(skip if you're easily bored)

Now that I don't have...stuff...to distract me, I've (finally) started in on some hardcore thesis reading, and so far I have to admit I'm stymied. Basically, I'm combining everything I've ever been interested in thus far in college to explore the relationship of music to film in Dziga Vertov's 1929 art film/manifesto "Man with a Movie Camera." The only existing information about the music that was originally supposed to accompany the film is a set of notes written by the director and a set of cue sheets written up by a trio of music supervisors meant to translate Vertov's notes into pieces that could be played by in-theater pianists (the film itself is silent.)
Problem is, Vertov, although very interested in music and sound, wrote this whole manifesto about how true cinema shouldn't be contaminated by music (his words.) "Man with a Movie Camera" is supposed to be a "city-symphony"; entire chapters of books are devoted to how the film is edited according to tempi and visual "intervals". By all right Vertov should've insisted that a score for "Man with a Movie Camera" was unnecessary and/or redundant. Or at least he should have protested when the music editors included pieces by bourgeois composers like Tchaikovsky and Massenet in their cue sheets where Vertov wanted something like calm, cheerful music dissolving into chaos. I mean, when Vertov did finally direct a sound film, the "score" was made up of the sounds of machinery--not a note of Tchaikovsky to be found. Why has nobody picked up on this? Or am I the only person who thinks it's remotely interesting?
Ah, the curse of the liberal-arts humanities major.
So my thesis is supposed to be about solving that little conundrum as well as scoring at least one reel of the film (conveniently available for download at archive.org, although I'm sure the fact that they only have it at a projection speed of 25 frames per second as opposed to the original 24 is going to come back and bite me in the ass sometime around March.) So far my head is full of all kinds of information about the meanings of specific images in the film and the historical context in which it was made, but nothing music-related. I never thought I'd say this, but I can't wait to have a nice, long talk with my (disturbingly grad-school-oriented) advisor once I'm back at school.
A less academia-oriented post to come soon, hopefully...