Biosphere and Dziga Vertov: Man With A Movie Camera

03.10.2010 // Films, Futuretronics, Visuals // Rucyl // No Comments

Biosphere: Man With A Movie Camera from Geir Jenssen / Biosphere

In 1996 Norwegian composer Geir Jenssen (“aka Biosphere”) was commissioned by the Tromsø International Film Festival (TIFF) to write a new soundtrack for the movie, using the director’s written instructions for the original accompanying piano player. Jenssen wrote half of the soundtrack, turning the other half to Per Martinsen (aka Mental Overdrive). It was used for the Norwegian version, “Mannen med filmkameraet”, at the 1996 TIFF. The scored movie was not available after the festival. The soundtrack was released in 2001. This edit of the film contains only the parts written by Biosphere.

Born in Tromso (Norway) 1962, Geir Jenssen is one of the most important artists in contemporary Norwegian music. If you haven’t seen the film, there’s no better time than with this Biosphere soundtrack.

Man with a Movie Camera, sometimes called The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova who helped with the process of deleting and adding new frames into the film. Vertov started the Kino-Pravda series, which means literally “film-truth”, meaning fragments of actuality which, when organized together, have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye. The cinéma vérité movement of the 1960s was named after Vertov’s Kino-Pravda.

Vertov’s feature film, produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in Odessa and other Soviet cities. 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 cameraman of the title and the modern Soviet Union he discovers and presents in the film.

This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles). [wikipedia] Vertov, and this film, had a profound effect on modern documentary/movie making.

p.s. Cinematic Orchestra has also re-scored this film.

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