Wikipedia describes Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman and edited by Vertov’s wife Yelizaveta Svilova, as an “experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film”. What kind of images does this conjure in your mind? My knowledge of Soviet art isn’t particularly broad, but it’s biased by what I’ve seen of Soviet propaganda: heroic, productive workers, didactic visuals showing us what the ideal communist world ought to look like. A utopia that, with the benefit of hindsight, often looks phoney, frightening or both.

Whatever I might have expected of Man with a Movie Camera, it’s very different from what the film actually is: an audacious, joyful approach to an art form that, even 36 years after its birth, was still in its infancy in many ways.