The Cosford Cinema is proud to present a screening series of the top 10 films of the 2022 Sight & Sound Top 100 Poll: The Greatest Films of All Time.

Launched in 1952 and conducted every 10 years since, the poll includes filmmakers, critics and journalists from around the world. The results are published in Sight & Sound, a monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute.

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA | YEAR: 1929 | DIRECTOR: Dziga Vertov | RUNNING TIME: 68 minutes | UNRATED: no offensive material

Vertov's feature film presents urban life in Moscow, Kyiv and Odesa during the late-1920s. It has no actors. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters", they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film.

The movie is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animation and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

"Man With a Movie Camera" ranked ninth in the Sight & Sound poll. Click here to see listings for the other movies in the series. Admission is $5 per film or $40 for a series pass. Students with Cane card use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission. 

"In 1929, the year it was released, films had an average shot length (ASL) of 11.2 seconds. "Man With a Movie Camera" had an ASL of 2.3 seconds. The ASL of Michael Bay's "Armageddon" was also 2.3 seconds. Why would I begin a discussion of a silent classic by discussing such a mundane matter? It helps to understand the impact the film made at the time.

"Viewers had never seen anything like it, and Mordaunt Hall, the horrified author of the New York Times review, wrote: "The producer, Dziga Vertof, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention." This reminds me of Harry Carey's advice in 1929 to John Wayne as the talkies were coming in: "Stop halfway through every sentence. The audience can't listen that fast.

"Man With a Movie Camera" is fascinating for many better reasons than its ASL, but let's begin with the point Dziga Vertof was trying to make. He felt film was locked into the tradition of stage plays, and it was time to discover a new style that was specifically cinematic.

"Movies could move with the speed of our minds when we are free-associating, or with the speed of a passionate musical composition. They did not need any dialogue--and indeed, at the opening of the film he pointed out that it had no scenario, no intertitles, and no characters. It was a series of images, and his notes specified a fast-moving musical score." -- Roger Ebert