SECRET MOVIE CLUB & LA FILMFORUM present
Part of our CLASSIC SILENT CINEMA WITH LIVE SCORES! Series, Friday, May 12, 2023
LOCATION: The Secret Movie Club Theater, 1917 Bay Street, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90021
*Please note entrance/parking is actually in the back of the building. Make a right on Wilson Street, then a right behind the building. We’re the first set of black steps after the big gate.
7:30pm MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929, dir. Dziga Vertov, USSR, 68mns, DCP)
With live original score by Montopolis!
*SPECIAL NOTE: This is a special event with live original musical score. Because of limited seating, regular event passes and comp tickets can not be used for the event. So please get your tickets ASAP as events like these often sell out fast.
We are excited and honored to partner with the Los Angeles Filmforum to present a special screening of Dziga Vertov’s montage/documentary/experimental masterpiece Man With A Movie Camera with live original score by Austin, Texas indie chamber group Montopolis.
The best way to describe Man with a Movie Camera is to experience it for yourself. However, until you can do that, we’ll do our poor best to set up one of the great, exciting, inspiring movie experiences of cinema’s first golden period:
Vertov, his brother Mikhail Kaufman (who acted as the cameraman both real and in front of the camera), and Vert’s wife Yelizaveta Svilova (who edited), worked to create an experimental kind of documentary that explored almost every cinematic trick and technique available in 1929. Along the way Vertov and his team pushed, invented, and expanded more cinematic language to inspire and launch filmmakers into the sound era.
Much like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise illuminated a cinematic road of design, atmosphere, lighting via German expressionism, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera illuminated a road of editing techniques, lab processes, special effects, camera effects that proved that cinema could be a vessel of poetry and experimentation far beyond what the theater, the novel, the canvas could accomplish.
Vertov himself, like Lars Von Trier near seventy years later, accompanied the movie with a manifesto that in part read:
The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.
If you’ve never seen Man with a Movie Camera, it’s a gloriously passionate, almost hyperactive look at hustling bustling life and the act of making a movie itself. Filled with multiple exposures, slo and fast motion, split screens, it explodes into a kaleidoscope of cinematic technique.
All this cinematic inspiration will be happening to the live original score of the indie chamber group Monopolis.
This is one of those bucket list screenings if you are a lover and student of cinematic expression. Get your tickets now before they're gone!
Best always,
Craig Hammill
Secret Movie Club Founder.Programmer
Montopolis is an indie chamber music group from Austin, Texas that performs the works of composer Justin Sherburn. Their music folds country and folk idioms into modern classical arrangements with inventive instrumentation to create "stunning and transcendent" (Austin Chronicle) concerts.
Their programs are audience-engaging, multi-media events that combine live music with video and interactive story telling. Their most recent albums, Music for Enchanted Rock and The Legend of Big Bend, are themed around Texan ecological points of interest. Montopolis will continue to be inspired by and draw attention to the natural wonders of our state, country and planet. The Montopolis musicians include members of the Austin Symphony, Okkervil River, Tosca String Quartet, and the Polyphonic Spree.
Founded in 1975, Los Angeles Filmforum promotes a greater understanding of media art, and the role of the artists and curators who create and present it, by providing a forum for independently produced, noncommercial work which has little opportunity of reaching the general public. Filmforum is currently the longest-running venue in Southern California dedicated exclusively to the ongoing, non-commercial exhibition of independent, experimental, and progressive cinema.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
REFUNDS:
We can offer refunds up to 24 hours before showtime. Please request a refund through Eventbrite and we will process ASAP. After that, no refunds. Sorry.
However if something last minute comes up and you can’t make the screening, for whatever reason, just write to us before showtime: community@secretmovieclub.com and we’ll offer you complimentary tickets to a future screening, good for 90 days. (Disclaimer: Future screening must have available tickets, cannot be a fundraiser, and must be comparably priced)
HELPFUL SECRET MOVIE CLUB (1917 Bay Street, 2nd Floor, LA, CA 90021) THEATER PARKING TIPS:
We recommend that you park just outside our theater. Remember our theater is actually in a beautiful street art alleyway in the back of the 1917 Bay Street building. You get to our entrance by taking a right on Wilson, then a right behind the building. We are the first set of black steps on the right after the big gate.
There is also a parking lot at the corner of Mateo and Violet Street, just 2 blocks from our theater, which costs $7 per car.
HOW CAN WE STAY ON TOP OF NEWLY ANNOUNCED 35MM SCREENINGS, EVENTS, ETC?
You can follow us on Instagram/Twitter: @secretmovieclub or Facebook: @secretmovieclub35mm
You can also subscribe to our weekly email newsletter at secretmovieclub.com or by writing to us at community@secretmovieclub.com and using the header “SUBSCRIBE ME TO NEWSLETTER”.
HOW CAN I CONTACT YOU IF I HAVE OTHER QUESTIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS:
You can always email us at community@secretmovieclub.com with any other questions, concerns, thoughts, recommendations.