This is obviously by far the best film in the rather limited genre of the "city tone-poem." The pacing is excellent, the editing is really stylish, and, for the most part, the subjects selected are interesting, either intrinsically or because of the editing. But what's more amazing than the quality of the film is the subject matter, because, with the exception of a shot of Lenin's portrait, this seems not just neutral politically but positively bourgeois in outlook. There ARE sequences of industry in action, automated machines twisting and turning, great steel furnaces, and girls on an assembly line making packets of cigarettes, all of which remind one of those American industry-distributed films of the 'fifties that were shown on rainy-day school lunch-hours. This isn't so surprising, since the Soviet view of industry regimentation seems to have been similar to the West's at the time. But the rest of the film is really amazing in that it is almost exclusively concerned with decidedly middle-class people at play. At play! Why aren't they out working on the latest five-year plan? Contrast this to Grigori Kozintsev's contemporary films: the party in THE NEW BABYLON (1929) is shown as wicked in comparison to the drudgery of the workers supporting it, and the girl in ALONE (1931) is admonished for her selfish desire to have a happy home life with a husband when there are Siberian children to teach. But here we see pretty girls in stylish clothes, middle class families out for a ride in carriages and *gasp* autos, beauty shops with manicurists (engagingly cross-cut with the film editor at work), Sunday at the beach, a magician entertaining children, merry-go-rounds, spectators having fun at a motorcycle race, very non-regimented basketball and soccer games, people at a reducing salon, relaxed couples drinking and eating at a bar, posters of entertainment films (and the audience of the film we're watching, trooping into a fairly plush theatre and enjoying themselves thoroughly), etc. The film is a celebration of life as it is, with bums waking up on their benches at the start of the day seen as a poetic celebration of life. Bums in the workers paradise?? In one sequence, happy mothers of newborns, old women in grief in a cemetery, and young people getting marriage licenses are contrasted, in an intended tapestry of life. The emphasis is on the emotions of the individual. There's a wry commentary on the young to-be-marrieds: some look as though they're not well matched; one woman covers her face when the camera intrudes. Affectionate, ironic, even satiric, comment on the human condition is the obvious purpose of the film. Typical is a sequence contrasting a young female nude long-distance swimmer applying grease to her body, with another young woman with a perm applying lipstick to her mouth. How did this paean to pleasure seeking and personal fulfillment, this hymn to individualism, ever get made in Russia in 1929?
Review of Man with a Movie Camera
