Screenings for the week of April 11th:

Man with a Movie Camera

From Wikipedia:

The film has an unabashedly avant-garde style, and emphasizes that film can go anywhere. For instance, the film uses such scenes as superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass, filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed, even filming a woman giving birth, and the baby being taken away to be bathed.

Vertov was one of the first to be able to find a mid-ground between a narrative media and a database form of media. He shot all the scenes separately, having no intention of making this film into a regular movie with a storyline. Instead, he took all the random clips and put it in a database, which Svilova later edited. The narrative part of this process was her job. She had to go into that random pool of clips that Vertov filmed, edit it, and put it in some kind of order. Vertov's purpose of all this was to break the mold of a linear film that the world was used to seeing in those days.