Man with the Movie Camera

Vertov's extremely avant-guard style is abundantly clear through his decision to exclude not only characters for the most part but any true sort of plot in the film "Man with the Movie Camera". It starts off portraying a movie theater preparing before a show. It then moves to showing several people, both children and adults, that live on the streets sleeping/waking up. This section of the film personally reminded me of the muckrakers in the early twentieth century, except despite being in a state of despair the people in the film, almost seemed happy. After that the film repeatedly jumps in between three main groups of images, machinery, work and life outside of work. The machinery section is quite possibly the most straight forward of any the groups, it simply showed machines. Whether they be for work, transportation or recreation there were images of all sorts of technology. The next group of images was the work life group. In this section people were diligently working at their craft almost always smiling and acting happy. Vertov undoubtedly did this on purpose as a form of propaganda trying to convey the message that works is in fact fun and that people are happy performing repetitive tasks. The last section is definitely the most intriguing of the three. The section that is life outside of work ranges in everything from relaxing on the beach to the birth of a baby and a funeral. This film undoubtedly is viewed as being very strange at best by the mass majority but is nonetheless a valiant effort to revolutionize the way that film up until that point had been created. Vertov masterfully uses the montage technique to establish motifs which is essential to the cohesiveness and entertaining aspects of the film. He frequently cuts back to similar images at different tempos to illustrate the progression as the day goes on. All-in-all a very interesting film.