The movie starts out slow and incredibly meta. I don't remember seeing anything quite so reflexive as this one before 1929. The cinematography is fantastic and varied. It's smart, even when showing the camera person. I realize on this showing, I thought there were way more superimpositions than there actually are, which obviously had the most impact on me the first time I saw it. I think the ending ramps up and the editing in the film matches the power of Battleship Potemkin.
Although the city symphony film had been made the entire decade beginning with Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is the most famous which is at least in part due to the fact that the movie starts out slow and is very meta. The cinematography is fantastic and varied using timelapses, juxtoposition, camera tricks. It's a culmination of camera possibilities up to this time.
Undoubtedly the film is considered a giant montage the editing style developed by his own country the Soviet Union. You see ideas of impressionism, a grandiosity of storytelling techniques combined into one documentary. On top of that, it’s one of the first reflexive documentaries that we would definitely define today as “meta.” We immediately are hit over the head that the film is meant to be shown in a theatre as the opening scenes are people going to the theatre to watch this very film.
Vertov’s thought on cinema was really a precursor to the 1960’s documentary vérité movement that documentarians still seem to refer to today as an ideal of what cinema can be for society, for a sort of objective truth and presented as art combined on screen. It is journalism, but shows how journalism can present facts with a perspective as well.
It’s really a culmination of the silent era at the end of a decade right when sound was about to take over permanently.