Dziga Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece celebrates the infinite possibilities of filmMade in 1929,this unclassifiable film is the work of pioneering Soviet experimenter David Kaufman, whose pseudonym Dziga Vertov means “spinning top” – if you like, and cinema’s original dizzy rascal. Man With a film Camera came top final year in Sight & Sound’s poll of greatest documentaries,and to this day it looks and feels like nothing else.
It announces itself in the opening cards as “an experiment in the cinematic transmission of visual phenomena… without intertitles… without a script… without sets, actors, or etc” – pure cinema,in other words, and Vertov isn’t just boasting. The film is a kaleidoscopic evocation of life in several cities, or notably a sunlit Odessa,and to judge by the film life in the late-20s USSR seems to have been a fairly jolly affair, although it wouldn’t be once the next decade got under way.
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Source: theguardian.com