Review: NYman With a Movie Camera

I discovered Peter Greenaway in 1988 while I was at the Australian National University (ANU) as an undergraduate. I was interested in film in that pretentious way many students have, although I did also have some commercial nous. I had joined the ANU Film Club in 1987, which at that stage had a pretty decent sized screen and lecture hall in which they screened usually a feature on Tuesday nights, Thursday nights, and two features on Sunday afternoons during term times. The theatre was actually bigger than the two theatres at the Electric Shadows art house cinema in central Canberra, which was the main competition. The Club was saving up to buy proper Dolby sound. The committee had got it into their heads that they would be able to do that by getting the usual number of students as members (expected) and took advantage of the free films on offer from the Australian Film and Sound Archive. It was sound logic; the problem was that the types of films that the Archive had for free rental were the types that would only appeal to a fairly narrow audience. I suggested that instead they could increase the membership base by spending a bit of money on a few recent blockbuster releases, but then have the rest as the freebies. I remember it was a heated discussion, but their hiring of Top Gun, and Alien and Aliens as a double worked. So did getting the Star Wars trilogy in honour of the first film’s tenth anniversary. The Dolby was purchased a semester early.

A Zed and Two Noughts (also rendered as A Z+O+O) was not one of the blockbusters chosen by the committee, but nor was it one of the freebies. I can’t remember what attracted my attention to it. Maybe I just wanted to zone out that Thursday night and let someone else’s imagination take me away from whatever troubles I had in my second year of university. I do remember being astounded by it from the opening scene. One of those films where everything was just extraordinary. I remember seeking out my friends Alistair and Grace immediately when I returned to the college where we lived. Of all my friends at the time, they were the only ones I thought would have a hope of understanding just what an experience A Z+O+O was.

Greenaway’s films are intellectual films. They are more like moving canvasses than films, although they have characters and stories in them. Those characters and situations are often grotesque, and usually hyper-real in a bizarre way. I say they are intellectual films because unlike most films that seek some kind of felt reaction in the audience (laughter, tears, shock), Greenaway’s films predominantly seek to engage the intellect in puzzling out the games being played, or being seduced by the visual and aural patterns. It’s not to say they don’t also engage with things visceral. I suggest that anyone whose stomach doesn’t turn at the dog shit and cannibalism of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and the mass rape in the Baby of Maçon are severely empathetically challenged.

Integral to Greenaway’s films are the musical scores. Michael Nyman provided the musical soundtracks for The Draughtsman’s Contract, A Z+O+O, Drowning by Numbers, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Prospero’s Books. For me, falling in love with the films meant falling in love with the music.

Nyman abandoned Greenaway due to “creative differences” coming to a head during the production of Prospero’s Books. Nyman is a prolific composer and performer and has also written and recorded the soundtracks to other films like Gattaca, The Piano and contributing to many more. He has also done operas and other albums unconnected to films.

He is what musicologists call a minimalist composer. Think Philip Glass and John Adams for other examples. I love the rhythm. The soothing repetitive cycles of pure sound not drowned by multiple instruments. It means the sound is pared back to single instruments. Nyman has what he calls his band, not an orchestra of any description.

By fluke, I saw that the Michael Nyman Band was going to be premiering Nyman’s latest work, NYman With a Movie Camera on 17 October 2010 at the Barbican. I immediately bought a ticket.

While I was at the ANU I read Politics and History. It was the mid-to-late 1980s and the Cold War was drawing to a close, but we didn’t know it at the time. I was doing a BA. I had the luxury of a father who was a lifelong academic and who therefore knew that university is not solely meant for vocational studies. But, thinking of a career still influenced my subject choices. Without any firm plans, or knowledge, a public sector career was always there for me. A friend was career goal orientated, her heart and mind set on being an expert in the USSR and thus employable in Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. She was even learning Russian. I wasn’t quite that dedicated, but I was taking units in Soviet history and Soviet politics.

