Defamer has opened up their closed comment system (presumably temporarily) so that the blog’s readers can Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent Soviet classic The Man With a Movie Camera has outlived the grand majority of films from its epoch to become a staple of film schools and retrospectives, a landmark of personal/political documentary and even a kind of style guide for avant garde filmmaking and design. Now, British artist Perry Bard is putting together a “global remake” of the film, to screen at the UK Big Screen touring film festival in 2007-2008.
Bard is using his website to solicit collaborations from around the world. He’s posted every scene from the film, as well as thumbnails representing each scene’s beginning, middle and end. The basic idea is to have volunteers pick a scene from the original to re-interpret by creating their own footage. Within those parameters, Bard is encouraging experimentation:
Use what you have at your disposal. If you don\’t have a video camera, a succession of still images will work. Text is also o.k. The database will reflect the shape of the wired world on the 21st century stage…Vertov\’s footage was shot in the industrial landscape of the 20\’s. What images translate the world today? e.g. instead of the mining scene if you\’re living in Silicon Valley you might film inside Apple headquarters, etc.
This approach makes a lot of sense. Not only was the original Movie Camera a love letter of sorts to collaborative labor, but as a one-man movie studio using a prosumer technology to document his vision of the world, Vertov sort of prefigured the YouTube generation by about 85 years.
If you’d like to participate, all the relevant info can be found here. Bard says he’ll start accepting submissions in August, but you’re advised to keep it clean–he reserves the right to “eliminate inappropriate material.”
[Via Michael Z. Newman on Twitter]
