Man with a Movie Camera

Speaker: Dziga Vertov

March 20, 2008
Little Theatre, National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai

Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is a stunning avant-garde, documentary meta-narrative which celebrates Soviet workers and filmmaking. The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. Vertov was a working-class artist who desired to link workers with machines. His film opens with a manifesto, a series of inter-titles telling us that this film is an experiment, a search for an absolute language of cinema that is based on its total separation from the language of literature and theatre. And as a peoples’ artist, Vertov felt that the peoples’ cinema must introduce creative ioy into all mechanical labor and foster new public.