Aghazadeh Masrour Nilufar - 12013816
Man With A Movie Camera – A revolutionary masterpiece or an experimental documentary?
This essay will discuss how ‘’Man With A Movie Camera ‘’ is represented in television documentary and will further examine the key contextual areas of factual film. By deconstructing the elements of cinematic techniques and previously existing forms of art and related concepts, a clear understanding of the chosen topic will be presented.
The documentary “Man With A Movie Camera’’ also known as ‘’Chelovek s kinoapparatom’’, was produced in 1929, by Dziga Vertov who used a different cinematographic approach to portray the Soviet society after the Revolution. Man With A Movie Camera simulates a reality of leisure time and daily activities completed by the Soviet workers, expressing the idea of a structured society which functions similar to a mechanical device.The representation of automatic machines in comparison with the Soviet working nation, creates an identifiable image of the connection between them within the documentary.
Throughout the film, Vertov experimented with manipulative techniques of the cinema such as speed, superimposition, juxtaposition, reversed action and multiple-frame imagery, to expose to the audience the essential significance that editing held. However, special effects are not used to correct scenes and they are not subtle either, rather constructing the idea of how camera can effortlessly influence everyday reality. Despite of lacking an usual narrative and a film script, the documentary still has a linear structure. Vertov successfully re-creates a ‘real’ version of the shots depicted within the scenes in Man With A Movie Camera. As a result, the continu...
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...uishable from fictional film-making and acted films’’ (Hicks, 2007) and hints that Vertov’s philosophy was born in an undeniable ambition of changing two major actualities: how documentaries were produced and the way in which the audience was already used with a staged product of the cinema.
Manovich states that Man With A Movie Camera is similar with a new media subject which contains fundamental levels of structure. Further on, he states that Vertov’s documentary structure is composed of at least three levels. Theoretically, the first level represents the story of the cameraman Mikhail Kaufman who records the shots. The next level portrays the audience watching this finished documentary in a movie theater, while the third level is based on the film itself and how the progression of one day takes place, which can be seen within the captured scenes (Manovich, 2001).
This analysis will explore these cinematic techniques employed by Pontecorvo within a short sequence and examine their effects on our understanding of the issues and themes raised within the film.
The Bolshevik Revolution was a defining turning point in Russian history. This overall revolution consisted of two individual revolutions in 1917 which resulted in the overthrow of the Tsarist government and the formation of a socialist society led by Vladimir Lenin’s radical Bolsheviks. For a moment with such enormous weight like the Bolshevik Revolution, there will be various interpretations on the true results of that moment and the meaning and value of these results. The film Man with a Movie Camera deals with the results of the Bolshevik Revolution and the early Soviet Society it birthed as it utilizes footage of one day in this early Soviet Union, thus making it worthy of examination. In the film Man With a Movie Camera, Vertov impressively
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative Apparatus Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen, (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 198-209.
Rascaroli, Laura. "The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (2008): 24-47. JSTOR. Web. 08 May 2014.
In the film V for Vendetta the director James Mcteigue uses a range of different film techniques in order to gain the audience's attention and to make the movie more interesting. The four film techniques I’m going to focus on in this essay are editing, music, camera angles and the lighting. I am going to do this by analysing the ‘Domino Montage’ scene.
...s appeared not so much to matter as the fact that he developed new techniques, devised camera approaches and sought always to bring out the potential of a still developing form. That he forgot--or overlooked--to bring the Marxist message to one of his films two years ago brought him that fatal kiss of all--the accusation from the authoritative Soviet magazine, Culture and Life, that his productions had been short on the prescribed Soviet requirement of art and interpretation of history” ("Sergei Eisenstein is Dead in Moscow”, New York Times, 1948) . In film, Eisenstein was known for his development of the montage sequence, his unusual juxtapositions, and his life-like imagery. In life he was known for his propaganda and belief in the plight of the working class. Eisenstein left an inevitable mark on his community, his time, the shape of a sub-culture, and his art.
...use of documentary style lighting and discontinuous editing that diverges from the Hollywood “invisible” editing. Through understanding the historical climates these two seemingly similar French cinematic movements were in, the psychology of a generation can be visualized in a way truly unique to the indexicality of the cinematic medium.
Turner, Graeme. Film as a Social Practice. 3rd ed. of the year. London: Routledge, 1999.
Just like most of his other films like, Broomfield uses the Cinéma-Vérité style for this documentary. Cinéma-Vérité is a style of film making which uses minimal equipments and editorials. It helps capture the truth of the film and its characters. As the documentary moves forward, it takes on a more interactive mode. This, as the name suggests, implies that there is an interaction between Broomfield and the people he meets. This is also mainly because, it is essential for Broomfield to interview people who were either directly or indirectly related to the late artists to gain more understanding of their individual upbringings, when they were growing up and also after they attained fame. By using commentary for most parts of the film, which, for example, may show an archived footage of the late artists, it provides us with a deeper understanding of who is present in that particular footage and even what was happening at that moment. Broomfield was also able to share with the audience his exact emotions at each moment.
However, in stark contrast to The General, other films were being made around the world that did not follow a simple Hollywood structure, but rather were more experimental with what a movie could be. Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a very ahead of its time, utilized a completely different style of filmmaking that resonated strongly with the ideals of the Soviet Union. Thus, Man With a Movie Camera sought out to make the everyday people of the Soviet Union the stars of the film. This idea was completely revolutionary as well, and almost by necessity, introduced a new style of editing to fit the story—or rather the documentation—that director Dziga Vertov was trying to tell.
...d not, however, only significant events, he stops at the store, or while remains on a field. Vertov was not hiding behind anything that might lead to the idea that all displayed events are not depend on many filmmaking techniques, on the contrary, it explicitly he makes clear. The film ends with the final image of the city that sleeps again, the image transferred to canvas and ends projection.
Traditional ideations of film and documentaries have been to create scripts that are structures to fulfill a set idea. The challenge with scripting an idea is that the script writer(s) have a subjective view of the documentary. The vastness of documenting a situation is restricted by the script making it impossible for a documentary film to capture objective realism in their work.
Soviet cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein argues that the basis of cinema is dialectical montage. In his article “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form”, Eisenstein explains dialectics as “a constant evolution from the interaction of two contradictory opposites” (45). These opposites synthesize and form a new thesis, which then may also be contradicted. Eisenstein employs dialectical montage in his films due to its ability to invoke change, an important goal in a revolutionary society. His film Battleship Potemkin is designed to display this theory and create a psychological change within his audience, corresponding to his revolutionist ideals.
2. Nichols, Bill. ‘Documentary Modes of Representation (The Observational Mode).’ Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis; Indiana University Press. 1991. 38-44
‘Then came the films’; writes the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, evoking the arrival of a powerful new art form at the end of 19th century. By this statement, he tried to explain that films were not just another visual medium, but it has a clear differentiation from all previous mediums of visual culture.