22 June 2025
(Photo: screen shot from the video show)
The screening of Dziga Vertov's classic film Man with a Movie Camera, accompanied by a jazz quartet of Odesa musician and composer Vitaliy Tkachuk, took place as part of the UA Days in Luxembourg festival.
The specially composed soundtrack, created back in 2010 for the First International Film Festival "Silent Nights" in Odesa, was performed this time in international collaboration with musicians Gilles Wagner (drums), Laurent Payfert (double bass), Alessandro Biasi (saxophone).
The music, based on jazz improvisations, is intertwined with the visual rhythm of the film, conveying the full range of its moods. The compositions contain echoes of Odesa, one of the cities featured in the film.
The UA Days in Luxembourgfestival, which is taking place for the third time, aims to open up the depth, sensitivity and diversity of modern Ukraine to the European audience through film, music, poetry, visual art and personal stories.
"Man with a Movie Camera is a 1929 Ukrainian Soviet silent documentary by Dzyga Vertov. In 2014, the British Film Institute (BFI) published a film rating in which Man with a Movie Camera was recognized as the greatest documentary of all time. It is ranked third in the list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema.
The film is a chronicle of one day in the life of a big city, captured by a movie camera.
At the end of the 1920s, when the internal party debate in the CPSU ended with the defeat of the opposition and the establishment of Joseph Stalin's hegemony, the party leadership launched an attack on proletarian art as not meeting the challenges of the times. Dzyga Vertov was criticized for his "formalism" and denied the opportunity to film in Moscow. Then he turned to the Odesa Film Studio, which supported his radical film idea. Filming began in the summer of 1928 and took place mostly in Odesa, but also in Kharkiv, Moscow, and Kyiv.
Кирило Бойко