Stylistic Aspects
Working within a Marxist ideology, Vertov strove to create a futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This artificial city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. The kino’s aesthetic shined through in his portrayal of electrification, industrialization, and the achievements of workers through hard labour. This could also be viewed as early modernism in film.
Some have mistakenly stated that many visual ideas, such as the quick editing, the close-ups of machinery, the store window displays, even the shots of a typewriter keyboard are borrowed from Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), which predates Man with a Movie Camera by two years, but as Vertov wrote to the German press in 1929, these techniques and images had been developed and employed by him in his Kino-Pravda newsreels and documentaries for the last ten years, all of which predate Berlin. Vertov's pioneering cinematic concepts actually inspired other abstract films by Ruttmann and others.
Because of doubts before screening, and great anticipation from Vertov's pre-screening statements, the film gained great interest before even shown. Once the film was finally screened, the public either embraced or dismissed Vertov's stylistic choices. The pace of the film's editing—more than four times faster than a typical 1929 feature, with approximately 1,775 separate shots—perturbed some viewers, including The New York Times' reviewer Mordaunt Hall:
- "The producer, Dziga Vertof, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention."
On a technical note, Man with a Movie Camera's usage of double exposure and seemingly 'hidden' cameras made the movie come across as a very surreal montage rather than a linear motion picture. Many of the scenes in the film contain people, which change size or appear underneath other objects (double exposure). Because of these aspects, the movie’s overall speed is fast moving and enthralling. The sequences and close-ups capture emotional qualities, which could not be fully portrayed through the use of words. The film's lack of 'actors' and 'sets' makes for a unique view of the everyday world; one "directed toward the creation of a genuine, international, purely cinematic language, entirely distinct from the language of theatre and literature."
Read more about this topic: Man With A Movie Camera
Famous quotes containing the words stylistic and/or aspects:
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