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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 allowed him to express his theories of his writings of Kino-eye (the camera). The film has a very simple plot that describes an average day in Russia, yet the final pieces of this film emerge a complex and fast-paced production that excites the audience. Vertov's ability to use radical editing techniques with unconventional filming to present ordinary things has inspired many directors around the world. And still now modern avant-garde movies apply many of these same techniques to dramatize simple and complex stories. Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema in the post WWI era. During this time, the freedom to make films was limited due to low stock of supply. Vertov and his colleagues had to be very creative and innovative if they were going produce anything at all. 'The Kuleshov Workshop', a workshop class at the Moscow Film School led by Lev Kuleshov included famous Soviet filmmakers like Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, but excluded Vertov. This is significant to the fact that Vertov was very different than any other Russian director. Unlike the other Russian filmmakers, Vertov usually captured people with a candid-camera that allowed him to portray the truth, for example in his series called Kino-Pravada 1922-1925. "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 cameraman's vision is put into question, since he moves out of frame in the third shot of the film. In other words, the cameraman cannot be equated with a central character, or even the central narrating intelligence of a narrative film, since visual perspective is not localized in a single figure, but dispersed through multiple perspectives." (162). From this point, the film is bombarded with sequence after sequence of 9 daily ordinary events that occur from morning to night in an orchestral movement manner. Bombarded are the cuts because of the abundant amount of imagery and plenty of assorted camera angles. There are a large variety of metaphorical cuts that search an intellectual response of the audience. For example, when the woman wakes up from bed at the very beginning, a clip of window shutters, a camera lens opening and closing, are juxtaposed in a sequence of her blinking (appendix 2). This sequence is a metaphor connecting the lens of a movie camera as "an extension of human vision". As the rapid-fire cuts increase with the music, tempo and rhythm, an emotional response is experienced, and this thesis (metaphor) of the film is emphasized. Other examples of this same technique are thoroughly presented in each other of the nine events. Amongst this array of symbolism, there exists other editing techniques that makes the film even more powerful at certain times. About twenty-one minutes into the film, Voltov's wife Elizaveta Svilova appears at the beginning of a movement at the editing table, with a pair of scissors.
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