Man with a Movie Camera

Sight and Sound's 'Top 100 Greatest Films of all time' is the critics poll the magazine takes each decade with more than 1,600 critics, to test the temperature of what is considered a classic!

This year, we are screening one of the choices from the poll each month, as part of our new Sunday Classics series. At the screenings, we invite you to join the conversation and vote for YOUR own classic, which we'll screen at the end of 2024 as part of our very own Audience Poll! 

Man with a Movie Camera is what many consider to be the greatest documentary film of all time. It was largely dismissed upon its initial release; the work's fast cutting, self-reflexivity, and emphasis on form over content were all subjects of criticism.

In the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, however, film critics voted it the 8th greatest film ever made, the 9th greatest in the 2022 poll, and in 2014 it was named the best documentary of all time in the same magazine.

The National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre placed it in 2021 at number three of their list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema. It presents urban life in Moscow, Kyiv and Odesa during the late-1920s. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life.

An experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov,  filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Together they created a new kind of cinema complete with their own cine-manifesto the Kino-Eye.

Anyone interested in cinema should see Man With a Movie Camera, famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

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