Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (Человек с киноаппаратом) opened in 1929. The Sight & Sound poll named it the greatest documentary of all time in 2014, and it placed in the top ten of the main greatest-films list in 2012 and 2022. It is the founding text of the European avant-garde essay documentary, and its influence on later filmmakers (Vertov's own contemporaries, the post-war essay film, the documentary canon at large) is incalculable.

It is built as a single experimental day in the lives of four Soviet cities (Moscow, Kyiv, Kharkov and Odessa), captured by a cameraman who is also its central figure. Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov's brother, plays the cameraman; Yelizaveta Svilova, Vertov's wife, edited the film and is shown in it at her flatbed editing table. It is a document of urban Soviet life in the late 1920s and a manifesto for what cinema could become once freed from theatrical convention, and it is also a formal experiment in what Vertov and his Kino-Eye collaborators were calling the cinema-eye.

Vertov does without actors, screenplay, dialogue (it is silent) and conventional narrative continuity. In their place come split screens, double exposures, slow motion, fast cutting, freeze frames and a running, recursive fascination with the act of filmmaking itself, and the result is one of the most formally radical works in any cinematic tradition. Almost a century after its release, working filmmakers are still learning from it, and no serious film education leaves it out.