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Michael Nymans Man With A Movie Camera
Background Information: Michael Nymans Man With A Movie Camera DVD Extras: Michael Nyman's Man with a Movie Camera comes to DVD packed in a hinged square metal tin reminiscent of the ones that hold small Dutch cigars. There are printed biogs of Vertov & Nyman, the latter rather cloyingly fulsome. The transfer is excellent & pretty well complete; a few minor blemishes where the original nitrate stock had deteriorated scarcely detract.
As you might guess from the rather impertinent possessive in the title, Michael Nymans Man with a Movie Camera is a re-release of Dziga Vertovs 1929 experimentalist classic provided with a score by Michael Nyman. Those who know & love Nymans music, & come to that, those who know & dislike it, will know pretty well what to expect: fluent orchestral minimalism turned out by the yard. The mood & the tempo scarcely vary, no matter what Vertovs showing us or how fast or slow the rhythm of his cutting. The effect is to tone down the excitement & audacity of Vertovs ideas & render them safe & even a touch bland. If youre a Nyman fan, this is definitely for you. Otherwise, the earlier BFI release of the same film has not one but two alternative scores: a pounding, heroic, forward-with-the-Soviets affair from the Alloy Orchestra, closely based on Vertovs own notes of the kind of orchestral accompaniment he wanted for his film; & a second from the progressive group In the Nursery, gentler & more expressionist, drawing on state-of-the-art music technology. Dziga Vertov was a Russian documentary film & newsreel director. Vertov was born Denis Abramovich Kaufman to Jewish intellectuals living in Bialystok & Russified his Jewish patronymic to Arkadievich in his youth. Kaufman studied music at Bialystok Conservatory until his parents fled with their family from the invading German army to Moscow in 1915 ; they soon settled in St. Petersburg, where Kaufman began writing poetry & science fiction / satire. In 1916 - 1917 Kaufman was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Instituted in St. Petersburg & experimenting with sound collages in his free time. Kaufman adopted the name Dziga Vertov, which connotes turning, revolving; Vertovs political writings & his work on the Kino-Pravda newsreel series shows a revolutionary bent which is perhaps unsurprising. In October 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelia. While working for Kino-Nedelia he met Elizaveta Svilova, who was later to become his wife. The first issue of the series came out in June 1918.
Editors Choice: Man With A Movie Camera, Michael Nymans Man With A Movie Camera, Man With The Movie Camera, View DVDology
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