The Man With the Movie Camera (1929, 90 min.), Dziga Vertov’s last silent film, is an extraordinary fusion of social-realist documentary and Soviet formalism. Vertov, through aggressive montage, draws parallels between each individual Soviet’s labor while centering his “kino-eye” on the labor of filmmaking itself, thus fulfilling Lenin’s dictum about film being “the most important art.”..Preceded by The Camera Goes Along! (1936,12 min.), a short produced by the Nazis’ Ministry of Propaganda to explain to German audiences how a newsreel is made.

pictured: The Man With the Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov