Man with a Movie Camera

Man with a Movie Camera is a 1929 Soviet silent documentary directed by Dziga Vertov, assembled without actors, sets or intertitles from footage of everyday urban life in several Soviet cities. Vertov used the film to demonstrate an unusually wide range of editing and camera techniques for its time, including multiple exposure, fast and slow motion, freeze frames, split screens and self-referential shots of the filmmaking process itself, in pursuit of what he described as a cinema-specific visual language independent of theater and literature. Though dismissed by some contemporaries, including fellow Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, the film has since undergone a substantial critical re-evaluation and now regularly ranks among the greatest documentaries and greatest films of any kind ever made, including a top-ten placement in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll.