Synopsis
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
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Cast
- Mikhail KaufmanThe Cameraman
- Elizaveta SvilovaWoman editing film (uncredited)
Recommendations
- 100
The Dissolve
The film would be exciting to watch even completely silent, both because it’s a valuable record of Soviet city life at the end of the 1920s, and because it explodes with visual ideas. - 100
The Guardian
The combustion engine gave humanity the new experience of speed; now the movie camera gave us a dizzying new speed of perception and creation. - 100
The Irish Times
No other film – not even by Georges Méliès at his most fantastic – trumpets early cinema's status as a magical science and scientific magic, quite so loudly or melodically. - 100
The Observer (UK)
This is an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be. - 100
RogerEbert.com
It was about the act of seeing, being seen, preparing to see, processing what had been seen, and finally seeing it. It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it. - 100
Time Out
Vertov’s experimental essay proclaims its ‘complete separation from the language of theatre and literature’ in the opening titles. What follows is cinema in its purest form: movement, sensation, action and visual trickery. - 100
The A.V. Club
It's a unique, unforgettable, enlightening experience. - 90
Chicago Reader
Just a little over an hour, it nevertheless towers over film history as an example par excellence of cinema’s ability to communicate in unique and transgressive ways.
