Man with a Movie Camera

Man with a Movie Camera follows a cameraman who moves through a city with his camera on his shoulder, recording everyday urban life. The film is a documentary, but it does not tell a story in the usual sense: its subject is the act of filming itself, and the editing and camera work are as much on display as the streets, faces and machines being recorded. Mikhail Kaufman plays the cameraman, and Elizaveta Svilova appears as the woman editing film. Dziga Vertov directed and wrote the screenplay, working in the Soviet Union for the studio VUFKU.

The film was released in 1929 and runs just over an hour. Vertov made it as part of a series of films, though the description of urban life through the camera's eye is what defines it. Kaufman and Svilova were both central to the project, with Svilova's editing and Kaufman's camerawork shaping its structure.

On IMDb, the film holds a rating of 8.3 from around 30,000 votes; on TMDB, it has a 7.8 from 826 votes. A film critics' score of 9.4 from 43 reviews places it notably higher than the audience scores on both platforms, suggesting that professional viewers rate it more strongly than general audiences do.