Man with a Movie Camera

A film with no plot?

Yes. It says so at the outset: an experiment without intertitles, without a scenario, without theatre, actors or sets, aiming at an international language of cinema wholly separated from the language of theatre and literature. Even so, a day passes as you watch. The city wakes up, trams and people fill the streets, factories start, couples marry and divorce, a woman gives birth, a funeral goes by, sporting events are held.

The protagonist is the camera. Vertov's brother Mikhail Kaufman carries it across town. He is superimposed setting up his camera on top of a second, mountainous camera, and again inside a beer glass. A camera on a tripod gets up and walks off by itself. Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova is shown cutting the film, and the audience in the cinema sees how the film it is watching is made.

What was it trying to do?

Vertov attacked fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses", and with his fellow kinoks he declared he would abolish non-documentary cinema. He believed the camera could capture what the human eye misses, and that truth emerges when the fragments are reassembled by editing: that is the Kino-Eye theory. The film was his answer to critics who said his previous film, A Sixth Part of the World, leaned too much on intertitles.

Multiple exposure, fast and slow motion, freeze frames, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, reversed footage and stop motion are all here, and he invented or developed many of them. With about 1,775 shots, it was cut more than four times faster than a typical feature of 1929. The critic J. Hoberman called this urban symphony the film equivalent of Ulysses and a leading candidate for the most densely edited film ever made. It was produced by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (VUFKU).

Why was it attacked at the time?

Form, critics said, had swallowed content. Vertov's targets in fiction film were hostile, and so was his fellow montage film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, who derided it as "pointless camera hooliganism". The British documentarist Paul Rotha recalled that Vertov was "regarded really as rather a joke", and the New York Times reviewer complained that the director ignored the time the human eye needs to fix on something. Despite its claim to have no actors, the film also contains a few staged situations, such as the woman getting dressed and some of the cameraman's actions.

How was it rehabilitated?

In the early 1970s Anthology Film Archives selected it for its essential collection. It came eighth in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll (ninth in 2022), and in 2014 the same magazine named it the best documentary of all time. In 2021 it placed third among 100 Ukrainian films. Being silent, it has attracted a dozen or so scores, by the Alloy Orchestra (1995), the Cinematic Orchestra (2002) and Michael Nyman (2002) among others. In 2015 EYE in Amsterdam restored the only known complete version.

Vertov himself never saw this success. A film he finished in late 1943 was given the third category and very limited release, and all his later projects were turned down. From 1944 until his death he edited the newsreel Novosti dnya, and he died of stomach cancer on 12 February 1954.