Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Occasionally, recently, I've grown weary of The Penciltonian, of having to watch a pair of films a week (as enjoyable as this is) matched to the years I haven't yet covered, then write them up.  Some days I look eagerly to December, when I can count it as a complete work, and update it only when I have a great urge, or a fine and unlikely film to speak about.

Sometimes, though, I find a film like this one, 'Человек с киноаппаратом', and the project seems worthwhile.  The whole scheme, and its attached blog, started so that I could find such amazing works as this, that I might watch films I would otherwise miss entirely - and this find has excited me more than any.

Three trams.

Chairs!  Trams!  A typewriter!  A telephone!  An I-don't-know-what!  The crowds swarm, the movie theatre warms up, the band begins to play.  The film is a torrent of images, tiny clips of life, and of objects in the Russia of the late 1920s.  It's a documentary, I suppose.  A silent film with no intertitles, no story and no characters.  Factories, engineering, trams and fast trains.  Horses and parasols.  The occasional car.  We even see a birth.

I had thought silent movies had peaked a couple of years earlier with 'Metropolis' (1927), when they'd grown as big and confident as they could.  1929 is down in my mind as the year talkies became the standard, with 'Hallelujah' and 'Sunny Side Up' and the Marx Brothers - but I didn't know about this film, which does pictures without sound - and without any commentary - so well, so intimately, giving us all the scale of the city without the need for sets, and with real people passing by as themselves, not silent crowds responding melodramatically to catastrophe.

Director Dziga Vertov had no interest in fiction, and thought the cinema had far more important matters to attend to.  Spurred on by a desire for authenticity, and with (in apparent contradiction to this) a rich imagination for special effects, Vertov filmed some of everything, and together with his wife Elizaveta crafted an absurdly fast montage, a picture of three cities in what is now the Ukraine.

Vertov in a moving car, filming another

A dying man in an ambulance, a sequence of the ambulance driving right across the screen cut together with fire-engines going left - or rather each holding steady, as the emergency vans are shot from parallel vehicles.  Weeping, sorting, mending.  A shampoo and a shave, intercut with the sharpening of an axe.  Russia looks warmer than I'd imagined.  Not comfortable, but full of life.

It's the sort of film Peter Greenaway might have put together in the silent age.  Like this, his early films eschewed characters and actors on the screen, but they justified their sets of pictures with narrators telling stories tenuously connected to the real, visual story.  This film doesn't have that opportunity, so uses music, with various different scores having been attached to different releases over the years.  The version I watched uses Greenaway-collaborator Michael Nyman, probably my favourite movie composer, with his obsessive rhythms, his minimal, urgent chords, deployed excellently here to support the astounding pace of the film.  It's just the sound I like.

Fire-truck!

Suddenly in the middle of the film the flow ceases.  We're given, not a moving image, but a still shot, a single frame repeated.  We cut to a lady, Elizaveta Svilova, trimming the film-strip with scissors.  A moment later, the frames she's been looking at, frozen shots of blurred action, come to life, and what we know as only a set of frames is played for us as motion.  What an excellent education this film is, teaching us that films are films, that what we see is not just the truth, or the way things really look, or the natural way to tell the story in images, but a deliberately constructed piece of work, something that has been crafted and engineered, over which decisions have been made by cameraman and editor.  I'm extremely taken with this movie, as you may note.

This isn't anyone's story but the director's.  This is the tale of how Dziga Vertov walked around with a camera and gathered footage.  It wants us to remember that there's a camera on the set as well, and that everything is for our benefit, like in 'Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen' (1965), when Cohen assures the audience that we haven't seen him acting naturally; caveat emptor.  The film sparkles with Vertov's amazing ingenuity and humour, reversing footage, bolstering a magician's act with trick photography, and giving us, through the wonder of stop-motion, a dancing lobster, a tripod that puts itself away and a camera that can take a bow.  The fun for the audience, then as now, is working out how it's been done.

What great shooting!  What great editing!  And after all these years, what great music, confirming and emphasising the excellent energy and drive of the pictures, an energy that exceeds anything else I've seen this year.  Few films have better captured and held my attention.

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Available on DVD, and also available on YouTube.  I think this is an amazing film, and would urge you to watch it.  It'll only take an hour.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)

I was looking at my blog's stats a few weeks ago, and learnt that the top five nations (in numbers of people looking at the blog, rather than in inherent merit) were the UK, US, Germany, Poland and the Ukraine.  I've looked at loads of films for the first three, one for Poland (with more on the way), but had nothing down in Ukrainian at all.  I knew this needed to be amended, for the sake of my ten Ukrainian readers (or my one very persistent reader in Ukraine, who may or may not be Ukrainian).  Amazon furnished me with a few suggestions, and I liked the cover and title of this one best.  The cover picture showed some magnificent moustaches which, I was sad to discover, are false in the story and used in only one scene.  In all non-moustache-related ways, however, I believe I chose the right film.

