Man with the Movie Camera

Vertov took the language of sound to a new level when making his masterpiece Man With the Movie Camera (also called Man With a Movie Camera) which is looked at as one of the most revolutionary silent films ever made. It was said that the average film shot length (ASL) was around 11.2 seconds in the year 1929. When Man With the Movie Camera was released it had an ASL of 2.3 seconds, which is four times faster than most films of that time and the speed of the average action film made today. And so when people first laid there eyes on images and edits that were flying passed them at a speed of 2.3 seconds in the year 1929, it must of stunned them. It horrified the author of the New York Times as he wrote in his review of the film, "The producer, Dziga Vertov, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention."

Right in the beginning of Man With the Movie Camera the inter-titles lets the audience know what kind of film to expect. Vertov informs us the film is an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events, without the aid of inter-titles, without the aid of a scenario and without the aid of a theater. He states the film is simply a series of images that is creating an absolute language of cinema by separating the language from the theater and literature. Man With the Movie Camera has a basic organizing format and a form of structural layout throughout the film. Vertov would open from dusk and close at dawn, a complete 24 hour single day throughout three cities: Moscow, Kiev and Odessa. It took Vertov nearly a total of four years to film this day with the help of his wife Yelizaveta Svilova who supervised the editing which involved nearly 1,7775 separate shots of film; which is a staggering amount of film to edit provided that most of these shots consisted of nearly set-ups.