Mikhail Kaufman
Encyclopedia
Cinematographer
A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...
and photographer. He was the younger brother of filmmaker Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov
David Abelevich Kaufman , better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov , was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist...
(Denis Kaufman) and the older brother of cinematographer Boris Kaufman
Boris Kaufman
Boris Abelevich Kaufman, A.S.C. was a cinematographer. He was the younger brother of famous filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman....
.
He was born into a family of Jewish intellectuals living in Białystok at the time when the Congress Poland
Congress Poland
The Kingdom of Poland , informally known as Congress Poland , created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, was a personal union of the Russian parcel of Poland with the Russian Empire...
was a part of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
.
In 1920s, after Mikhail Kaufman returned from Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
, Vertov offered him to participate in his newsreel
Newsreel
A newsreel was a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs and entertainment for millions of moviegoers...
series Kino-Pravda
Kino-Pravda
Kino-Pravda was a newsreel series by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman.Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of kino-pravda, or film-truth, through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized...
as a cameraman.
Mikhail Kaufman directed photography for several films, including the 1929 Man with the Movie Camera.
The film is built around meta-reference
Meta-reference
Metareference, a metafiction technique, is a situation in a work of fiction whereby characters display an awareness that they are in such a work, such as a film, television show or book. Sometimes it may even just be a form of editing or film-making technique that comments on the...
and is full of innovative visual effects: in it, Kaufman acts as a cameraman and is seen shooting the film while walking on high bridges, hanging off the side of a train, climbing a smokestack and crawling underground with miners – all in order to get the best shot. His brother's wife, Yelizaveta Svilova
Yelizaveta Svilova
Yelizaveta Ignatevna Svilova was a Russian filmmaker and film editor. She was a lifelong collaborator with her husband, Dziga Vertov. She is best known as supervising editor on Man with a Movie Camera...
, was editor and part of the "Council of Three" who "proclaimed a 'death sentence' on the cinema that came before, faulting it for mixing in 'foreign matter' from theater and literature."
Mikhail Kaufman also directed two films: "Moscow" (1927) and "In Spring" (1929). Shortly after the filming of Man with the Movie Camera, Kaufman and Vertov fell out over artistic differences. The two would never work together again.
External links
- The Man with a Movie Camera at nottingham.ac.uk
- The man with the movie camera. Speed of vision, speed of truth? by MARKO DANIEL
- Stills from The Man with the Movie [pl:MCamera