Man with a Movie Camera

1929 ‘Человек с киноаппаратом’ Directed by Dziga Vertov

A cameraman wanders around Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.

Mikhail Kaufman

Alternative Titles

Mannen med filmkameran, Czlowiek z kamera, L'home de la màquina de filmar, Liudyna z kinoaparatom, El hombre de la cámara, O homem da câmara de filmar, Living Russia, or The Man with a Camera, De man met de camera, Chelovek s kinoapparatom, Людина з кіноапаратом

documentary

68 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by PTAbro ★★★★½ 9

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…
Review by Jonathan White ★★★★★ 37

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;…
Review by Reznikov🔥 ★★★★★ 2

This film is just so beautiful. I...have no words.
#48 on My Favourite Films List
#39 on 2020: First Time Watches List
Review by Lise ★★★★★ 9

Part of the 2014 30 countries challenge, Film #18 - Soviet Union
I can't think of another film that has created such excitement in me. About 20 minutes in I was grinning ear to ear, glued to the screen, and just so happy. It is unbelievable what this guy does. I mean, he does it all. Every type of shot, every type of transition, every kind of magic that can be done with a camera. It was crazy! The only thing he didn't include was 3D. That's it. That's the only thing. In 1929!
I've seen the Samsaras of the world, and I enjoyed them as much as the next guy, but this, this is the real deal. This was story told with images. This was avant-garde. This was beautiful. Just beautiful.
Review by 🌻✨ Andi ✨🌻 ★★★★★

Sinegang Weekly Pick #19
By Ivan Arcena
”An excerpt in the diary of a cameraman: This film presents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events. Without the aid of intertitles, scenario, or theater.”
Gorgeous. Exhilarating. Half documentary, and half magical cinematic art. Watched this with Josh Augustin’s score, which I later on compared to the Cinematic Orchestra’s, and I much prefer the former’s emotional and glorious motion to the latter’s soaring sophisticated mix of progressive, lounge, and jazz.
” This film presents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events.”
The Man with a Movie Camera scales factories, picture theaters, taverns! He gauges through the lyrical pandemonium of busy streets and rush-hour traffic. He sees the beauty…
Review by allain 1

SINEGANG WEEK #19, picked by ivan
Sinegang Film Club Account — CLICK HERE
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I haven’t seen a lot of silent films and the ones I’ve watched so far are City Lights (1931), The Epic of Everest (1924), and Shiraz: A Romance of India (1928), but there’s something so incredibly perplexing and mesmerizing with this experimental silent documentary that made me want to explore more of its genre.
The title is what you get in this one-hour visual treat–a footage of a man with a moving camera–and, despite being boringly described as such, every single shot was dizzyingly remarkable and captivating. The obscure camera angles, the split-screens, the slow-mo, the sped up shots, the stop-motion, and the trick shots…
Review by LinusMxx ★★★★★

I've watched this film twice today. At first watch, I wasn't really feeling it, mainly because I was too sleepy to care so. I initially rated it 3 stars. But I was willing to give this film a second chance after I took a very quick nap. It was only during my second watch that I was able to fully immerse myself on its beauty, and boy, it was actually a wonderful experience. I found myself in awe most of the time, grinning at certain moments in the film, and getting turned on by its fascinatingly beautiful musical score (The Cinematic Orchestra 2003).
Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental silent documentary film that follows a city in the…
Review by Elwood B. ★★★★★ 4

It's not really the editing or the technical innovations, not even the metaphoric quality, that the film possesses, which i find most fascinating about this experimental montage-masterpiece. It's the conviction of the film, that it's all worth it. Climbing mountains, laying under speeding trains, witnessing nature's most dangerous outbursts all seems so outrageiously stupid just to get a few pictures with your camera and yet the movie not only convinces you, that it's not just not stupid, it's logical, the right thing to do, something that HAS to be done.
It's been about 90 years since this movie came out and everybody involved in making it is most likely dead by now and yet the symbol of everything that was before and that will be after, the symbol of conviction about filmmaking will never be lost and will outlive every human on earth.
Totally worth it.
Review by feedingbrett ★½ 19

