Beginning 'Man With a Movie Camera'

Good scenes to analyse:
The opening sequence of everyone coming into the cinema.
'On Sports'



Things I have noticed.
Establishing/birds eye shot is used midway through a scene
No tracking
Hardly any camera movement, camera moves when is placed on top of a train
interesting combinations of shots: Many extreme low shots.
Use of extreme close ups, Many closeups, however little use of mid shots and no two shots.
Use of split screen
Shot on very narrow film
At point the camera cuts extremely quickly from one random image to another at an extremely high pace.
Camera tracking the horse
The pace of the editing often increases accordingly with the music.
Hand held camera in 'Beer pub' scene.
Anti Nazi/fascism symbolism.
Lots of layers of spectatorship, watching people watching a film in a cinema that you have witnessed being made

The film is a celebration of industrialisation.
No characters that the audience get to know or feel any empathy for, just a series of people in various industries.
Factories producing butter cases, cigarettes, in telephone communication, manufacturing, hairdressing.

There is no Narrative or structure, it certainly does not follow a punctuated equilibrium.
The film feels like you are watching people get on with their daily lives.
There are no dramatic events or events of high significance in comparison to the rest of the film. There is no dramatic climax that lasts over the course of the film however music builds tension within particular moments e.g: when a man is leaning over a train track and the train is steadily moving towards him, the background music adds to the stressful mood that is created for the audience.




Tatlin Malevitch
-Young artists attacked traditional art forms and absorbed european modernist movements such as cubism and futurism


Silent cinema
Films of the 1920s are often considered among the greatest masterpieces created in the whole history of the medium.
The argument of those who concur (agree) with this view is that cinema should be regarded as primarily a visual medium. They believe that by the mid 1920s filmmakers had developed ways to tell film stories visually with great skill and ingenuity.
Filmmakers and critics alike despaired with the coming of sound at the end of the 1920s as the unique dimension of film had been discarded. Dialogue-driven narrative was perceived as dragging cinema backwards as a form of their, rather than as the brilliantly new, innovative and artistic form of visual expression it was proving itself to be.

Why was silent film resisted?

- New technologies.
- Not what people were used to, a completely different concept.
- Silent cinema was considered an art form


Modernism: a style or movement in the arts that aims to depart significantly from classical and traditional forms.
Is film art/expressive or is it realist?





Technological: Vertov had worked on the agit trains, mobile propaganda centres sent to the eastern front and the far corners of the soviet union.  Their task was to disseminate the propaganda through films, plays, leaflets and posters.

Have a set introduction and tweak it to the question. Bring in context e.g.:
historically socially, politically economically. You can intertwine it through the essay as well