FILM SCREENINGS

Man with a Movie Camera

1929. USSR. Directed by Dziga Vertov. MoMA presents the U.S. premiere of the EYE Film Institute Netherland’s definitive new restoration of Man with a Movie Camera, which allows us at long last to appreciate cameraman Mikhail Kaufman’s dazzling Constructivist frame compositions by preserving the film’s original full-frame image. The opening-night screening features Filmharmonia Ensemble performing Dennis James’ critically acclaimed score, which was inspired by original accompaniment notes left by Vertov himself. A breathtaking and often startlingly funny vision of cosmopolitan life in Moscow and Odessa, Man with a Movie Camera remains among the most radical, and imitated, films in cinema history. It is a film about its own creation, about the material process of work, about cinema as a means of transforming perception and spatial-temporal relations, about the power of kino-pravda (“film-truth”) to unmask and banish oppression and ignorance, and about a New Russia rising out of the ashes of the Old, symbolized by the spark of the movie projector coming to life at the start of the film, and by the famous trick shot of the Bolshoi Theatre collapsing on itself at the end. Silent. 65 min.