Man With A Movie List

Director: Dziga Vertov Year: 1929 Runtime: 1 hr 7 min Source: Amazon Video Wikipedia Kyle Kallgren's Video Analysis Notable for : Being one of the most critically acclaimed silent films (although not at the time of release).  It was voted the 8th best film of all time by Sight and Sound in 2012, and the best documentary of all time a few years later. Critics respond to many things about the film, including but not limited to: Putting the act of film-making front and center, including the editing process (here undertaken by Vertov's wife).  Previously the task of editing was considered secondary to artistic vision. The invention or innovation (there is some debate here) of many editing techniques, including split screen, stop or slow motion, and double exposure. Vertov wanted his audience to know that this was not magic but a mechanical science. Vertov's radical belief in the power of cinema to create a communal, universal perspective on the world, independen...

Director: Dziga Vertov Year: 1928 Run-time: 52 min Source: Youtube "In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people" - Dziga Vertov In 1928, Stalin's Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization began.  The plan ended in chaos four years later with massive famine - an estimated 3.3 to 7.5 million dead.  This makes The Eleventh Year , a stark and strange propaganda film presumably commissioned to sell the program to Ukraine by showcasing innovations in machinery, one of the eeriest and most haunting films on this list, even without the industrial techno soundtrack added in a version that I found on Youtube. Vertov is well-known among cinephiles, and his film Man With a Movie Camera  made it into the top ten of the most recent Sight and Sound poll, but information on this particul...