1895-1928. Henschelverlag Berlin 1975, p. 366.
  5. ↑ E.g. the Alloy Orchestra , which announces in the opening credits of its version of the film: "... following the music instructions given by Dziga Vertov".
  6. ↑ At the end of the third act, Ruttmann also uses double exposures of the traffic and fades with daily newspapers (probably the most innovative scenes in his film).
  7. ↑ The cameraman with tripod emerges in miniature form from the filled beer glass.
  8. ↑ Ukrainian : Father of Fascism
  9. ↑ Obviously it is not about Benito Mussolini , who ruled as a fascist dictator in Italy since 1925
  10. ↑ It must be remembered that the NSDAP only had 2.6% of the votes (12 of 491 seats) in the Reichstag election in 1928 ; its success only came with the 1930 Reichstag election .
  11. ↑ absolut Medien GmbH
  12. ^ In the opening credits of the film: “By arrangement with GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE International Museum of Photography and Film. Original Music Composed and Performed by THE ALLOY ORCHESTRA Following the Music Instructions Written by Dziga Vertov. Music and Film Research and Annotation YURI TSIVIAN. Music Produced by PAOLO CHERCHI USAI for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Premiered in the Pordenone Teatro Verdi, Oct. 14, 1995. Produced for Video by DAVID SHEPARD. "
  13. ↑ The Alloy Orchestra has set many silent films to music.
  14. ^ Pierre Henry: L'homme à la caméra. Paris: Mantra 1994. CD (74 min.) (Catalog of the Weimar University Library ).