Dziga Vertov in La Lleialtat Santseca

The Italian Opera23 (synthesizer and live electronics) and the Portuguese Diogo Santos (drums and percussion) form the Kaufman Duo, a collective that is part of the La Lleialtat Santseca creative support programme. They presented the project's work in progress in July 2021 and are now finally launching it.

Following the film's narrative indications, the musicians will embark on a spontaneous exercise that will give rise to an unreleased, unique and unrepeatable soundtrack for Man with a movie camera. It is a silent experimental documentary that, according to the British Film Institute, has become "the most significant documentary of all time".

Unlike Vertov's other purely propagandistic works, such as Anniversary of the Revolution (1919), History of the Civil War (1922), Shagay, sovet! (1926) and Three Songs about Lenin (1934), the innovative Man with a movie camera stands out for the spontaneity with which it captures everyday life and for its innovative use of montage and other cinematographic techniques, including multiple exposures, slow motion, accelerated sequences, oblique angles, close-ups, tracking shots and stop motion.

Shot in Kyiv, Moscow and Odesa in 1929, the film shows what an operator filming a Soviet city from dawn to dusk sees: The first awakening of the first workers, the working day in the factories, the practice of sporting activities and other chores typical of a modern, post-revolutionary industrial society. For all these reasons, the film is considered the greatest exponent of cinema-eye, as well as the precursor of the French cinema verité of the 1960s.

Vertov and the other futurist filmmakers of the Kinoglaz group, like his partner Yelizaveta Svilova, rejected all the elements of conventional cinema: From pre-writing scripts to using professional actors or shooting in studios, the sets, and the lighting. He aimed to capture cinematic truth through the "art of montage" of topical scenes — or "fragments of energy", as he put it — that would bring out a deeper truth that can't be perceived by the human eye.

Tickets for the session cost 3 euros and can be purchased online by clicking here.