Review In A Nutshell:
Forgive me Letterboxd, for I have sinned.
Man with a Movie Camera is no doubt a groundbreaking feat for the documentary genre through the stripping of a conventional narrative and utilising natural elements to evoke emotion and poetic imagery, but it rarely left me captivated with what was delivered on screen; finding cohesion in themes but lack the power to surge them. I was left as a passive viewer throughout, constantly hoping for something to capture my attention.
I have prepared myself for the infinite lashes that is surely going to come my way.
Review by Two Cineasts ★★★★★ 2

Film reviews in 22 sentences (or less)
Today: Man with a Movie Camera
"I'm an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it..."
(Dziga Vertov)
Hi everybody, in 1929 the world economic crisis may have ruled the world, but not the revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose highly experimental portrait of Moscow is in retrospect clearly decades ahead of its time.
We have watched thousands of movies and found our favorite directors in Kubrick, Hitchcock and Tarkovsky, we thought that these men had invented the cinema like we know it today, but we were wrong. This documentary right here is a prove that many camera techniques were already invented right in…
Review by Emily Housel ★★★★★ 5

one of the most beautiful things i've ever experienced. i'm in love. i'm speechless. wasn't expecting for it to make me this emotional. absolutely going in my top ten. this film gives me life
Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★★ 5

Man with a Movie Camera shows us the potential of cinema. It is an experiment in cinematic communication; a wordless, story-less experience. Dziga Vertov thought this would be the future of cinema but he was sadly mistaken. Man with a Movie Camera is a look into a frontier that has barely been explored, cinema is still essentially what it was in 1930 (focused on narrative and escapism). It is a film about being a film and an extremely watchable, meta look at what cinema and the world can be. Man with a Movie Camera is the purest form of cinema, images of reality cut together to create something more.
Man with a Movie Camera is just one long montage, but it has such…

Recent reviews

Review by boshiby ★★★★★

A surrealist avant-garde deconstruction of cinema in a 1929 Soviet silent documentary? True kino shit.
Honestly though I loved it. The music is amazing. That song at the beginning of reel 2 is a bop. So is the drum solo at the end of reel 4. To me, this is Vertov showing the world that cinema is whatever we want it to be, and an art all on it's own. The best way to summarize this piece is with the text at the beginning:
“This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.”
Review by eviewonder

very good slideshow :D
Review by ryan_norton

That man most definitely had a movie camera
Review by Fernando Cabrini

Deixo aqui um trecho do ensaio "A Metrópole e a Vida Mental", de Georg Simmel, publicado em 1902:
"0 homem é uma criatura que procede a diferenciações. Sua mente é estimulada pela diferença entre a impressão de um dado momenta e a que a precedeu. Impressões duradouras, impressões que diferem apenas ligeiramente uma da outra, impressões que assumem um curso regular e habitual e exibem contrastes regulares e habituais -- todas essas formas de impressão gastam, por assim dizer, menos consciência do que a rápida convergência de imagens em mudança, a descontinuidade aguda contida na apreensão com uma única vista de olhos e o inesperado de impressões súbitas. Tais são as condições psicológicas que a metrópole cria."
Review by Thomas Medel ★★★★★ 1

Now this is some true ass
In martin scorsese's voice:
C I N E M A
Review by Sean Burdett ★★★½ 2

83/100
I think there was a smile on my face just about every second of this. It's such an amazing and free-flowing expression of one's love for cinema, and I love cinema, so I love loving cinema! So much creativity, so much passion, so much love; ahhhhhh this is just so sweet and genuine and I love it so much. Thanks Abby <3333
Review by 10SecondReviews ★★★

Created as both an aesthetic and political statement, Man with a Movie Camera is compelling today because of its technical achievements and its documentation of the minutiae of of daily life nearly a century ago.
Review by miguelcsantos ★★★★½

Não estava nada á espera de gostar assim tanto do filme...
Este filme é tudo, especialmente tendo em conta que é de 1929 !!
Review by Matthew Benz ★★★★½

I've never seen a movie so in love with life and so enthralled by the possibilities of filmmaking.
Review by frideuu ★★★★

Ta bonito el cine experimental
Review by disabelharo

con música de alloy orchestra
Review by Ellie ★★★★

Great, and obviously very groundbreaking. Like all films of this era it’s hard to believe it was filmed so long ago! Probably deserves a rewatch cos I wasn’t concentrating fully. Also the tunes over this on YT do it no favours lol