Moskva

This guy had a brother who was up to some pretty cool , pretty radical things at the time. He did not just rhapsodize the radical socialist experiment, he was looking into structured musical possibilities in the eye, rhythmic perception. The state apparatus viewed experimentation of the sort with suspicion, already since the early days and Lenin's decision to dissolve the Proletkult, but there were more significant problems afoot - Trotsky and the Left Wing - so for most of the 1920's no one paid much mind.

At around this time someone had enough though, so the two brothers were fired from Sovkino and had to pack their things for Ukraine, a more fertile ground then for expression. Dovzhenko was already there, preparing work on his Ukrainian trilogy.

It was from Ukraine that they launched their seminal work. That was Man with a Movie Camera. The brother was Dziga Vertov. Our guy, Mikhail, was the cameraman travelling around a film that he captured.

He's on his own in this film from the Sovkino days, doing what the two of them had been doing since Kino-Pravda in the early 1920's: visual reporting on Soviet life in the streets, some of it staged.

The history buff will be pleased to see in passing the Comintern, Lenin's mausoleum, the Red Square, the Duma, another sign that points at a Proletkult building, or festivities that demonstrate the presence of German comrades from Weimar's booming communist party (the subject of Pudovkin's Dezertir), but that's not my interest in the thing.

It's the undramatized flow of entirely visual life that appeals to me, the relaxed segue in and out of poetic routine, informal even in front of places of importance.

It's pretty blissful to watch in short stretches, for example the marvellous scene of divers jumping from a platform and reversed again that anticipates, in primitive form, Riefenstahl's weightless bodies from Olympia Pt 2.. But, in the long run you get the sense that something is missing without Vertov. The point was a cinematic symphony, but it's melody without contrapuntal ebb, without an adventurous eye spliced in the fabric. It's a cameraman's chamber music.

Shucks. There's a scene that is about what the film is for me at its most pure; a slow night-drive and in the glow of headlights suddenly people materialize from the night and vanish again. Watch it for ghostly visitors and places such as these materializing out of time.