This is a guest post for Silent London by film historian Richard Bossons about the reconstruction of the original score for Man With a Movie Camera. The new Eye Filmmuseum print of the film will screen at the Rainy Days contemporary music festival at the Philharmonie in Luxembourg on 23 November with an ensemble from the Luxembourg Philharmonic conducted by Leo Geyer, playing this reconstructed score. 

The original music for the 1929 Moscow screening of the film has been recreated by the composer Leo Geyer and myself Richard Bossons.

Though a silent film, the visual rhythm of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is often akin to a musical composition. Vertov’s biographer John MacKay suggested that he used the frames of the film and the intervals between them in a similar way to notes on a score. The film is structured so that its tempo gradually increases to reach an extraordinary climax at the end, a thrilling montage of chaotic images created by the film’s editor, Elizaveta Svilova. The Soviet film scholar Yuri Tsivian wrote that “Man with a Movie Camera invades the territory of sound cinema as far as a silent film can reach.”