Part of the 30 Days in May challenge, 2014 edition

USSR

I’m positively gob-smacked.

Completely unexpectedly I’ve witnessed the birth of pure visual and emotional storytelling. Now, you can’t be completely caught off guard as director Dziga Vertov states the fact conclusively right at the start of the picture, but even that stern warning doesn’t prepare you for what is to immediately follow.

Man with a Movie Camera joyously bursts onto the screen like an invigorating swim at the break of dawn. It’s alive; its buzzing; it’s jubilant. Watching it is like being swept along by a coursing current twisting and turning through mountainside gorge; you’re helpless to resist it.

This is far more than simply telling a story visually;…

It's really a bittersweet feeling to know that I will never be able to truly understand what it must have been like to sit in a theater and watch one of the first screenings of Man with a Movie Camera. As enchanting as the images and editing techniques are to today's audience, I try to imagine how much more mindblowing such revolutionary concepts would be in 1929 and I fall far short. It's a virtual encyclopedia of techniques, performed with bravado and a certain show-offiness, but redeemed by the fact that it pulls off the act to perfection. How close to magic this must have been (frankly, it still seems as much), and how much more exhilarating and frightening the…

Man With A Movie Camera is one of the most playful and clever films I have ever seen. It was therefore surprising for me to learn in reading up on the film that its director Dziga Vertov was part of a movement dedicated to the elimination of narrative filmaking. It seems strange to me that a man capable of such brilliant and varied experimentation with form could be opposed to any kind of filmmaking.

Vertov uses every trick in the book to create a portrayal of humanity in a bustling urban environment, and the efforts of himself to document them. His film is full of dutch angles, tracking shots, jump cuts, various motion speeds, extreme closeups, stop-motion animation, and some…

Somehow, even through film school, this film has eluded me until now so after watching a pretty dark and disturbing film I turned it on as a palette cleanser. There is no plot to Man with a Movie Camera; it's just a series of images that take place in Moscow throughout the course of a day.

Daily life, rituals like marriage, divorce and birth, workmen and artists are all exhibited. Some of the shots are breathtaking in their scope, especially for 1929 Russian films. (Who knew the big "city turning over into itself" thing from Inception actually happened in this film first?) Some of the shots were artistically fascinating, like a bizarre one of a human with a doll's head…

With documentary filmmaking, the most successful pieces will combine spontaneity and intentionality. If something unstaged is caught on camera, and it can be added into a narrative to create meaning, then there’s something there that’s worth watching.

With that being said, Man With A Movie Camera is a dizzying piece of successful documentary filmmaking. The power of the camera to enhance the human eye is put on display; a story is traced:
-A camera catches the real world on film
-A camera catches on film the camera capturing the world on film
-The editor stitches it together, building a cohesive whole
-an audience catches the cohesive whole, and makes sense of it themselves

But hanging over all of this is…