The Man With a Movie Camera

Just a little over an hour, it nevertheless towers over film history as an example par excellence of cinema’s ability to communicate in unique and transgressive ways.

The sheer jouissance of Vertov's experimentation in a film defined by odd angles, jump cuts, split screens, tracking shots, double exposure and... playful montage, might alone propel Man with a Movie Camera onto greatest film ever lists.

This is an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be.

Fascinating enough as a social document, but genuinely thrilling in how its multifarious technical trickery whips up an ecstatically cinematic delirium.

Silent stunner.

Dizga Vertov's 1929 experimental Soviet propaganda picture is breathtaking in its formal ingenuity.

Indeed, it's the camera that is the hero of this influential documentary.

This documentary uses techniques and tricks to show us more about life than we can otherwise discern. In addition to that capability, Man with a Movie Camera also makes us think more about what cinema is and can be.

It took a long time for the documentary to hazard such expansiveness of form and risk again.

Anyone studying or teaching filmmaking technique needs to check this out just for Vertov’s mastery of editing and music.