Man with a Movie Camera is a city-symphony documentary with no actors, no sets, and no intertitles, built entirely from a single day in Soviet urban life and Dziga Vertov's belief that the camera could see truth the human eye couldn't. This opening image, a cameraman dwarfed atop his own giant apparatus, announces the film's constant self-awareness: it shows its own editor at work, its own audience watching it, and its own camera being carried into traffic and up factory scaffolding to get the shot. It topped Sight & Sound's directors' and critics' polls decades later as one of the greatest documentaries ever made.Man with a Movie Camera is a city-symphony documentary with no actors, no sets, and no intertitles, built entirely from a single day in Soviet urban life and Dziga Vertov's belief that the camera could see truth the human eye couldn't. This opening image, a cameraman dwarfed atop his own giant apparatus, announces the film's constant self-awareness: it shows its own editor at work, its own audience watching it, and its own camera being carried into traffic and up factory scaffolding to get the shot. It topped Sight & Sound's directors' and critics' polls decades later as one of the greatest documentaries ever made.
Dziga Vertov — Soviet Union — Documentary / Experimental
The cameraman atop his own camera
Man with a Movie Camera is a city-symphony documentary with no actors, no sets, and no intertitles, built entirely from a single day in Soviet urban life and Dziga Vertov's belief that the camera could see truth the human eye couldn't. This opening image, a cameraman dwarfed atop his own giant apparatus, announces the film's constant self-awareness: it shows its own editor at work, its own audience watching it, and its own camera being carried into traffic and up factory scaffolding to get the shot. It topped Sight & Sound's directors' and critics' polls decades later as one of the greatest documentaries ever made.