"The Man with the Camera" is a hybrid of experimental and documentary film and, in the search for an absolute film language, does without intertitles and any reference to theatre or literature. Only excerpts from the diary of a cameraman are to be shown in the film, according to its own statement. What can never be emphasised enough is the central importance of his brother Mikhail Kaufman at the camera and his wife Yelizaveta Svilova, who was responsible for the editing.

The event takes place as part of the Filmpodium series "Cinema seen through the eyes of...", for which the up-and-coming Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin has made a selection of films that are significant for him: "The constructivist group of poets around Sergei Tretiakov called in the early Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s for people no longer to be at the centres of narratives, but for machines to take on the role of protagonists. At the same time, Dziga Vertov makes this radiant film and goes on an exploratory tour into the middle of the magical field of the relationship between man and machine, in this case a camera." (Cyril Schäublin)