After picking up a pair of headphones at the entrance to this exhibition, I walked into a spacious room in which clips from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1926, and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, were being shown. Vertov created one of the most emblematic of all film images, featuring the protagonist (the cameraman of the title) perching on a steel girder high above the city and panning his camera over the teeming forms below. Just as this sequence was projected on the screen—a “curtain” made of a regular movie screen cut into strips and hung from the ceiling—a group of people broke