Man With A Film Camera, Directed By Dziga Vertov And Edited

Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov and edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova, is an experimental film released in 1929 after having been filmed over a period of three years in urban U.S.S.R and is considered by some to be both a documentary and avant-garde cinema (Aitken, 2011, p. 602). The film was shot in the Soviet cities of Kiev, Moscow and Odessa (Nytimes.com, 2015). Unlike Hollywood and the growing trends of Russian silent Cinema at the time, Vertov chose not use actors, theatrical elements and melodrama to capture the urban sprawl of Soviet Russia; calling drama a corrupting influence on the proletarian sensibility (Kolchevska et al., 1986). Vertov’s cinematic focus was instead on the cityscapes, industrial structure†¦show more content†¦72), to build their narrative as an assortment of observations, and to adopt an authentic cinematic style - ‘Kino-eye’. â€Å"I make the viewer see in the manner best suited to my presentation of thi s or that visual phenomenon. The eye submits to the will of the camera and is directed by it to those successive points of the action that, most succinctly and vividly, bring the film phrase to the height or depth of resolution† (Vertov, Michelson and O Brien, 1984, p. 16). Vertov with his Kino-pravda – or â€Å"cinematic truth† (McLane, 2012, p.44) took an incredibly technical approach to filmmaking. He believed that because the camera’s ability to capture was via a mechanical process, the camera’s mechanical eye could capture reality with greater clarity than the human eye. Because of Vertov’s Kino-eye philosophy and the experimental nature of Man with a Movie Camera, his cinematography had a playfulness to it; using camera to fullest of its potential, and skillfully selecting different filmmaking techniques and effects as to best capture his subject. The nature of the film, and its broad use of techniques (in particular: montage, double exposure, split screen, Dutch angle, fast cutting, and slow and fast motion), along with Vertov’s