Twenty, 30 years ago, Dziga Vertov’s montage classic of 1929, Man With a Movie Camera, was usually projected in total silence to curious students in lecture rooms. Now the film is everyone’s friend. Musicians of every stripe cluster around public spaces and bombard it with sound, from Michael Nyman to the French luminary of musique concrète, Pierre Henry. Saturday was the turn of the jazz-techno band the Cinematic Orchestra, masters of the “sampladelic”; and fans packed out the Barbican.

This is a heartening development, by and large. Vertov’s plotless assemblage deserves every pair of eyes it gets, and rewards them, too, with images of Soviet citizens waking, working, playing, drinking spliced and superimposed into an exuberant celebration of daily life and movie artifice.

You’d go mad trying to match exactly the images’ whirlwind in music, shot by shot, beat by beat, and no musician has yet tried. Certainly not Jason Swinscoe’s Cinematic Orchestra. At two points only did the turntables, keyboards, saxes, drums, bass, percussion and strings ever aim for direct illustration. When a ship sailed, a hooter sounded; when fire engines raced, the bell clanged. For the rest Swinscoe’s crew pitched themselves at the halfway point between paying attention to the images and spinning off rather rudely into their own private concert.

Riffs and licks bounced around on harmonies hot and heavy, sometimes supported by hovering strings, other times punctured by drums. All great to listen to with eyes closed. Preferable, too, in some spots: you were spared the clash of aural and visual rhythms, or the effort of puzzling out precisely why shots of wedding and divorce registration forms summoned Phil France’s double bass.

But better by far to keep the eyes open. Vertov’s film was the masterpiece here — it always will be — and at times sight and sound fused in delicious counterpoint. The mechanical motions of factory girls making cigarette packets triggered a furious percussion spree: obvious, perhaps, but effective. Each time the pace of Vertov’s editing reached delirium, so did the music’s dynamics. And the Cinematics at least avoided the blasting intrusions of Nyman’s score; like the film, this music had a human face.

At the end the house rose in a mighty roar, and DJs took the party into the foyer. Not much of Soviet life was probably left in anyone’s mind, but you can’t have everything. What would Vertov have thought of it all?

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010