The Man with His Movie Camera

The Man with His Movie Camera is a 1985 American experimental documentary film directed by, written by and produced by Hiroshi Yajima. It was Kōji Itō's cinematographic debut which the film starred him himself. The film is well-known for the first appearances of and.

Based on the 1929 Soviet silent documentary film of the same name, Schrader's feature film presents urban life in the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, Tallahassee, New York City, Manhattan, Modesto and Emeryville. Unlike Dziga Vertov's original version, it occasionally had actors. From dawn to dusk, American citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters", they are the cameraman of the title, the film editor, and the modern United States they discover and present in the film.

A co-production from Brooksfilms and Lucasfilm, The Man with His Movie Camera premiered in the on August 11, 1985 and was released in the United States by 20th Century Fox on August 15, 1985. The film received mixed reviews upon its initial release; the work's fast cutting, self-reflexivity, and emphasis on form over content were all subjects of criticism.

Overview
The film has an unabashedly avant-garde style, and emphasizes that film can go anywhere. For instance, the film uses scenes such as superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass, filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed, filming a woman giving birth, and the baby being taken away to be bathed.

The film features a few obvious stagings such as the scene of a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed and the shot of chess pieces being swept to the center of the board (a shot spliced in backwards so the pieces expand outward and stand in position). The film was criticized for both the stagings and the stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director's frequent assailing of fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses".

Cast

 * Kōji Itō as the Cameraman
 * as the Movie Theater Manager
 * as the Music Conductor
 * as Woman at Home
 * , and  as the Sleeping Homeless Men
 * as the Rail Worker
 * as the Sleeping Woman on the Bench
 * as the Electric Worker
 * as the Woman Sewing Clothes
 * as the Gear Manufacturer
 * as the Wine Store Owner
 * as the Film Editor
 * as the Eager Child in Footage
 * as the Surprised Child in Footage
 * as the Hotel Receptionist