Movie Loner

It’s been a while since I’ve gone back in the day so I figured I’d go way back to 1929. I first saw Man with the Movie Camera in film school at Ithaca College. I remember being transfixed by the striking images and inventive shooting techniques. To this day I am still impressed. The man responsible for this seminal masterpiece is the great Russian documentarian Dziga Vertov. Vertov believed in what he called “film truth”, a methodology that strove to capture reality in a way that the human eye could not.

Man with the Movie Camera is not a documentary in the traditional sense. There is no specific subject like you’d see from Ken Burns or Michael Moore. Vertov’s subject is life itself, in point of fact the life of a city and its inhabitants. He begins with a woman rising in the morning. Then the city awakens; empty streets fill with people, cars, buses, wagons. The hustle and bustle of urban existence is filmed in its purest form, without artifice. To be fair some of the setups are clearly staged, but Vertov deftly maneuvers his lens across the city in such an innovative fashion that you can hardly quibble over his creative indulgences. Split-screens, double-exposures, slow motion, and skew angles gloriously pepper the screen throughout.

Tricks and treats aside, Vertov succinctly contrasts the influx of technology on society with the routine occurrences of human life. Wheels turn, gears grind, pistons pump while people work, marry, play and die. The camera travels everywhere, from dark, dank coalmines to sun-soaked beaches. Vertov provides an all-encompassing portrait of a city’s populace: the joy of marriage and childbirth parallels the pain of injury and loss. His camera rarely stops to rest, electing to remain in motion seizing the rhythm and energy of man and machine. The similarities between the two is impossible to ignore.

Vertov believed the camera possessed a unique power greater than that of the pen or instrument. He eschewed romanticized images in favor of precise ones free of manipulation. He regarded fictional drama as an “opiate of the masses”, one that reinforced man’s inherent weakness and fallibility. It was his great desire to witness man evolve from an imperfect being into a more exact machine. His experimental endeavors behind the lens attempted to bring truth to the people. Man with the Movie Camera is one such truth, not a universal truth, but rather a subjective truth from the brilliant eye of Dziga Vertov.

A scene from Man with the Movie Camera:

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Occasionally, I’ll use this forum to discuss an older film that younger audiences might not be familiar with. Night of the Hunter is perfect for this site because it was overlooked by critics and ignored by moviegoers when it was released. Today it’s regarded as one of the most gorgeous examples of black and white cinematography put to film.

Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a menacing criminal who gets pinched for stealing a car. While in jail, he meets Ben Harper, a man condemned to die. In their conversations, Harry learns Harper stole $10,000 and stashed it away. Harper is executed before he can tell Harry the money’s whereabouts. Once released, Harry travels to Harper’s home town, the hamlet of Cresap’s Landing in search of the stolen cash.

He arrives in town pretending to be a Preacher and immediately begins pursuing Harper’s widow, Willa (Shelley Winters). He seduces her with bible thumping sermons until she agrees to marry him. Once married, he refuses to touch her, claiming sex is a sin. When he’s not browbeating Willa, he interrogates her children, John and Pearl, who both know where the money is hidden. Frustrated by his lot, Harry resorts to murder. The children escape down river in a boat. Singing hymns, astride his horse, the Preacher follows. His evil shadow never far behind.

Charles Laughton, famous for acting in movies like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, directed Night of the Hunter. Due to its poor reception in 1955 Laughton would never direct again. What a waste. This film is visually stunning. Its images are like moving paintings. In my opinion, it looks better than Citizen Cane.

Then there is Mitchum’s creepy portrayal of the Preacher. He’s my favorite screen villain of all time. Forget Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter. This guy seduces widows, menaces children, and tattoos ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on his knuckles. If that doesn’t define “bad guy”, I don’t know what does. Please watch Night of the Hunter and tell me what you think. It has always had a spot on my Top 10 list.

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