alexlimberg

10/10

I watched *Battleship Potemkin* last year when Russia started the war with Ukraine. Now, I watched *A man with a movie camera* hoping to gain a better understanding of this region by viewing it from a different angle. A region that is so close, so European and yet so far away. In *Battleship Potemkin* you learn a lot about Russia. This movie isn't as educative. I still enjoyed the historic pictures of a bygone era. Music is also great (watched the Michael Nyman version). It's not even a traditional movie. It's an eclectic mix of often isolated short scenes. I must stop saying this everytime I watch an old b/w movie, but: b/w looks fantastic. It's like the video or photo slideshow of your vacation you always tried to shoot but always failed to do. You need to be a special kind of avant-garde artist to produce such a movie. Some of the scenes could very well be Kraftwerk music video. It's also a very Soviet movie. He pictures a lot of industry, heavy machines, means of mass transportation, modern tech, hard working men and women, proletarians. I can't rank this movie by the usual standards. It's probably a 10 though. Simply for its style, its historic value and its impact. You should watch this movie once. I can't guarantee you will like it.

CinemaSerf

0/10

Could this be the original observational documentary? We begin as the audience flood into a cinema and settle down in front of the big screen. The cameraman then takes us on a tour of his city with no apparent rhyme nor reason to the imagery we see. There's a bit of the old Imperial opulence reflected in the architecture to contrast with the street beggars (whom the Soviet Union aways denied existed). A very near miss whilst trying to get some POV footage of a train. Then what feels rather pruriently like a look at a woman's morning levée all intercut cleverly using the camera shutter to deliver this in chapters as their city awakens and the trams start to run, the bustle sets in and the industry comes alive. The photography frequently captures the intricacy of different manufacturing processes - both with and without human input, the latter sometimes being quite labour intensive. People mill about like ants racing to and fro and the cameraman himself appears in shot now and again to add additional context to this remarkably captivating look at a day in the life of an huge variety of people and activities - including a wedding and funeral. What's quite astonishing is the quality of the film. It's almost pristine, almost a century after it was made, and there are even some very basic visual effects merging the images and creatively capturing the lives of the community. It's barely an hour long, but effectively combines pictures of the serious and professional as well as the mischievous and playful and it's well worth a gander.