'Man With A Movie Camera'

The premise is simple: Mother Russia is the character. Life is its plot.

I don't know if this is the first ever documentary, but it has to be close. Silent, "Man With a Movie Camera" is purely people walking about and doing whatever they do on a regular day.

It's filled with a ton of innovative film techniques like slow motion, freeze frames, fast motion, double exposure and split screens. All sound like campy comedy titles. "This summer. Tim Allen in Fast Motion!"

I think about life and death a lot nowadays and all I could really think about while watching this film is that a vast majority of these people are dead. Then I wonder how many died in World War II on the eastern front or how many perished in Stalin's gulags or starved to death in the country.

It's a portrait into a civilization that had no fucking clue the number of figurative atom bombs about to be dropped on them. Just smiling, hamming it up going to work and drinking beer and coffee. Clueless.