Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake

Video artist Perry Bard initiated this participatory, global, shot-for-shot remake of Dziga Vertov's \i Man with a Movie Camera\i0 (1929). The project invites its Internet audience to submit footage that corresponds to one of the 1,276 shots from the film's 57 scenes. The software on the site produces a new version of the film every day from the submitted material, and this is shown in split screen next to the original, with a new soundtrack by Steve Baun. In the opening titles of the original version, Vertov describes his film as "An experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events without the aid of intertitles, without the aid of a scenario, without the aid of theater." In this remake, Bard removes even the single guiding influence of one single director. Bard also extrapolates Vertov's meta-reflection on a filmic level. Vertov's original edits are preserved frame-for-frame, but the shots themselves are all new: a typewriter becomes a digital keyboard and the complex analog film equipment becomes a cell phone camera. We see 1920s Russia transformed into other places and times. \par \par dziga.perrybard.net