The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1929)

: While demonstrating director Vertov's "kino-eye" theory endowing the movie camera with the flexibility of the human eye, this is also a very witty, sassy movie, bubbling with an infectious joie de vivre. It is a kind of documentary, the portrait of a city and its inhabitants (really two cities, Moscow and Odessa merged), but even more it is a compendium of extravagant camera techniques and editing tricks, forever commenting on itself and our own watching. Appropriately, the camera-hero takes a bow at the end.

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