Filmed in Moscow and Odessa, The Man with the Movie Camera exemplifies the montage of aesthetic of the Soviet vanguard of the 1920’s. It belongs to the “city symphony” genre of documentaries, depicting a day in the life of an urban metropolis. Dziga Vertov establishes a conceptual parallel of the role of the filmmaker with that of other works, such as comparing fabric passing through a sewing-machine gear to a film strip moving through the editor’s fingers. Vertov thus creates a documentary of a socialist society and an investigation of the filmmaking process, delighting in the extravagant visual devices of the avant-garde, such as the split screen and slow and accelerated motion.