Man With a Movie Camera Live Scored by Taras Luka

Man Behind the Camera is a live cinematic performance by Ukrainian-Canadian composer and pianist Taras Luka, featuring an original contemporary score performed live to the legendary Ukrainian avant-garde silent film Man With a Movie Camera (1929).

Presented as part of the Canadian Live Performance Tour, the project reimagines one of the most influential works of avant-garde cinema through a powerful live musical interpretation for piano and electronics. During the screening, Luka performs the score live on stage, transforming the film into an immersive audiovisual experience where music and image unfold in real time.

Created within the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, Man With a Movie Camera is widely recognized as a masterpiece of world cinema and a cornerstone of Ukrainian avant-garde film. Through a contemporary musical language, Man Behind the Camera brings this iconic work into a modern concert setting, creating a dialogue between early cinematic experimentation and today’s live performance culture.

The result is a poetic and dynamic experience where rhythm, montage, and live music merge into one artistic event.

More about the film:

Certainly among the most exhilarating movies ever made, no matter that it’s nearly a hundred years old now, Dziga Vertov’s whirligig portrait of modern life as experienced in (then) Soviet cities (Kharkiv, Odessa and Kyiv) uses a battery of innovative photographic and editing techniques (slow and fast motion; superimposition; freeze frames; jump cuts etc.) in a way that might be compared to the cut-up techniques of cubism.

Vertov — the Ukrainian nom de plume of David Kaufman, which translates as “spinning top” — composes his non-fiction film with artistic exuberance and freedom. In truth, this was a team effort. His brother Boris Kaufman (who would become a Hollywood cinematographer on films like On the Waterfront) was behind the camera (and in front of it, in the title role), and his wife Yelizaveta Svilova was the editor. Together, they created a film without a screenplay, without intertitles, without a debt to theatre or literature, a pure motion picture. In this instance, the avant-garde forges a universal language.

About Taras Luka

Taras Luka is an award-winning Ukrainian composer and music director with an established international career across Europe and North America. His work “Choral of Freedom” world premiered at Teatro Comunale di Bologna and Teatro Verdi (Italy) under conductor Oksana Lyniv as part of the international Concerto per la Pace initiative with the Italian Red Cross.

Taras is the composer of major theatrical and musical productions, including Romeo & Juliet, Heart in Half, Buka, and In Captivity. His works have received national recognition in Ukraine, including composer nominations for the Revutsky Award, Lyatoshynsky Award, and the GRA National Theatre Award (“Ukrainian Theatre Oscar”).