The 42nd Annual Denver Film Festival is set to kick off at the end of the month, and they’ve already got a few special surprises up their sleeves. One, in particular, courtesy of beloved Denver band DeVotchKa, is bringing live music to the big screen. On Sunday, November 3 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, DeVotchKa will live score the 1929 classic Soviet silent documentary, Man With A Movie Camera in the IMAX theater. Previously, DeVotchKa has soundtracked such movies as Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and live scored Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Sweeney Todd (2016) amongst other projects.
“This is a project we have been dreaming about for years,” says DeVotchKa frontman Nick Urata regarding the upcomign collaboration. “We’ve scored a lot of films but none can compare to Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov is a master at marrying humanity to film, and although it was shot in pre-WWII Russia and Ukraine, you see your family, your friends, and yourself on the screen. Realizing every single person in the film is now gone is what really got to us and guided our hands as we wrote the score. Scoring the film live is like walking the tightrope without a net—it guarantees that no two performances will ever be the same.”
Man With A Movie Camera, is often regarded as a masterpiece of the era in due part to its experimental processes. Antant-garde filmaking through the chronicling of daily activity in Moscow, Odessa and Kiev was boundary pushing.