Soviet art is one way in to understanding the Revolution; how and why it happened, and what those involved hoped for it. One of our lecturers decided to show us examples of some of the Soviet movies to contrast the social realism form and futurist avant garde styles.

She chose Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (Russian title: Человек с киноаппаратом) as an example of the avant garde. I was captivated. Up until that point, all the films I had ever seen were stories with a fairly straightforward narrative structure. Even the pure art house of Greenaway’s films were telling stories in a recognisable way.

Man With a Movie Camera was a silent film released in 1929. It had no inter-titles (the slides in silent films explaining key scenes or snippets of dialogue), no story and no actors. Vertov was the director, his wife Elizaveta Svilova edited it, and Mikhail Kaufman was the cinematographer. It was produced by the Ukrainian VUFKU studio and filmed in Odessa and some other Soviet cities. It shows the people living and working in those cities, and the machinery of those cities. It experimented with a wide range of cinematic techniques: double exposure, fast and slow motion, jump cuts, split screens, etc, etc, etc. Vertov and Kaufman filmed random clips of life without any conscious effort in finding any kind of narrative. Only a few of the clips were staged in any way: cameras in the late 1920s were large and noisy, far from being unobtrusive. But most were shot in ways to limit any form of staginess. Svilova took approximately 1,775 clips and edited them together into the film as released.

Upon the official release of Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov issued a statement at the beginning of the film, which read: "The film Man with a Movie Camera represents AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION Of visual phenomena WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES (a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

The film was shot and made in the decade following the Bolshevik revolution and formation of the USSR, but just before the tyranny of Stalin took an iron yet bloody grip on the country. Experimentation was rife, as was debate about the different forms of artistic experimentation. Vertov’s film is in the documentarist tradition, but resists even the narrative structure of most documentaries. It has no one story thread running through it, but there are hundreds of points where stories exist.

Unsurprisingly for such an important film in the history of cinema, there have been relatively frequent re-releases. It is a silent film, and modern releases include a variety of soundtracks. Love it or hate it, the 1984 release of Metropolis with the crude synth Giorgio Moroder soundtrack and barmy colourisation did show that people were quite happy to see silent classics with a makeover. Even if you loathe it, without that release arguably the subsequent releases of fuller prints would not have graced movie screens in the decades hence.

In 2003 the British Film Institute (BFI) asked Nyman to do a new soundtrack for a DVD release of Man With a Movie Camera. It was the first time Nyman had seen the film. According to the Barbican’s notes about NYman With a Movie Camera, Max Pugh first saw Vertov’s film in 2009. From 2007 Pugh had been working editing Nyman’s odd collection of film snippets he had been making mostly on digital cameras since the early 1990s. Pugh noticed the similarity of Vertov and Nyman's attitude to "life caught unawares". NYman With a Movie Camera was thus inevitable.

For me, this was amazing, and the performance did not disappoint. It was not a shot-for-short remake in the sense of the remake done of Psycho a few years ago, where each scene was remade and re-shot based slavishly on the original. But, the sense of each piece was preserved. Some of Vertov's original film appears to remind the audience of where Nyman's work is drawn. Importantly, though, Nyman's takes place now, and it is about him and his experiences: where he has been with his digital camera taking random shots perhaps with no particular project in mind. As a result, the places Nyman takes us are very different to Vertov's locations. Iran, Mexico, the USA, the UK, Italy and Tunisia exist in Nyman's footage. Inserted, too, are scenes of prisoners in the Birkenau Concentration Camp, which sent a chill through my heart. It made me think of how Vertov's film was before all that horror, and just before Stalin's purges. It made me think of how vigorous Vertov's film is in capturing Soviet life when there was still the democratic hopes of the revolution that had toppled the Tsarist dictatorship.

Like Man With a Movie Camera, NYman with a Movie Camera is art and as such is not something that would grip everyone the same way it did me. I'm very aware it resonated with me for numerous reasons, including that curse of the middle-aged - nostalgia.