Of all the cin­e­mat­ic trail­blaz­ers to emerge dur­ing the ear­ly years of the Sovi­et Union – Sergei Eisen­stein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov – Dzi­ga Ver­tov (né Denis Arkadievitch Kauf­man, 1896–1954) was the most rad­i­cal.

Where­as Eisen­stein – as seen in that film school stan­dard Bat­tle­ship Potemkin – used mon­tage edit­ing to cre­ate new ways of telling a sto­ry, Ver­tov dis­pensed with sto­ry alto­geth­er. He loathed fic­tion films. “The film dra­ma is the Opi­um of the peo­ple,” he wrote. “Down with Bour­geois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!”  He called for the cre­ation of a new kind of cin­e­ma free of the counter-rev­o­lu­tion­ary bag­gage of West­ern movies. A cin­e­ma that cap­tured real life.

At the begin­ning of his mas­ter­piece, A Man with a Movie Cam­era (1929) – which was named in 2012 by Sight and Sound mag­a­zine as the 8th best movie ever made – Ver­tov announced exact­ly what that kind of cin­e­ma would look like:

This film is an exper­i­ment in cin­e­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion of real events with­out the help of inter­ti­tles, with­out the help of a sto­ry, with­out the help of the­atre. This exper­i­men­tal work aims at cre­at­ing a tru­ly inter­na­tion­al lan­guage of cin­e­ma based on its absolute sep­a­ra­tion from the lan­guage of the­atre and lit­er­a­ture.

Glee­ful­ly using jump cuts, super­im­po­si­tions, split screens and every oth­er trick in a filmmaker’s arse­nal, Ver­tov, along with his edi­tor (and wife) Eliza­ve­ta Svilo­va, crafts a dizzy­ing, impres­sion­is­tic, propul­sive por­trait of the new­ly indus­tri­al­iz­ing Sovi­et Union. The lengths to which Ver­tov goes to cap­ture this “cin­e­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion of real events” are star­tling: His cam­era soars over cities and gazes up at street­cars; it films machines chug­ging away and even records a woman giv­ing birth. “I am eye. I am a mechan­i­cal eye,” Ver­tov once famous­ly wrote. “I, a machine, am show­ing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.”

Yet Vertov’s stroke of genius was to expose the entire arti­fice of film­mak­ing with­in the movie itself. In A Man with a Movie Cam­era, Ver­tov shoots footage of his cam­era­men shoot­ing footage. There’s a recur­ring shot of an eye star­ing through a lens. We see images from ear­li­er in the movie get­ting edit­ed into the film. This sort of cin­e­mat­ic self-reflex­iv­i­ty was decades ahead of its time, influ­enc­ing such future exper­i­men­tal film­mak­ers as Chris Mark­er, Stan Brakhage and espe­cial­ly Jean-Luc Godard who in 1968 formed a rad­i­cal film­mak­ing col­lec­tive called The Dzi­ga Ver­tov Group.

A Man with a Movie Cam­era is noth­ing short of exhil­a­rat­ing. Check it out above.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Novem­ber 2014.

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

The ear­ly trail­er for Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Psy­cho above describes the film as “the pic­ture you MUST see from the begin­ning… or not at all!” That’s good advice, giv­en how ear­ly in the film its first big twist arrives. But it was also a pol­i­cy: “Every the­atre man­ag­er, every­where, has been instruct­ed to admit no one after the start of each per­for­mance of Psy­cho,” declares Hitch­cock him­self in its print adver­tise­ments. “We said no one — not even the man­ager’s broth­er, the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States or the Queen of Eng­land (God bless her).” Even in 1960, ordi­nary movie­go­ers still had the habit of enter­ing and leav­ing the the­ater when­ev­er they pleased. With Psy­cho’s mar­ket­ing cam­paign, Hitch­cock meant to alter their rela­tion­ship to cin­e­ma itself.

As for the trail­er’s form and con­tent, audi­ences would nev­er have seen any­thing like it before. Con­tain­ing no actu­al footage from the film — and indeed, con­sti­tut­ing some­thing of a short film itself — it instead offers a tour of its main loca­tions per­son­al­ly guid­ed by Hitch­cock. Those are, of course, the Bates Motel and its pro­pri­etor’s house, “which is, if I may say so, a lit­tle more sin­is­ter look­ing, less inno­cent-look­ing than the motel itself. And in this house, the most dire, hor­ri­ble events took place.”

In his telling, these build­ings are not film sets, but the gen­uine sites of heinous crimes, about which he proves only too hap­py to pro­vide sug­ges­tive details. We com­plain that today’s trail­ers “give the movie away,” and that seems to be Hitch­cock­’s enter­prise here.

But after these six min­utes, what, in a world that had yet to see Psy­cho, would you real­ly know about the movie? It would seem to involve some sort of gris­ly mur­ders, and you’d sure­ly be dying, as it were, to know of what sort and how gris­ly. Who, more­over, could fail to be star­tled and intrigued by Hitch­cock­’s sud­den reveal of a scream­ing blonde woman behind the motel-room show­er cur­tain? Hitch fans might have rec­og­nized her as Vera Miles, who’d been in The Wrong Man in 1956 and the first episode of Alfred Hitch­cock Presents the next year. They might also have noticed the name of no less a movie star than Janet Leigh, and won­dered what she was doing in such a sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic-look­ing genre pic­ture. One thing is cer­tain: when they final­ly did take their seat for Psy­cho — before show­time, of course — they had no idea what they were in for.

Relat­ed con­tent:

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Watch 25 Alfred Hitch­cock Trail­ers, Excit­ing Films in Their Own Right

Alfred Hitchcock’s Strict Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho in The­aters (1960)

Who Cre­at­ed the Famous Show­er Scene in Psy­cho? Alfred Hitch­cock or the Leg­endary Design­er Saul Bass?

Hitch­cock (Antho­ny Hop­kins) Pitch­es Janet Leigh (Scar­lett Johans­son) on the Famous Show­er Scene

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.