Editing Man with a Movie Camera (section)

===Initial===
''Man with a Movie Camera'' was not always a highly regarded work. 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".<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://psi416.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Screen-1977-Crofts-9-60.pdf |title=An Essay Towards Man with a Movie Camera |last=Crofts |first=Stephen |website=psi416.cankaya.edu.tr |access-date=2 December 2017}}</ref>

Vertov's Soviet contemporaries criticized its focus on form over content, with [[Sergei Eisenstein]] even deriding the film as "pointless camera hooliganism".<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/64140 |title=Man With a Movie Camera |last=Feaster |first=Felicia |publisher=Turner Classic Movies, Inc. |access-date=3 February 2017}}</ref> The work was largely dismissed in the West as well.<ref name="BFI Best Docs">{{cite web |url=https://www2.bfi.org.uk//sight-sound-magazine/greatest-docs |title=Critics' 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time |publisher=British Film Institute |access-date=3 February 2017}}</ref> Documentary filmmaker [[Paul Rotha]] said that in Britain, Vertov was "regarded really as rather a joke, you know. All this cutting, and one camera photographing another camera – it was all trickery, and we didn't take it seriously."<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AcfvcuHC4IIC&pg=PA99 |title=The Man With the Movie Camera: The Film Companion |page=99 |last=Roberts |first=Graham |publisher=I.B. Tauris |date=2000 |isbn=1860643949}}</ref> The pace of the film's editing – more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots – also perturbed some viewers, including ''[[The New York Times]]''{{'}} reviewer [[Mordaunt Hall]]:<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-man-with-a-movie-camera-1929|title=''Man with a Movie Camera''|author=[[Roger Ebert]]|date=1 July 2009|work=[[Chicago Sun-Times]]|access-date=10 March 2016}}</ref> "The producer, Dziga Vertov, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention."