Landmark - Man with a Movie Camera

Available for over a year

"The greatest documentary of all time"? Michael Nyman, Alexei Popogrebsky, Ian Christie and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh join Matthew Sweet to discuss Dziga Vertov's 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera, which was voted top of a poll conducted by Sight and Sound Magazine. Born into a Jewish family in Białystok, Poland, David Abelevich Kaufman changed his name to Dziga Vertov which translates loosely from Ukrainian as 'spinning top'. His revolutionary cinematic and symphonic vision of urban life was filmed in Kyiv, Odesa and Moscow and in later years he also directed Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (1931), an examination into Soviet miners. Michael Nyman has composed scores for the three major films that the pioneering Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov made in the late 1920s Ian Christie is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck University London. He is co-editor, with Richard Taylor, of The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939 and Eisenstein rediscovered. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh is chief film critic for the Metro newspaper. Alexei Popogrebsky is a film director and screenwriter whose work includes How I Ended this Summer and Prostye veshchi. Plus, on the website you can find Salman Rushdie's comments about watching the film. Producer: Zahid Warley.