'Man with a Movie Camera' directed by Dziga Vertov has been declared as the greatest ever documentary in the inaugural Sight and Sound poll.
A 1929 silent film was picked up by more than 100 cineastes in the survey conducted by British Film Institute magazine every decade to find the best film, BBC reported.
When the most recent poll was conducted in 2012, Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' took the top spot and 'Man with a Movie Camera' "turned up out of the blue" in eighth place, prompting the decision to run a separate best documentary poll.
Nick Bradshaw, Sight and Sound's web editor, said that the film was about the city, society, and the world; it's also a film about cinema and what cinema adds to the world, so the movie was part of a genre that was very popular in the 1920s.
Sophie Fiennes said that the poll showed that just how far the medium could be pushed, and how by getting outside of the formulas of television people could say things a different way.