Director: Dziga Vertov (1929)

No-one with an interest in the history of cinema should pass on the chance of seeing this ground-breaking documentary.

It’s astonishing, dynamic, sexy, exhilarating, humorous and vital.

This hymn to the machine age has been lovingly restored and guided by the director’s own extensive notes, gifted a thrilling new orchestration.

Filmed in Odessa, Moscow and Kiev in the 1920’s, an extraordinary range of techniques are used or invented to capture every day life.

These include but are not limited to: double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles and extreme close-ups.

Christopher Nolan is not the first director to turn a city onto itself.

As we follow the man with the camera we experience the danger and fun of filmmaking. He clings to side of trains and climbs vertiginous chimney-stacks.

Watching him, watching them, we see the population endure births, deaths, divorce and weddings. We witness them enjoy sport and strive at work.

Industry, technology and machinery dominate the landscape; there are ships, trams, cars, chimneys, cranes, mines, telephones and elevators.

As the film deconstructs the mechanics of filmmaking, the camera begins to experience itself and becomes animate.

Eventually it combines with it’s human operator, evolving into cybernetic organism which fixes it’s gaze on the viewer.

Man With A Movie Camera was voted number 1 in Sight & Sound’s Poll of the Greatest Documentaries of All Time (2014) and number 8 in the Greatest Films of All Time (2012).

As Vertov says ‘I am the camera eye, I am the mechanical eye. I am the machine which shows you the world as only I can see it’

It is hellish, transcendent and extraordinarily prescient.

★★★★★