Man With A Movie Camera declared the best documentary ever made
Held once every 10 years, the Sight & Sound poll—in which a broad, international group of critics and filmmakers pick the greatest movies of all time—is the closest thing film culture has to a definitive survey, a document of the consensus about what movies are supposed to be. The most recent poll, held in 2012, attracted attention because it found Citizen Kane—which had held the No. 1 spot since 1962—overtaken by Vertigo as the critics’ choice. (The director survey, tallied separately, was topped by Tokyo Story.)
This year, spurred by the ongoing nonfiction filmmaking renaissance, Sight & Sound conducted a spin-off poll, focused entirely on documentaries. Now the results are in.
Unsurprisingly, the No. 1 spot is occupied by Dziga Vertov’s 1929 avant-garde classic Man With A Movie Camera, the highest-ranked nonfiction film on the 2012 survey. (It was No. 8 on the critics’ poll, slotted between The Searchers and The Passion Of Joan Of Arc.) Equally unsurprising is the fact that politics have already entered into the mix.
Man With The Movie Camera was made in Odessa, a Russian-speaking city on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, by a Russian-Jewish crew who hailed from present-day Poland. This means that the film—a milestone whose reputation has grown exponentially since the collapse of the USSR—is part of the shared cultural heritage of two countries that are effectively at war. The easy (and honest) way out would be to call it a Soviet film, and label Vertov a Soviet filmmaker.