The Man With the Movie Camera

This is arguably the single most famous movie poster ever made - the 1929 masterpiece by the Stenberg Brothers (Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg) for Dziga Vertov's revolutionary Soviet film 'The Man with a Movie Camera' (Chelovek s kinoapparatom). A pair of a woman's legs strides straight across the centre, caught mid-step and towering over a great bellows movie camera on its wooden tripod; to the left a cameraman crouches behind a lens that looks almost like a machine gun, a smiling face glows in a block of Constructivist red, and the bold Cyrillic title - ЧЕЛОВЕК С АППАРАТОМ - marches across the foot of the sheet beside a scarlet KINO bar. It is signed, as always, '2 Стенберг 2'.

Every element tells you what kind of film this is. Vertov's 'Man with a Movie Camera' has no actors, no story, no sets and no intertitles - just a single day in the life of the Soviet city, filmed across Kyiv, Kharkiv, Moscow and Odessa and produced by the Ukrainian studio VUFKU (Производство ВУФКУ, credited at lower left). Vertov called his method the 'Kino-Eye': the camera as a new, mechanical, all-seeing way of looking at the world. The poster makes that idea physical - the enormous apparatus, the striding legs, the weapon-like lens - while crediting the men and woman who made it: Dziga Vertov (author of the experiment), his cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman (М. Кауфман), and the editor Elizaveta Svilova (Е. Свилова), whose dazzling cutting assembled its double exposures, split screens, freeze-frames and jump cuts. In 2012 the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound critics' poll named the film the greatest documentary ever made.

The Stenberg Brothers were the undisputed masters of the Soviet film poster. Between roughly 1923 and 1933 they produced around 300 designs and effectively invented the modern form. Trained as engineers as much as artists, they even built their own projector-like device to trace, tilt and distort photographic film stills - which is exactly how those disembodied legs and that fragmented face come to hover with such uncanny, kinetic force. The result is pure movement frozen on paper.

As wall art the design is an absolute statement piece. Its graphic punch - the confident diagonals, the tight red-black-and-cream palette, the raw modernist Cyrillic lettering - reads beautifully across a room and rewards a close look. It anchors a modern, mid-century, industrial or minimalist interior and is a natural for a home cinema, a creative studio, an office or a gallery wall. It makes a perfect gift for film lovers and cinephiles, graphic designers, and anyone drawn to Constructivism, Bauhaus, the Russian avant-garde or the golden age of experimental cinema.

Because the original was published in 1929, it now sits in the public domain, which is why we can reproduce it at full museum quality.

Each print is produced on premium 189 gsm museum-grade archival matte paper, faithfully capturing the intensity of the red, the depth of the black and the crisp geometry of the original design - ready to frame and enjoy for years to come.