Man with a Movie Camera Documentary Review

Man with a Movie Camera [Chelovek s kino-apparatom] (1929)

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Written by: Dziga Vertov
Directed by: Dziga Vertov
Starring: Mikhail Kaufman, Elizaveta Svilova
Rated: NR
Watch the trailer

Plot
A man travels around a Russian city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.

Verdict
If you're a fan of film history, it's a must watch. Even then, it's an interesting time capsule, but what was ground breaking at the time now seems banal. Then you have to remember this movie is almost one hundred years old. It doesn't seem like it. At the time, it broke all the rules. Now it's a documentary that transcends time.
It depends.

Review
It's been called one of the most innovative and influential movies during the silent era.

It's definitely a film buff movie. This doesn't have a plot, and there's no dialog. This is just a guy recording the city without even a script. This documentary was a response to the criticisms of his previous movie, A Sixth Part of the World (1926), which explored the remote parts of the USSR.

Vertov introduced several camera tricks that had never been seen before; multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, and stop motion animations. It was such a shift that this movie was criticized for it. While the effects seem fanciful, they don't seem groundbreaking because we've seen these effects used frequently. They're a common story telling tool now that has evolved over the years. With this movie, it was revolutionary.

This is a city in the 1920s, a time capsule of what life was like back then. We see people interacting with their city, as well as trains, a marriage, babies born, and even a couple getting a divorce certificate. It's more engaging than you might think, but it's also nearly 100 years old. For that, it's surprisingly modern. This was a movie that explored the very art of film, offering techniques unique to the medium.