Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov, VUFKU, 1929. Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov's brother, carries the camera through Moscow, Kyiv, Odessa, and Kharkiv: waking, work, sport, a funeral, a birth. Elizaveta Svilova, in the cutting room, is shown assembling the film we are watching. The opening titles refuse intertitles, a script, and theatre. Split screens, freeze frames, superimpositions, a camera that walks. Often grouped with the city symphonies, though Vertov called it a theoretical manifesto on celluloid; the Ukrainian state studio funded it after Vertov left Moscow.