Man with a Movie Camera

Silent Film Classic with Live Score by Mike Cooper (UK/Italy)

Old Fire Station, View St, Bendigo

Saturday 21st April 8pm $10

enquiries 0421786595

Dziga Vertov’s Film

“Man With A Movie Camera” (1929), with live score by legendary avante-garde musician, film-maker and artist Mike Cooper (UK) who is now resident in Rome. Dziga Vertov's “Man With A Movie Camera” is considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era and the greatest documentary ever made. Startlingly modern, this film utilizes a groundbreaking style of rapid editing and incorporates innumerable other cinematic effects such as dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze frames, to create a work of amazing power and energy. Dziga Vertov's `The Man with the Movie Camera' begins with a prologue that explains that the director is attempting to stretch the boundaries of the cinematic medium, trying to achieve `a total separation from the language of literature and theater.' It accomplishes this by throwing out conventional storytelling and taking a non-narrative approach. Basically, the entire film consists of different series of shots that illuminate day-to-day life in Moscow and Odessa. The periods of the day - dawn, working hours, and resting hours - are represented by the activities of the ordinary people that make up the `cast' of the film, while the activities of certain citizens are contrasted with activities of others to create a panorama of Russian urban life in 1929.  “The pulsating excitement, the sense of almost infinite social and artistic possibilities that was unleashed by the Russian Revolution, reached its cinematic climax in Man With A Movie Camera, a film made just as the dead weight of Stalinist orthodoxy was about to crush down on the whole avant garde movement..."

Mike Cooper’s Music

For the past 40 years Mike Cooper has traced a path completely his own as an international musical explorer, performing and recording, solo and in a number of inspired groupings and a variety of genres. His first band, The Blues Committee, played with and supported blues legends such John Lee Hooker, Howlin Wolf and Jimmy Reed. With his roots lying in acoustic country blues he has, arguably, stretched the possibilities of the guitar by pursuing it into the more avant-garde musical areas with an eclectic mix of the many styles he has practiced over the years. Ranging freely through traditional country blues, folk, original songs, free improvisation, pop songs, exotica, electronic music, electro-acoustic music, and ‘sonic gestural’ playing utilising open tunings and extended techniques. His favoured instrument is a vintage 1930’s National tri-cone resophonic guitar played acoustically and/or ‘treated’ through a series of digital sampling and looping devices and his voice.