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The Man with the Movie Camera

Chelovek s kino-apparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera)

1929

Dziga Vertov

Documentary

8.1

6,299

Documentary An extraordinary montage of urban Russian life in 1929, showing the people of the city at work and at play, and the machines that keep the city going. It was Dziga Vertov's first full-length film, and he used all the techniques - dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze-frames - to produce an exhilarating and intellectually brilliant feature.

	Author	Review
Spain	FilmAffinity	According to the "Sight & Sound" poll, the 8th greatest Film of All Time.	POS
United States	Ciara Wardlow Film School Rejects	"'Man with a Movie Camera' has no intertitles (...) subverting expectations and traditional narrative structures at every turn. The incredibly innovative and playful editing is the real star of the show."	POS
Ireland	Tara Brady Irish Times	"No other film – not even by Georges Méliès at his most fantastic – trumpets early cinema's status as a magical science and scientific magic, quite so loudly or melodically."	POS
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"The combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation."	POS
United States	Keith Phipps AV Club	"It's a unique, unforgettable, enlightening experience."	POS
United States	Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times	"It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it. (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Tom Huddleston Time Out	"Vertov’s experimental essay proclaims its ‘complete separation from the language of theatre and literature’ in the opening titles. What follows is cinema in its purest form: movement, sensation, action and visual trickery."	POS
United States	TV Guide	"It's a startlingly avant-garde cross-examination of modern life, as well as a lesson in the power of filmmaking and an autopsy of its methods."	POS
United States	Chicago Reader	"Just a little over an hour, it nevertheless towers over film history as an example par excellence of cinema’s ability to communicate in unique and transgressive ways."	POS
United States	Mordaunt Hall The New York Times	"It is a disjointed array of scenes in which the producer, Dziga Vertoff, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention."	NEU
United States	Slant	"The blatant staging and rich emotional undercurrent of Vertov’s documentary footage presage Werner Herzog’s ecstatic truth mantra"	POS
United States	Mark Feeney Boston Globe	"A marvel of energy, wit, and visual imagination, The Man With a Movie Camera remains one of the most exhilarating movies ever made"	POS

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