8/12/2019 Silent Film Tops Documentary Poll
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ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS
1 August 2014 Last updated at 07:21 ET
Silent film tops documentary poll
A 1929 silent film has been voted the greatest ever documentary
in a poll of some 300 film-makers and critics.
Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov, was picked by
more than 100 cineastes who took part in the inaugural Sight
&Sound poll.
The magazine launched the survey after Vertov's film, shot in
the cities of Odessa, Kiev and Kharkiv, came eighth in their 2012
bestfilm poll.
The magazine called it a "teasingly surrealist" homage to city
life.
The British Film Institute magazine conducts a poll every decade
to find the best film. When the most recent poll was conducted
in2012, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo took the top spot.
But Man With a Movie Camera "turned up out of the blue" in
eighth place, prompting the decision to run a separate best
documentarypoll .
"It's part of a genre that was very popular in the 1920s," Sight
and Sound's web editor Nick Bradshaw told BBC Radio 4's Today
programme.
"Filming cities, showing you the workings of them, showing you
all the layers and intricacies that make up, typically, a day in
the lifeof a city."
"This one has the extra layer of showing you its own filming...
so as the title suggests you see quite a lot of Dziga
Vertov'scameraman filming the city, you see the editor putting the
film together, you see the audience coming into the cinema and
watchingit."
"It's a film about the city and about society, and about the
world; it's also a film about cinema and what cinema adds to the
world."
More than 1,000 films were nominated by more than 200 critics
and 100 film-makers from around the world.
Mr Bradshaw described the list as "widespread", including two
films about the holocaust in the top 10, and the presence of
therecent documentary hit The Act of Killing.
Film-makers including Paul Greengrass, Kevin Macdonald, Senna's
Asif Kapadia and Man on Wire's James Marsh were invited totake part
in the poll.
Greengrass included Man with a Movie Camera and Marsh's
Oscar-winning Man on Wire in his top 10, alongside Primary, by
RobertDrew, whose death was announced earlier this week.
Macdonald cited Michael Moore's Roger and Me, saying the US
film-maker "brought entertainment back into documentary films -
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8/12/2019 Silent Film Tops Documentary Poll
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