Around the clock in a Soviet city is depicted by camera flashes … a disjointed array of scenes in which the producer, Dziga Vertoff, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention … As a matter of fact it becomes quite tedious and the hour that it lasts seems at least an hour and a half. It is also somewhat confusing. The individual who pops up every now and then with his camera has really little if anything to do with the picture, for what he photographs is not shown. One sees him at work, it is true, but he is no more interesting than a number of other persons in this kaleidoscopic stream. There are undoubtedly clever stretches in this picture, which was photographed in Odessa, Kharkov and Kieff. The notion of having everything come to a sudden stop is ingenious, especially when one discovers that the reason is that a motion picture film joiner is pausing at her work. The slow-motion passages of athletes diving, throwing the shot and other physical exercises are well conceived. The wheels of business and industry being set in motion is another laudable phase of this feature. But often one would like to dwell upon some of the doings. – Mordaunt Hall, New York Times, 1929

Directed by the great Soviet theorist and polemicist Dziga Vertov, this classic movie, one of the most ambitious of the silent era, purports to document a day in Moscow. But using every known cinematic device, it wittily and imaginatively investigates the meaning of film, the relationship between image and reality, and the way cinema can transform society. The movie remains as astonishing as the day it first baffled Russian bureaucrats and audiences. – Philip French, the Observer, 2000

What’s remarkable about this Top 50 is that it feels so fresh. One in five of the films were made since the millennium, and to have a silent film from 1929 at the top is equally surprising. That essay films feature so strongly here shows that nonfiction cinema is not a narrow discipline but a wide open country full of explorers. – Nick James, editor of Sight & Sound, 2014

Everything film could do in 1929 was paraded in this dizzying technical manifesto — we’re still doing most of it, and the absence of sound, colour or 3D hardly get in Dziga Vertov’s way: a man conducting his maturing medium like an orchestra. – Tim Robey, the Telegraph, 2013

It is fabulous, but not really a good introduction to silent film as it is so unique and lacking emotion. The true test is whether you can enter the emotional world of the past, but Man With a Movie Camera doesn’t really require you to do that. – Lawrence Napper, King’s College London, 2014

To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named “Dziga Vertov”, was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium that revealed the truths of life … Seen now, its celebration of the burgeoning machine age is still resonant but not without humour – even if its constantly self-reflexive nature borders on exhausting. Indeed, you could draw a direct line from Vertov’s film to the deadpan electronic beats of Kraftwerk, whose 1978 album Man Machine the Polish-born director would surely have relished. Damon Wise, the Guardian, 2013

It works as a kaleidoscopic treatment of real lives, but it is a nightmare to discern any structure from (intentionally) and, for me, more than crosses the line into pretension. – Neil Brand, composer, on what it’s like to accompany Man With a Movie Camera, 2014

Most movies strive for what John Ford called “invisible editing” – edits that are at the service at the storytelling, and do not call attention to themselves. Even with a shock cut in a horror film, we are focused on the subject of the shot, not the shot itself. Considered as a visual object, “Man With a Movie Camera” deconstructs this process. It assembles itself in plain view. It is about itself, and folds into and out of itself like origami. It was in 1912 that Marcel Duchamp shocked the art world with his painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.” It wasn’t shocked by nudity–the painting was too abstract to show any. They were shocked that he depicted the descent in a series of steps taking place all at the same time. In a way, he had invented the freeze frame.

What Vertov did was elevate this avant-garde freedom to a level encompassing his entire film. That is why the film seems fresh today; 80 years later, it is fresh … It was about the act of seeing, being seen, preparing to see, processing what had been seen, and finally seeing it. It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhythm and language on it, and transcending it. Godard once said “The cinema is life at 24 frames per second.” Wrong. That’s what life is. The Cinema only starts with the 24 frames — and besides, in the silent era it was closer to 18 fps. It’s what you do after you have your frames that makes it Cinema. – Roger Ebert, 2009

It’s a great ‘city’ film and I like it for that, although it’s not a film I can watch too often. It’s a film I appreciate rather than enjoy. – Jenny Stewart, Leicester University, 2014

DISCLAIMER: I voted in this poll, and yes, I voted for both Man With a Movie Camera and Nanook of the North. In fact I submitted an entirely silent top 10. Well, what did you expect? My top10 should be posted online on 14 August 2014, but for now, you can find out much more about the poll and read some words from me on Nanook of the North here at this link.