After several sold-out screenings of silent movie classics like Battleship Potemkin, Man of Aran, and Nosferatu with newly composed live scores in previous years, Clones Film Festival has commissioned a brand-new score to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 avant-garde masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera, which will be performed live for the first time on Saturday 27 October by its composers Robbie and Rita Perry
Ranking in the top ten of Sight & Sound magazine’s 2022 critics’ poll of the best films ever made and topping that publication’s list of the greatest documentaries in the history of moviemaking, Man with a Movie Camera holds up as a marvel of experimental filmmaking to this day.
Vertov was a newsreel and documentary director as well as a film theorist in the early days of the Soviet Union and openly and frequently expressed his dissatisfaction with narrative tradition and his hostility towards dramatic fiction of any kind. Searching for innovative ways of reflecting “truth”, he regarded drama as another “opiate of the masses”. Man with a Movie Camera is thus not only a film about the life of Soviet citizens in the cities of Moscow, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa, a “city symphony” reflecting the optimism and belief in technology of the time, but also a film about filmmaking, following around the titular camera operator as he goes about his business.
To the bafflement of contemporary critics, this groundbreaking film made use of (or invented) many innovative techniques that have since become standard devices of moviemaking, including slow motion, fast motion, freeze frames, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, backward footage, animation, multiple exposures, stop motion, jump cuts, match cuts, split screen, Dutch angles, and more.
The actual Man with a Movie Camera, the chief camera operator for the film, was Dziga Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman.
This screening will take place in St. Joseph’s Temperance Hall on Church Hill, especially transformed for the occasion by Fermanagh artist Donna Bannon and her team.
Please book early for this very special audiovisual experience at CFF!