Okay, so it’s really really really easy to see why critics like this 1929 avant-garde Soviet silent documentary, and it’s because it’s fundamentally a film about films.

Partly this is in the subject. It’s ostensibly showing a day in the life of a city, but it’s suuuuper-meta. It starts off with an audience filing into a theatre to see this film (an audience it returns to at the end of the movie), and throughout the thing it keeps showing a camera-man getting the shots that it will then show later. At one point, it even shows the film being edited (with a scissors); all of this is intercut with shots of trains and streetcars and people walking around and machinery in motion.

And beyond the subject, it’s a showcase of cinematic technique. The director made the movie as an explicitly ideological statement about the creation of a universal cinematic language (which is why there are no title cards; this is pure imagery after the opening credits). Toward this end, there’s stop motion animation (including a camera on a tripod that is briefly almost a character), slow motion, reverse motion, double exposure, fade-ins, fast strobe-like intercutting, swooping fast pans, and above all, fast cuts.

VERY fast cuts. According to Ebert, the average scene length of this movie is 2.3 seconds, in an era when the average film went 11.2 seconds between cuts. To put that in perspective, another movie that cuts as fast as this movie is Michael Bay’s Armageddon. So yeah.

The speed of the cutting (which comes to an almost crescendo at the end) works really well with the music of the version here. This is not the original music (which is apparently lost), it’s by Michael Nyman, probably most famous for doing the music to The Piano; it’s a minimalist score, repetitive and rhythmic, and there’s no chance at all that the movie sounded like this in 1929, but it should have, because this is perfect for it.

As to whether I enjoyed this movie… look, that’s not the important question, really, is it? When a director makes a movie that’s deliberately standing against narrative and drama as the opiate of the masses, in true Marxist style, asking whether it was pleasant and enjoyable seems way off-point. But I am not a fancy person, so I’ll answer that anyway: Yeah, mostly. It’s just pure visual and music, and if it’s maybe about twice as long as I’d really ideally want to watch, it was nevertheless interesting in its own way.