Man With a Movie Camera

Pros: historical interest (both in portraying 1920s and in film history)
Cons: its experiments have been assimilated and seem old-hat; anachronistic music

Cinema history generally treats Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) as the prophet of montage, with the Odesse steps sequence with the runaway baby carriage from "Potemkin" as the archetype and prototype. There was a Soviet director before the dominance of ...

Pros: rivetting images and film technique done brilliantly; the score adds to the experience
Cons: you really must watch it more than once to fully appreciate what you're seeing

Creepy. Disturbingly mesmerizing. Magical. Pulsating motion everywhere you look, everywhere the camera looks. Phantasmagorical, yet mundane in its humanity. These are just a few ways to describe the 68-minute, black-and-white documentary called ...

Pros: Visual innovation, beauty, gimmicks, a talent for making us see the world's connectedness.
Cons: Intentionally lacks plot, dialogue, and characters.

Man with a Movie Camera’s first image is a trick. We stare into the lens of a camera, taking ...

Pros: A technique that was groundbreaking in its day
Cons: More important as history than as entertainment

Silent films need a totally different frame of mind to view. There are no sounds, no dialogue; it’s all about the pictures. Watching a silent film really shouldn’t be difficult, but we’re so used to watching a TV show or a movie with people talking ...

Pros: A fascinating 68 minute exploration of film's form and art.
Cons: If film is only escapist entertainment this one's not for you.

In 1922, Russian documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov threw down the gauntlet declaring the new language of the cinema as practiced by D.W. Griffith and other fiction film makers was false, phony and might be numbing intellectual growth. Film could never...

Pros: The whole idea and execution of it are brilliant.
Cons: Average movie fans may hate it.

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
Tom Clancy


Do you know what the great thing about documentaries are? The camera basically becomes a character also. It is the seeing eye to the...