Junior Trinity alum and Lecturer in Music Dr Leo Geyer has completed the first documented contemporary accompaniment to Dziga Vertov’s influential film Man with a Movie Camera in collaboration with film historian Richard Bossons.
Leo Geyer, Artistic Director of Constella Music and the presenter and researcher behind the “profoundly moving” (FT) award-winning Sky Arts documentary The Lost Music of Auschwitz, collaborated with film historian Richard Bossons to restore the score from Vertov’s recently discovered notes. Leo will discuss the film and process on BBC Radio 3’s The Essay, broadcast on Friday 13 March.
“Surely a silent film is silent,” Leo says. “And for nearly 100 years, this avant-garde black-and-white film has often been projected into cinemas without sound. But this is not what the director intended.” At the premiere in Kyiv, there was a live soundtrack, and today, Vertov’s detailed musical requirements have been unearthed.
The discovery of Vertov’s “Musical Conspectus”—a detailed guide of all the pre-existing music that would accompany the silent film—by academic Professor Yuri Tsivian helped shape Leo and Richard’s work. The conspectus has the names of Vertov’s desired instrumental music: a mix of ballet scores, opera overtures, waltzes, piano solos, foxtrots and more. Completing the score required a painstaking, 4-year process, combining archival work, researching little-known scores, re-arrangement and restoration of old manuscripts, and, in some cases, creatively filling the gaps based on historical research. The new music helps underline the film’s many exciting, dramatic moments, and also fills in a gap in film music history: techniques such as “Mickey Mousing” (synchronising moments in the film with those in the score) that would later become commonplace are gestured at here.
In recent years, the film has also seen renewed attention as an early example of Ukrainian film, with coverage in The Guardian and Artforum discussing it within the wider context of the country’s contribution to the artform.
Voted #9 in the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2022, Dziga Vertov’s silent film masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera was produced by the Ukrainian VUFKU film studio and filmed mostly in Kyiv, Odessa, and Moscow, through beautiful cinematography (including trademark montage shots), insights into the process of film, and acute capturing of humanity. Man with a Movie Camera transcends its documentary film origins to become something much closer to visual art. Leo’s score works to enhance and deepen the drama.
Commenting on the film, Leo Geyer says: “Man with a Movie Camera has shown just how critical music can be in determining that multimedia experience. As part archaeologist and part composer, it was incredibly rewarding not simply to recreate the music, but to provide the missing piece of what now feels like a complete artwork.”