Comparing Dziga Vertovs Film, Man with a Movie Camera...

Comparing Dziga Vertovs Film, Man with a Movie Camera and Run Lola Run The main and essential thing is : the sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as a point of departure the use of the camera as a keno-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space. - Dziga Vertov , Manifesto The Council of Three (1923) The innovative theories and filmmaking techniques of Dziga Vertov revolutionized the way films are made today. Man With a Movie Camera (1929), a documentary that represented the peak of the Soviet avant-garde film movement in the twenties, displayed techniques in montage, creative camera angles, rich imagery, but most importantly†¦show more content†¦Not filming life unawares for the sake of the unawares, but in order to show people without masks, without makeup, to catch them through the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting... (41 Vertov) His original ways of thinking, isolated him from all other filmmakers. Even his style of using montage (editing style commonly used by Soviet directors) in Man with a Movie Camera was very different. In this film, hours of footage are edited together in many cuts, which is the style that Vertov is well known for. His cuts are very rapid and he displays them accordingly to music to add excitement to the sequence. The sequences act on all three levels of montage: narrative, intellectual, and emotional. For example in the beginning of Man with a Movie Camera, there is a sequence in a theatre where the cameraman sets up the film for the audience to watch (appendix 1). The lights come on, the seats go down, the cameraman sets up the projector, the audience enters, the lights dim, the orchestra awaits and then the manifest begins. The narration comes from the editor throughout the whole film. The cameraman cannot possibly be the narrator since he is randomly out of frame and it is a silent film. From the very beginning†¦ the centrality of the cameramans vision is put into question, since he moves out