Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov's exhilarating experiment throws out every convention of narrative cinema and invents a new visual language from scratch. A cameraman roams through Soviet cities capturing life as it happens — trains, factories, birth, death, sports, crowds, machines — while Vertov's editing builds these fragments into a breathless symphony of modern urban existence. The film is simultaneously a documentary, a self-reflexive essay on filmmaking itself (we watch the editor assembling the very footage we're seeing), and a utopian hymn to the possibilities of the camera eye. Split screens, slow motion, freeze frames, double exposures, stop-motion animation — Vertov deploys every trick available and invents several new ones. Regularly voted one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and still the most radical and joyful celebration of what cinema can do.