About the restoration of The Man with the Movie Camera
By Mark-Paul Meyer, EYE Film Institute
The Man with the Movie Camera is one of the best-known works in film history and generally
regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the classical Soviet avant-garde. Every person who has
ever shown the slightest interest in the history of cinema has heard about this film and probably seen
it at some point. But what has this person actually seen? Of course this is a question that often
occurs when you see film presentations or video releases of films: how do you know what version
you are looking at and how does it relate to other prints or copies of the same film? It is well known
that many films exist in variant versions. Sometimes these are intentionally created by the director or
the producer, as with multi-language versions, or films that were made with multiple cameras to
produce additional negatives, as was common practice in the era of silent films. But mostly film
prints have suffered from wear and tear, from cuts by projectionists or censors, or as a result of
inferior duplication and reproduction. When you see a film from 1929, like TMWTMC, you must
always be aware of the fact that you may be watching just "a” print of the film, not necessarily
exactly as it was intended by the film maker or as it was shown on its opening night.
Unfortunately TMWMC is mostly known in prints that are defective. For decades the film was widely
seen only in prints that were printed with a sound aperture. TMWMC was shot in the period of silent
cinema with silent camera aperture. This means that the filmed image used the full area between
perforations on both sides that were necessary for the transport of the film. In later years, when
sound was introduced, part of the image width was used for the optical sound track. This reduced
the horizontal size of the image ; then both top and bottom of the silent image were also cropped to
maintain the customary screen shape. The consequence of this practice was that the cinema
apparatus, both in cinemas and in film laboratories, was soon no longer set up for the silent frame
ratio. In a nutshell, most prints of TMWMC, even in archives, have these parts of the image cut-off.
They are full length - all the shots are there - but suffer severe mutilation so far as the photographic
composition is concerned.
The most important feature of the restored film print represented here is that the full frame image is
preserved. This is because the print that served as the source is from the first years of its release and
preserved in the archives of the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. This print was brought to
Amsterdam by Vertov himself when he travelled through Western
Europe in 1931 and showed the film on different occasions. In the Netherlands this print was
presented by the Filmliga, an active film club that promoted film as visual art. The film was shown in
the presence of Dziga Vertov, and when Vertov returned to the Soviet Union, the print was acquired
by the Filmliga. The Filmliga continued to occasionally show the film in the Netherlands and after the
war the film became part of the collection of the then Nederlands Filmmuseum.
This vintage nitrate print is full frame and has superb photographic quality, due to the fact that it is
directly printed from the original negative on good quality positive film stock. This doesn’t mean that
the film is perfect. For many reasons this print has also its deficiencies. The main reason is that the
print was regularly used for presentations in the years that inflammable nitrate film was still shown.
Subsequently the print was screened in the Filmmuseum itself as well as in other film museums and
archives that requested the film print from Amsterdam. When in the 1960s a duplicate was made on
non-flammable film stock, the film was already missing several elements that that will be described
below. The ongoing use of the film created problems that can be summarized as wear and tear
through continuously changing reel ends, the disappearance of credits and chapter numbers, and
even a cut that might be a censor cut or a cut that made by a projectionist or programmer.
One short but essential scene was removed from the Amsterdam print. It is obvious from the film
print that something was cut out, because a splice can be found, but there is no documentation on
who or exactly why it was cut out. This sequence showed the birth of a baby very closely from the lap
of the mother and was possibly considered as too explicit and shocking. These 39 frames - less than
two seconds - were restored from a film reel that the Austrian Filmmuseum acquired in 2004 from
The Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnagorsk.
It is not clear whether the film print was presented with opening credits or not. The credits are
obviously missing and all other existing prints have title cards that are not original from 1929.
However, existing documents make it very likely that title cards were intended and that the text of
the title cards sketched the artistic intentions of the film. The credits were recreated from the notes
for the film, as was done before in the 1950s. Because the film is without intertitles, the titles at the
beginning are important to direct the attention of spectators in a specific way. To avoid subtitling it
was decided to create new titles in English, to facilitate an international audience.
As is clearly stated in the beginning credits of the film, TMWMC is a film in six chapters. These six
chapters are no longer clearly distinguishable in the known existing prints. Also the print from the
EYE Filmmuseum did not have clear indications anymore where the chapters started and where they
ended. TMWMC was released in single reels of slightly less than a thousand feet each. Beginnings
and endings of these reels were subject to damage when it was still common practice to show the
shorter reels. Also, there were more reels than chapters, therefore the numbers seemed illogical if
considered merely as indications for the reel order. It was common practice that every reel had a
head leader and a tail leader, clearly indicating the number of the reel, but in this case the
numeration was not in accordance with the division in reels and could therefore easily be considered
as confusing
or mistaken and that therefore complete removal was chosen. Moreover, when it became practice to
mount the shorter reels to reels of 2000 feet or even larger, the beginning and endings were taken
off to enable a film presentation without undesired interruptions. When these larger reels were
dismounted again, the reel ends were sometimes discarded or put in the wrong places. This is all
speculation, but it is a fact that the numbers have disappeared, both from the Amsterdam print and
from the prints that were available elsewhere.
However, during the restoration process it became clear that the film originally contained numbers
that clearly indicated the different chapters, all intended as integral to the film, meant to be seen by
the spectator. Oddly, the number 1 is still to be found in most prints, probably because it is
somewhere in the middle of reel 1 and therefore never considered as a leader strip that could easily
be taken off. It also clearly indicates the beginning of the film after a short introduction. The film
consisted therefore of a prologue and six chapters. After the prologue the number 1 rises and the
first chapter starts.
Fortunately, there is a 16mm print in the archives of EYE which turned out to be an early duplication
of the original nitrate print. In this print the numbers were all still present, except number 6. Because
of the specific graphic qualities of the numbers and the animated movement - the number falling at
the end of a chapter and rising to indicate the start of the next - is was clear that these number were
meant not only as reference for the projectionists, but also intended as integral parts of the film.
Chapters started with a number rising and a camera lens that opened its diaphragm, and at the end
of the chapter the same sequence was presented in reverse order: the diaphragm closed and the
number fell. It was therefore possible to restore the division in six chapters. For the restoration the
numbers that were still present in the 16mm print were digitized and edited into the film. Only the
number 6 was newly created.
The original nitrate print was digitized at 2K resolution by Haghefilm in Amsterdam, on its Oxberry
scanner with wet gate. The superb photographic quality of the original print guaranteed good quality
digital files. The restoration interventions were made on the digital data, such as inserting the
missing birth scene, the titles and the numbers. No elaborate clean up was executed. For the
production of a new 35mm print, the data were recorded back to a 35mm black and white negative.
The print made from this negative was presented for the first time in 2010 in Amsterdam. The file for
the DVD, Blu-Ray and DCP was produced directly from the 2K data and extensively cleaned and
restored by Lobster films in 2014.
Written for booklet DVD release 2015 by Lobsterfilms, Cinémathèque Toulouse and EYE
Filmmuseum, Amsterdam
See: http://shop-lobsterfilms.com/fr/dvd/114-coffret-dziga-vertov-bluraydvd--3760130460453.html
And for the USA: www.Flickeralley.com
Mark-Paul Meyer