Man with a Movie Camera

The opening title is a manifesto. Vertov presents the film as an experiment in the cinematic transmission of visible phenomena and sets out its conditions: no intertitles, no script, no sets, no actors. The aim is to free cinema completely from the language of theatre and literature. His slogan ran the same way: down with bourgeois fairytale plots and scenarios, long live life as it is. Behind the film sits what was called the Council of Three: Vertov, his editor and wife Elizaveta Svilova, and his cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman. Svilova does not only cut the film, she appears in it. Around the twenty-second minute a lesson in editing begins: Svilova clips frames and demonstrates how a still image is set moving and then placed in a sequence. The film explains its own construction inside itself. Footage from Soviet cities is assembled into the cycle of a single day: waking, working, resting. In the 2022 Sight and Sound poll it placed ninth, the only documentary in the top twenty. Who it is for: viewers who want to see what cinema can do in its own language, and who are curious about editing. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story. There is no narrative and no character, and across sixty-eight minutes it offers no attachment beyond rhythm.