Man With a Movie Camera/Человек с киноаппаратом (1929) - Mechanical USSR fascination in technically astute experimental documentary

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A colorful original poster with English text over it for Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera

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Man With a Movie Camera is an experimental avant-garde silent B/W documentary of 68 minutes, a film without inter-titles, actors or a plot. Instead, it is an abstract work in cinema and a portrait of a Soviet city.

The film is a technical montage of fast-cut images and movement. It varies between depictions of sufferings in a modern metropolis, - perhaps an implicit criticism of the economical policies of the USSR? - with an intense fascination and excitement concerning everything new, (which rather annuls any inherent critique, I should think.) It was filmed in Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev. Movie Camera features an endless display of Soviet industrial excellence and mechanical strength (through fire trucks, for instance.)
The film is made by Dziga Vertov (Kino Eye/Kinoglaz (1924)), born in Bialystok in what is Poland today but was part of the Russian empire then, and in his statement at the beginning of Movie Camera, he asserts that the film "is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theater and literature."
The radical idealism behind Vertov's endeavor here comes off to me as more of a nationally-motivated show, and I think it was the same brand of extreme idealism that led the Soviet Union to some of its most detrimental and humanly disastrous policies. - Which is one reason that I am not full of groveling admiration for the film, (as many other film scholars seem to be.)

Watch the entire film with English subtitles (for the opening titles) here

Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Unknown
[The film had a difficult time upon release because of its radical structure and lack of formal content, but apart from this, I have not been able to ascertain whether or not it was a flop commercially. It took 3 years to make and bolsters a variety of advanced cinematic visual and editing techniques, which it remains notorious and respected for: The film was listed as the 8th best film ever by the 2012 critics' Sight & Sound poll and in 2014 was named best documentary ever (again by Sight & Sound). - Phew...!!]

What do you think of Man With a Movie Camera?
If you have insight into Dziga Vertov and/or any of his other films, please, enlighten us about him/them

Un Chien Andalou (1929) or, Clouds Cut the Moon in Two

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A magnificent poster for Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou

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SPOILER Woman gets her eyeball slit open. 6 years after: The man wants the woman. The woman is run over. Ants run across the man's hand. A while later. At Spring.

Un Chien Andalou [An Andulusian Dog] is a stunning short film and a chief work in experimental and surrealist cinema, directed by Spanish master filmmaker Luis Buñuel (The Exterminating Angel/El Ángel Exterminador m(1962)) and co-written by Buñuel and Surrealist master painter/artist Salvador Dalí.
The film, - which is only 16-21 minutes long, depending on the version, - is sublime for the poetic unreality it conjures up, and for the strangely recognizable, abstract perception of dreams and the subconscious that it recreates with its remarkable, subversive aesthetic and compositions, which get stored in the minds of its audiences whether they realize it or not.
The film was made on a tiny budget lend to Buñuel by his mother, and they ran out of money before post production, so that he had to cut the film together in their kitchen without any editing equipment besides a pair of scissors and glue. 
Both artists were surprised to see Un Chien Andalou succeed with the Parisian audience, whom they had expected to outrage into a violent mass-reaction. They were subsequently commissioned to make a sequel, which became L'Age d'Or (1930). The film lasts around 60 minutes, but the wealthy benefactors quickly withdrew it, when the Prefecture of the Paris Police banned it.
Another curio concerns the two main actors in Un Chien Andalou: They both ended their lives with suicide: Pierre Batcheff (Love in Morocco/Baroud (1933)) overdosed in 1932, and Simone Mareuil (Peach Skin/Peau de Pêche (1929)) set herself on fire and burned to death in a public square in 1954.

Here is the film, without English subtitles, however - so order it online, if you don't know French

Cost: Estimated around 100,000 franc
Box office: Unknown
= Unknown

What do you think of Un Chien Andalou?
Other surrealist or absurdist short or feature films that you want to recommend?
If you know why both stars of Un Chien Andalou committed suicide, please, inform us

The Bridge/The Spy (1929) - Time-playing fine short debut of Charles Vidor

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In lieu of a picture from the short film, which is rare, here is one of its Hungarian director Charles Vidor

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The Bridge is a short film based on American writer and critic Ambrose Bierce's famous short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge from 1890. It is about a presumed train-saboteur or spy, who is to be hanged from a bridge, but who flees and sees his family before him, but then feels something tighten around his neck...
SPOILER The whole survival-plot is a subjective fantasy: The man gets executed.
This short experiments with time and is visually stunning if uneven otherwise.
Its director is Hungarian Charles Vidor, who did small writing jobs after it, until he began getting feature directorial gigs, starting with uncredited work on the Boris Karloff-starring The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). He later directed big movies such as Gilda (1946), Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and Love Me or Leave Me (1955).

Related review:

Charles Vidor: A Farewell to Arms (1957) or, Love in Spite!

See 2 minutes of this fine short here, with a new soundtrack

What do you think of The Bridge?
Any comments on Charles Vidor and his films are very welcome