Director: Dziga Vertov
In a BBC poll recently, this documentary from the silent film era got the nod as the best documentary film ever made. It is surprising that even with the modern investigative journalistic techniques and presentations, this Russian entry won hands down. And the best part is that there is no story, no plot, no actors and no inter-titling (the message that comes in between scenes to convey the unspoken words). 
What the director is showing are his newly thought movie making techniques which were considered avant-garde at his time. The use of slow motion, panning, super-imposing, zooming and others are highlighted. He also tries to promote his 'state of the art' mobile camera on a tripod. His wife did an excellent job on editing.The subjects were ordinary subjects from three Russian towns doing their daily chores like dancing, sleeping, cleaning, washing, commuting from the trams and even engaged in childbirth!
The director goes on exploring new daredevil and innovative cinematographic techniques like filming an on-coming train, filming from the undercarriage of a tram and burying a running camera in the sand as the train went over it.
Sometimes, he becomes cheeky and tries to equate our daily constitutional duties to our daily chores, e.g. washing the face is compared to scrubbing clothes! The director belonged to a group of filmmakers who were disillusioned with movies with fictional stories whom he feels is 'the opium for the masses'. As expected from the message above, he and his team became part of the team who became the mouthpiece of the Soviet regime to spread their ideology.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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