Ivanko drinks from the river.  We are a riverbed.

I wasn't really sure what to expect of 'Тіні забутих предків'.  What I got seemed strikingly unusual, at least to me.  I suspect it's just that this is far more Eastern than I'm used to.  Ukraine is in Europe but is as close to Iran as it is to Britain, and the director Sergei Parajanov hails from nearby Armenia (nearby in the same sense that Sheffield is near Münster), and it's Parajanov's direction that makes the film so pleasingly irregular.

The story starts with a tree falling on the main character's brother.  We get this shot from the point of view of the tree, and this unpredictable motion and imagination runs all the way through.  Rather than cutting between shots, the camera prefers to lurch around, casting shadows where it will, and the camera-operator at one point audibly taking a run-up over gravel.  Cameras vault over huts, and shots are taken from under water.  Characters, incidents and instruments are only audible, and only really present, from the moment they enter the frame.  Everything is red and gold, with the Carpathian mountains often rendering the frame behind the characters totally white, like 'Tintin in Tibet'.  Bells sound loudly through much of the action, and if ever they stop, men enter the frame and blow a hullabaloo on extremely long trumpets, after which the bells start again.  Under soviet rule, Ukraine had a 'house style' of directing, and this film was so far outside of it as to cause a great deal of trouble between the director and the authorities.

This is the screenshot absolutely everybody uses to represent this film

So I was inclined to avoid it.  It crept in eventually because I don't

like to represent any film enturely with screenshots of males.

It may sound like tokenism, but hey, tokenism has many merits,

and it's a pretty interesting screen-shot.  Of a wedding, by the by.

The brother's tree-accident is the first of several deaths, all sudden, without foreshadowing or any sense of justice.  All are mourned loudly, then forgotten entirely, which is, I suppose, the point of the title.  The film looks set to be a romance, but Marichka's death (in a sheep-related incident) curtails that plot-line very suddenly indeed.  She gets a less festive, more personal mourning than the men: Ivan (the main character) drops out of society, loses his mojo and grows a beard, and everything is in monochrome for a good twenty minutes.  Everything except Easter, of course, as you can't do a Russian Orthodox Easter in anything less than full colour.

I don't quite know how to interpret the last of the film's deaths.  I hardly think of this as a spoiler, by the way, as the movie is more a sensation than a narrative.  After an unsatisfactory life of farming, Ivan is struck on the head by some kind of sorcerer, and suddenly he's in slow motion and the picture broken down into white, red and yellow.  He stumbles out into the forest, where something happens.  Either we see the beautiful romantic reunion of the souls of true lovers, or else we're given something far more horrible and nightmarish.  Marichka is there, moving toward him, as alive as ever she was, but her hands are as grey as death, or even greyer.  Ivan and Marichka finally clasp hands, and the forest is suddenly coated in blood, and spinning.

Some blood, yesterday.

We resolve to still shots of bloody twisted branches, presented without further comment, just as we had earlier been treated to a succession of still shots of moss and bits of wood.  And just when we're getting into Peter Greenaway territory, we jump back to the world of people, everybody having a great time at the funeral, and the movie ends.

It's a curious film, and not really what I expected.  The cover had suggested something more historical, more adventurous.  The film I saw seemed at times like a realistic depiction of the hardness of a 19th century cattle-herder's life - like classic western 'Will Penny' (1968) - and at times like a Grimm fairy tale.  Certainly one to re-watch  I think, for the sound and pictures more than for the characters.


P.S. I guess 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925) was kinda set in Ukraine, but the intertitles were in Russian, so let's say it doesn't count.

P.P.S. Poland is next door to the Ukraine, and having watched this film, 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977) suddenly makes much more sense - or, I should say, it has a bit more context, but still makes little sense and remains cold, unappealing and frightening.

P.P.P.S. These days nobody in Ukraine looks at the blog any more, and Malaysia has taken its place as the country I'm rudely neglecting.  Can anyone recommend me a decent Malay film?

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If you want it, the film can be had from Amazon.  I'm aware that I'm the only person who's ever ordered through this blog, but I still think it worth putting these things down here in case you ever read about something exciting and decide to scratch the itch with mammon.