Michael Nyman: Man with a Movie Camera

The Michael Nyman Band perform Nyman's own stunning score to the classic 1929 Dziga Vertov film Man with a Movie Camera.  It is an extraordinary piece of work, a montage of urban Russian life showing the people of the city at work and at play, and the machines that keep the city going.  It was Vertov's first full-length film, and he used all the cinematic techniques at his disposal - split screen, slow motion etc - to produce a work that is thrilling and intellectually brilliant.  The pulsating excitement of the film is perfectly reflected in Nyman's exhilarating score, and together film and music convey the sense of almost infinite social and artistic possibilities that was unleashed by the Russian Revolution, which reached its cinematic climax in Man with a Movie Camera.  The film was made just as the dead weight of Stalinist orthodoxy was about to crush down on the whole avant-garde movement, and so marked the end of an era.