Landmark – Man with a Movie Camera

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2017

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

"The greatest documentary of all time"? Michael Nyman, Alexei Popogrebsky, Ian Christie and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh join Matthew Sweet to discuss Dziga Vertov's 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera, which was voted top of a poll conducted by Sight and Sound Magazine.

Vertov's film is a kind of cinematic symphony of urban life in the Soviet Union. It fizzes with ideas and is the embodiment of the notion that cinema can promote revolutionary consciousness. For some its an achievement to set along side the films of Eisenstein. Both could lay claim to being the greatest film maker of their time and their friendship ended in rivalry. Man with a Movie Camera counts amongst its admirers the novelist, Salman Rushdie and the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard.

Michael Nyman has composed scores for the three major films that the pioneering Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov made in the late 1920s and is now working on an opera about Vertov. Ian Christie is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck University London. He is co-editor, with Richard Taylor, of The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939 and Eisenstein rediscovered. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh is chief film critic for the Metro newspaper. Alexei Popogrebsky is a film director and screenwriter whose work includes How I Ended this Summer and Prostye veshchi. Plus, on the website you can find Salman Rushdie's comments about watching the film.

Part of Radio 3’s Breaking Free: A Century of Russian Culture

Producer: Zahid Warley

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music
0:27.0	when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.1	Thanks for downloading this program from the free thinking team at the BBC.
0:36.6	This is the BBC.
0:46.5	Vignanourn't
0:48.3	VIII.
0:49.1	NISTOND-Urinesses,
0:50.2	without the message,
0:52.9	film,
0:53.3	without knowledge,
0:53.9	without script, without, without, without decaration, without any of the writing of the images, film, by the script,
0:55.0	without a film,
0:56.0	by the scenario,
0:57.0	without decorations,
0:58.0	actors and,
0:59.0	and,
1:00.0	on the whole of
1:01.0	the music,
1:02.0	theatre and literature.
1:03.0	In March
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.