A Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

A movie without a plot, conventional actors or a script-can it work? Countless film critics the world over believe that it did, at least once...

Directed by Russian auteur Dziga Vertov in 1929, this 67 minute silent feature is considered one of the most groundbreaking films of its day. In order to create a story of a day in Moscow that would essentially tell itself, Vertov filmed numerous of hours of film not intentionally thinking to use it for a project. He experimented with different type of cinematic shots which were purely avant-garde, including recording under a moving train and even over a water fall. The film displayed double exposures, playing with fast and slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, close-ups, stop motion animation...seeming random images portray the natural contrasting the mechanical, images of life verses death, youth verses age, and the citizens of Moscow at work and play...

This film seems at once a documentary of a day in the life of the Soviet Union, a documentary of the filming of said documentary, and a depiction of an audience watching the film-even the editing of the film is itself documented! Many classic directors such as Alfred Hitchcock ,Stanley Kubrick and Darren Aronofsky have taken cues from Vertov’s 1929 opus.

I have actually had this film for several days but only recently had the time to watch it-and now i'm headed in for a pot of hot tea and another viewing...Silent, B&W.