Man With A Movie Camera

Voted one of the ten greatest films ever made in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll — and named the best documentary of all time in a 2014 follow-up survey — Man with a Movie Camera stands as one of cinema’s essential works: a dazzling exploration of what image-making can reveal about the everyday world around us. Filmed across Odessa, Kyiv and Moscow, Vertov constructs a portrait of a city in motion using rapid montage, double exposures, split screens, slow motion and every cinematic device at his disposal. Everyday life — work, play, machinery, movement, intimacy — is transformed into pure visual rhythm. Dispensing with actors, intertitles and narrative, the film reveals not only the world before the lens but the filmmaking process itself, turning the cameraman and the editor into central characters in this exhilarating experiment in what Vertov called “pure cinema.”

The screening will be introduced by festival guest kirsten johnson