Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

A playful documentary of a day in the life of the Soviet Union.

"I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only the machine can see it. - Dziga Vertov ("Kino-Eye")

These words, written in 1923 (only a year after Robert Flaherty s Nanook of the North was released) reflect the Soviet pioneer s developing approach to cinema as an art form that shuns traditional or Western narrative in favor of images from real life. They lay the foundation for what would become the crux of Vertov s revolutionary, anti-bourgeois aesthetic wherein the camera is an extension of the human eye, capturing the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe. Over the next decade-and-a-half, Vertov would devote his life to the construction and organization of these raw images, his apotheosis being the landmark 1929 film The Man with the Movie Camera. In it, he comes closest to realizing his theory of Kino-Eye, creating a new, more ambitious and more significant picture than what the eye initially perceives.

Man With a Movie Camera is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking. An exuberant montage of urban Russia, it represents the people of the city at work and at play, and the machines that keep the city going with energetic lyricism. A member of the Soviet avant-garde, Vertov used a variety of pioneering cinematic techniques to document the full spectrum of 1929 Soviet life - dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze frames - and produced a radical experiment that is exhilarating and intellectually brilliant.