Film Terms Put in Action

In Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, Vertov attempts to make a bold statement about film making through his various filming techniques and styles that seemed almost futuristic and too fragmented for its times. I was honestly shocked because I had never seen a movie like this. I am much absorbed by popular culture films and movies known as “chick flicks,” so this movie was drastically different for me. After starting out confused from all of the different and random scenes flashing across the screen, I slowly started understand their significance to his film.

Since I did not understand the movie and its composition at all for the most part while watching it, my notes consisted of scenes and thoughts that could possibly play a role in the entire meaning of the movie. Now, as I look through my notes and after some research, I see that the scenes represent all the usual happenings that could occur in a day in the Soviet Union. The flashes of random sights showing people, benches, and other objects such as typewriters depict a quiet morning that became livelier with the beat of the music.

What is more interesting than what is happening in the frames is how they are shot. Reading the glossary terms for film analysis before the movie was helpful because I started to notice filming techniques more instead of simply the content of the film, which I believe to be one of Vertov’s purposes. For example, I noticed that there were low-angle shots when the man was filming the feet, and there were also high-angle shots when there was a view of the street from up above. There were frozen shots that seemed like photographs and they froze upon framed photographs. I also noticed that the camera itself was not moving very much. The people and objects that the camera was filming moved, but the machine itself did not tilt, pan, or zoom. If the camera was moving, it was because the machine itself was on a moving object, such as a car. Other techniques that Vertov utilized were fast forwarding, reversing, splitting scenes vertically and horizontally, slow motion, point of view shots, and super-imposing images on one another, such as the first scene in which the man with the camera was setting up on top of another mountainous camera.

The significance of these techniques comes from looking at them as a whole instead of individually, because many of them, especially put together, were ahead of their times when placed in that movie. This could reflect Vertov’s view of the state of the Soviet Union at the time, since the country was going through a rebirth and attempting to take strides beyond other countries to be ahead of its times technologically, economically, and even cinematically. Scenes of industry, cars, and machinery depict the industrialization of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the showings of marriage to divorce, death to birth, and old technology to new technology display the underlying transition occurring to the Soviet Union at the time.

Most importantly, the many various filming techniques contribute to Vertov’s view of how films should be made, especially documentaries. He created a montage through splicing the thousands of scenes together in different ways, but it still depicted an overall image of a day in the life of the up and coming Soviet Union. This follows his views about how the Kino-Eye deletes all of the unnecessary images that the human eye sees and pieces together the most important scenes to create one impression for the entire audience to react to.