Biosphere- Man With a Movie Camera

Didn't see a post about this when I searched, so I thought I'd mention it. Back in October, Biosphere posted the silent film 'Man With A Movie Camera' to Youtube complete with his score and I only just found it. I have the 2cd set of Substrata that includes this, but I hadn't seen the movie with the score synced up before. It's really awesome how parts of the music act as sound for what's going on in the film. For example, the sample 'sorry to wake you' coincides with a woman waking up. And the various spectral sounds that seem like part of the music when you listen to the score by itself turn out to be foley for machines and trains when you watch the movie.

There is a brief childbirth scene, so you might get a bit grossed out, but this is balanced out by the cute topless Soviet woman giving herself a mud bath. Kind of racy for 1929.

http://youtu.be/iIguRl-1EvY

Brilliant! Thanks for the heads up!!

I remember seeing the post, but I didn't watch it for whatever reason. Thanks for the reminder.

In the Nursery did this like 15 years ago

Hey it's not a pissing contest. Cinematic Orchestra have done a version as well - Is this like the most 're-scored' film ? (I have a feeling Metropolis has been done a lot too)

  On 1/9/2014 at 7:47 PM, Rubin Farr said:

In the Nursery did this like 15 years ago

Biosphere's soundtrack to the film was commissioned in 1996.

Aye I was trying to find the date - Discogs said 2006 but I'm sure I got it bundled with Substrata years before that.

The longest paper I wrote in college was about Soviet avant-garde films from that era, and I compared and contrasted Vertov and Eisenstein's use of montage. Soviet Cinema was incredibly progressive, in fact art was coupled with socialist thought in the decade that followed the revolution, but imploded (as did the country) into authoritarianism. It's a pity Vertov eased up his very experimental and forward-thinking efforts int he 30s. Once Stalin came to power he had to back altogether.

It's one of my favorite movies, incredibly thought out and mind-blowing that it was conceived and committed to film in 1929. Vertov actually was interested in music as well, in fact he theorized musique concrete efforts in 1918! He was theorizing it before it was possible to capture in recording. I wasn't able to access any of that info beyond a few citations years ago, there's a few recordings on discogs apparently, from the same era as his filmwork.

Dziga-Vertov

I've seen Man With A Movie Camera a couple times. I forget who did the soundtrack for the DVD we watched in my class, but it followed the original score. I've listened to both the famed Cinematic Orchestra and Biosphere soundtracks but yet to watch the film with either backing soundtrack.