Old Movies and Jazz: Man with a Movie Camera

“Man with a Movie Camera” (Ukrainian: Людина з кіноапаратом) is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov on request of the Ukrainian Photo Cinema State Studio.

 It presents Soviet urban life during the late 1920s. It has no actors. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have “characters”, they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film.

“Man with a Movie Camera” is famous for the range of experimental cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed while filming in Ukraine.

 In the British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted it as the best documentary of all time. The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre placed it in 2021 at number three of their list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema.

The soundtrack to a movie was composed by Vitaliy Tkachuk in 2010 for the 1st International Movie Festival “Silent Nights’ in Odesa, Ukraine.

It was later successfully performed several times, including on MAMI international movie festival in Mumbai (India) in 2016. 

One of the locations used in the film was the city of Odesa and its surroundings. This led the composer to use some melodies and motives that make allusion to Odesa, like music of Leonid Utesov (famous jazz composer born in Odesa) and song “My Odesa” by Evgeni Krichmar, which opens the soundtrack.

 The music of this soundtrack is rooted in jazz and uses a lot of improvisation and spontaneous interaction between musicians of the quartet to illustrate all the variety of moods and scenes, which are many in the film.

Musicians: 

Vitaliy Tkachuk, guitar

Gilles Wagner, drums/ percussion

Laurent Payfert, contrebasse

Alessandro Biasi, saxophone