The Man with the Movie Camera

David Crosswaite references Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, but rather than treating the camera as a metaphor for the eye looking out into the world and making sense of it, for this film the focus is on the camera itself and the filmmaking process. Through the use of mirrors, manipulations of focus, aperture and composition, film camera and filmmaker are progressively revealed, and the construction of illusion in film is broken down. The Man With A Movie Camera is one the purest examples of reflexive filmmaking in the early years of the LFMC.