I liked this film -- I very nearly liked it very much indeed -- which I would perhaps not have expected, given that its reputation appears to be as a technical and philosophical experiment, and my own interest in film lies in character, story and entertainment. But "Man with a Movie Camera" avoids the cardinal sin of experimental film-making in that it is almost never boring: there is no story as such, but the overlapping montage of events from a single day contains both cinematic beauty and human interest, plus a saving dash of humour (I loved the moment where the car passengers being filmed react to the camera's intrusion by making cranking gestures in return). And it does, very effectively, convey the sense of a city waking up and progressing throughout the day to the golden leisure of a summer's evening. It is at the very end that it becomes overtly experimental, breaking down altogether into whizzing images instead of winding down its city-character back into sleep, and it was at this stage that it began to lose my interest and some of my enthusiasm.
To the modern eye, of course the film is also a fascinating document of 1920s Russia: or at least Russia as she wished herself to be portrayed. History books are full of plots and counter-plots, coups and massacres and ideals, but they tell us nothing of motor-buses trundling down streets, of the sun slanting through blinds, of everyday detail that was worth no-one's while to censor or to preserve. (Ironically, the decidedly graphic sequence of a woman giving birth would probably be censored for modern sensibilities!) Like any silent film, this one relies on 'found titles' -- the text on a shop window, the caption on a form -- and I suspect that a basic knowledge of Russian/Cyrillic probably helps to render the picture both more interesting and easier to follow. It helps if one can at least manage the Russian for 'bus' or 'beer': knowledge which the original audience naturally took for granted.
At its best, the film reminded me of the city sequences in "Sunrise", as a dazzling symphony of images, beauty in the ordinary and a kaleidoscope of everyday perception. There is no conscious plot-line, just the gradually perceived shift of time in the quality of the sunlight and the rituals of the day. The intermittent presence of the camera, whether made manifest in trick shots as an animated creature, brought to our attention in split shots or sudden freeze-frames, or interspersed in 'candid' sequences showing the filming going on, keeps the deliberately artificial nature of the whole enterprise to the forefront: this is Art, not a documentary. But oddly enough, those glimpses of the cameraman at work -- very ordinary, perceived and accepted by the people around him -- also seem to humanise what could have been a sterile experiment and give us the sense that we are indeed seeing what he is seeing; perceiving the world through his camera's eye.
