‘Attention Viewers! This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events…’
The Sight and Sound is a prestigious and some would say pretentious film magazine created by the BFI that is most notable for its list of the 100 greatest films of all time that it updates every ten years. It was recently roundly mocked for a ridiculously esoteric list that saw a little-seen Belgian experimental film from 1975 taking the top spot away from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Well, sitting 9th on that same list is 1929’s Man with a Movie Camera, and it is everything you would expect from the title…
The opening crawl of Dziga Vertov’s silent classic informs us his film has no plot, no actors and no title cards. Good stuff. Instead, Vertov presents us with an authentic view of life in Russia in the 1920s. And somehow, it works.
It’s clear to see why this film has endured in the Sight and Sound list, the cinematography and editing are literally light years away from anything else that was happening in that era. Feature-length silent films were already well into their golden age by 1929, but nobody had ever seen anything like this before. Not just the daring decision to focus on the lives of normal people, a woman sleeping on a bench, construction workers sharing a joke, but what Vertov achieves with the camera here is truly jaw-dropping and utterly groundbreaking. The version I watched on BFI player also had an incredible score, sometimes haunting and ethereal, sometimes jaunty and playful, it serves as the perfect accompaniment to what is undoubtedly a landmark in the history of cinema.
Man with a Movie Camera is obviously not the ninth-best film of all time and I can’t imagine anyone other than the most committed cinephiles watching it more than once, but there is no denying that in terms of influence and legacy, Vertov’s film looms large over the cinematic landscape.