Dziga Vertov’s Soviet experimental silent feature, Man with a Movie Camera has been voted the world’s best documentary ever by a poll of filmmakers and critics by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine.
A family affair, the 69 minute long Man with a Movie Camera, was shot by Dziga’s brother Mikhail Kaufman (who also appears as the cameraman), and edited by Vertov’s wife Yelizaveta Svilova.
Vertov’s feature presents–with no actos–urban life in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa. Soviet citizens are shown from dawn to dusk in their work (interacting with the machinery of modern life) and leisure activities.
Largely dismissed upon its initial release, due to its innovative format and style, Man with a Movie Camera exhibits techniques that Vertov developed, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals.
The Soviet-era film, shot in the cities of Odessa, Kiev and Kharkiv, was one of “dazzling beauty and bewitching complexity, which unleashed the camera in a teasingly surrealist fashion to capture everyday life in a unique and hugely influential way,” the BFI said in a statement.
The magazine has held a similar poll to decide the best film once a decade since 1952, with Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” receiving the most votes in the last edition.
The vast majority of films nominated were fiction features, though in the most recent poll Man With a Movie Camera came in at a surprising 8th place and was the only documentary in the top 10. Now, for the first time, the magazine has launched a poll to discover the greatest documentaries.
More than 1,000 films were nominated by over 200 critics and 100 filmmakers from around the world; over 100 of them voted for “Man with a Movie Camera.”
Nick James, editor, Sight & Sound, said: “What’s remarkable about this top 50 is that it feels so fresh. One in five of the films were made since the millennium, and to have a silent film from 1929 at the top is equally surprising.
Researchers often overlook that the film was made mostly in Odessa, but to ignore it makes a thorough interpretation of the film impossible. This is a very ‘Odessian’ film: it has so much sun, sea, and space in it; its emotion is lively and vital likely inspired by ‘romantic vita-ism’ a popular theme in Ukrainian art in 1920s.
It comes from a long line of brilliant propaganda films by Vertov, but is itself apolitical, though its ‘non-Russian’ aesthetic was rejected by Sovkino in Moscow.
As a result, it could only be made in the Ukraine, which became a heaven for artists fleeing from Russia where attacks on dissent had begun.
Eleven out of the first 56 nominations are for films made since 2000, including 2012’s The Acting of Killing and the Russina Leviathan.
