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“Vertov has pushed the argument to a point at which it becomes ridiculous.” All this cutting, and one camera photographing another camera photographing another camera – it was all trickery, and we didn’t take it seriously.”Īt the time, his colleague John Grierson, the Scottish producer and theorist regarded as the father of British realist documentary, dismissed Vertov’s work peremptorily: “Vertov we regarded really as rather a joke, you know. The British documentarist Paul Rotha remembered: When the film was seen in the West, it was dismissed. His experimental exuberance was not appreciated.
The act documentary movie#
The eponymous man with the movie camera is his brother Mikhail, and his wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, is his editor. Most surprisingly, he shows us the processes whereby a documentary is made. He superimposes, splits the screen, deploys fast- and slow-motion and extreme close-ups, and animates using stop-motion. Vertov, though, plays fast and loose with the conventions of such films, to profound effect. These films celebrated the vibrancy of the modern cityscape with pastiches of urban images, for the most part neither set up nor reconstructed. Man with a Movie Camera is a ‘city symphony’ film of a kind not uncommon in the 1920s. It has taken more than 80 years, though, for this to be fully recognised. And his masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929) is a flash spinning-top of a movie.
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His pseudonym ‘Dziga Vertov’, which translates as ‘spinning top’, could not be more apposite. Indeed, there is a photograph of him caught in mid-air, jumping. The current special documentary edition of S&S contains further features and reflections on our poll the real explorers among you will also want to browse all the individual votes and comments over on our dedicated interactive web page.ĭziga Vertov, USSR 1929 (soundtrack here by Michael Nyman)ĭavid Abelevich Kaufman is documentary’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
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That allusive essay films feature so strongly throughout demonstrates that nonfiction cinema is not a narrow discipline but a wide open country full of explorers. One in five of the films chosen were made since the millennium, and to have a silent film from 1929 at the top of the list is an absolute joy. What’s remarkable about the Top 50 documentaries list is that it feels so fresh. Approximately four months later I’m delighted with the quality of what more than 200 critics and curators – including many documentary specialists – and 100 filmmakers (the likes of John Akomfrah, Michael Apted, Clio Barnard, James Benning, Sophie Fiennes, Amos Gitai, Paul Greengrass, Jose Guerin, Isaac Julien, Asif Kapadia, Sergei Loznitsa, Kevin Macdonald, James Marsh, Joshua Oppenheimer, Anand Patwardhan, Pawel Pawlikowski, Nicolas Philibert, Walter Salles and James Toback) have come up with in terms of choices and commentary and I’m very proud of the team of advisors, BFI colleagues and S&S editors who have worked so hard to produce this poll edition. I’m usually loath to do anything that takes lustre away from Sight & Sound’s ten-year poll of the Greatest Films of All Time but a new poll seemed to me the most obvious solution to getting a full view of the documentary canon.