'Man With A Movie Camera (1929)' is a revolutionary silent film that pioneered so many cinematic techniques - including (but not limited to) extreme close-ups, shaky cam, tracking shots, slow motion, fast motion, stop motion, split framing, double exposure, canted angles, fourth-wall breaks, and so much more - that it's impossible to overstate its influence in the almost hundred years of cinema that followed it. It was so unprecedented that it drew criticism from even the most forward-thinking of its director's contemporaries, not to mention from the Soviet Union itself; Dziga Vertov was sadly forced into obscurity not long after its release, relegated to anonymously editing news reels. The picture is presented as a day in the life of a Russian city - even though it was actually filmed in several cities, most of which are in modern-day Ukraine, over a period of a few years - and it's split into six parts which explore different aspects of daily life and occasionally delve into deeper topics such as mortality itself. The majority of the movie works on the concept of contrast, as it juxtaposes images of people and places and nature and machinery and marriage and divorce and birth and death to craft its central thesis that we're all connected and that cinema has the power to widen that connection across space and time itself. After all, here we are discussing a movie that's almost a hundred years old, one that allows us an insight into the lives of people we've never met in a place we'll never be able to visit (a location, while usually permanent, is intrinsically tied to time, so in some ways it changes irrevocably as life carries on in and around it). With a pacing that ebbs and flows perfectly, the experimental picture's 68-minute runtime flies by even though it has no traditional narrative (and no intertitles to guide you through it). It's often an arresting, impressively vital experience that's utterly compelling. It's occasionally moving, and even sometimes frightening, in a totally unexpected way. Frankly, it's brilliant even today; I can't imagine what it would have been like to see it in 1929. It's a gripping effort that often makes you smile simply because of how bold and inventive it is. It's genuinely great.
Review of Man with a Movie Camera
