Man with a Movie Camera

Plot

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

About Man with a Movie Camera

Man with a Movie Camera is a 1929 Soviet experimental silent documentary film, written and directed by Dziga Vertov. It was filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman (who also appears as the titular cameraman), and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Vertov's feature film, produced by the film studio All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU), presents urban life in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa during the late 1920s. It has no actors. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters", they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film. Man with a Movie Camera is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles). Man with a Movie Camera was largely dismissed upon its initial release; the work's fast cutting, self-reflexivity, and emphasis on form over content were all subjects of criticism. In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound…

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