Man with a Movie Camera

 

A still of Man with a Movie Camera [bfi.org.uk]

 Director: Dziga Vertov

Production Country: USSR

Year: 1939

Is Dziga Vertov's cine-city symphony a film whose time has finally come? Ranked only no. 27 in our last critics' poll, it now displaces Eisenstein's erstwhile perennial Battleship Potemkin as the Constructivist Soviet silent of choice. Like Eisenstein's warhorse, it's an agit-experiment that sees montage as the means to a revolutionary consciousness; but rather than proceeding through fable and illusion, it's explicitly engaged both with recording the modern urban everyday (which makes it the top documentary in our poll) and with its representation back to its participant-subjects (thus the top meta-movie).