Greatest Film Scenes
and Moments



The Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

 



Written by Tim Dirks

Title Screen
Movie Title/Year and Scene Descriptions
Screenshots

The Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Soviet Union) (aka Chelovek S Kinoapparatom, or Человек C Kино-Aппаратом)

In Soviet director Dziga Vertov's quintessential experimental, avante-garde film - an excellent example of a "city symphony" documentary, and regarded as "pure" visual cinema without a plot, action, setting or dialogue (or intertitles); the use of radical hyper-editing techniques, variable camera speeds, dissolves, special visual effects, stop-motion, wild juxtapositions of images, freeze frames, split-screens, and super-imposed double exposures - a precursor of Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and MTV videos:

  • the many day-in-Soviet-life views of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa, of Russian workers and machines, after the arrival of a camera man (Mikhail Kaufman) (with an old-styled hand-cranked camera with a tripod) in a very-static and dead city, that suddenly became enlivened and energized by his arrival
  • the film's opening - an empty film theatre, where the seats folded down by themselves, and the audience entered to watch a film (this film!)
  • the double-exposure, camera-trickery shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop another camera
  • the fast-moving, free-association of images (over 1,700 shots and scenes of everyday life), all presented with an average of 2.3 seconds per shot length - was wholly unprecedented in the late 1920s
Free-Association of Film Images
  • the images: street scenes, close-ups of machinery, architecture, nature, beaches and beach crowds, workers, birth/wedding/death-funeral, static shots (a typewriter keyboard, a store window display), etc. - some images were displayed as dissolves, split-screens, in slow-motion, or as super-impositions or double exposures
  • the best example of stop-motion were the playful views of the tripod-camera acting anthropomorphically, by rotating its camera-head around, and then beginning to walk away on its three legs
  • the ending, including some views of the actual process of the editing of the film by the cameraman, accentuated by the super-imposed image of a human eye looking out of a camera lens
The Ending

Camera Trickery

Filming an Oncoming Train

Movie Camera Lens

Birth of Baby

Eyeball Reflection

Stop Motion of Anthropomorphic Camera

100's of the GREATEST SCENES AND MOMENTS

Greatest Scenes: Intro | What Makes a Great Scene? | Scenes: Quiz
Scenes: Film Titles A - H | Scenes: Film Titles I - R | Scenes: Film Titles S - Z