News | June 27, 2024

Movie Poster of Groundbreaking Soviet Man With a Camera to Auction

Kiefer

The Man with the Movie Camera poster

A poster by brothers Vladimir & Georgij Stenberg advertising the 1929 silent movie Man with the Movie Camera will go under the hammer on July 4 at Kiefer's Alte Drucke, Handschriften und Theologie auction.

The Stenbergs were avant-garde Russian artists and designers who also produced posters for movies by Sergei Eisenstein, and a good match for the similarly avant-garde film directed by Dziga Vertov with Mikhail Kaufman on the camera, and editing done by Vertov´s wife, Yelizaveta Svilova. 

The film is essentially a documentary of everyday Russian life in the late 1920s, shot over three years in the cities of Moscow, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa. Its techniques such as slow motion, freeze frame, jump cuts, and split screens had a major influence on film aesthetic. The poster reflects these artistic ambitions has an estimage 36,000,00 Euros.

Man with the Movie Camera was not successful on first release but its value has been appreciated by more recent critics such as Roger Ebert, voted the 9th best film ever made in the British Film Institute's 2022 Sight & Sound magazine poll which also named it the best documentary.