Man Vertov Analysis

998 Words4 Pages
Montage, in cinematic terms, is defined as the juxtaposition of conflicting images and ideas, which then creates meaning. It is the fundamental and defining characteristic of cinema. Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera uses montage as a means to create a sense of consciousness within the viewer, while also reflecting, in his montage, the dynamism and chaos of modern life under the new Soviet regime. Vertov’s ultimate goal for cinema was to emancipate it from the bourgeois realm of canonical art and create a universal cinematic language that transcends class boundaries. The film associates the movie camera lens with the human eye, which gives birth to a new form of mechanical vision grounded in this new modern world. Vertov’s Man…show more content…
According to Anne Michelson’s article “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera,” “the apparent purpose of the film was to show breadth and precision of the camera’s recording ability” (Michelson 99). Vertov superimposes a human eye onto the camera lens at the beginning of the film. The type of vision that Vertov introduces in the film is associated with the newly mechanized world. Vertov sought out to “redefine cinema as capturing the ‘feel of the world’ through the substitution of the camera, that ‘perfectible eye,’ for the human eye, that ‘imperceptible one’” (Michelson 101). The camera represents the new human eye, freeing humanity of its immobility. In his piece “A New Current in Cinema”, Vertov claims that his films would be “a revolution in seeing, and therefore in man’s reception of the world in general” (Vertov 84). The camera is everywhere in the city, placed at times at the center of the action and focusing on the minute details of its subject. In other instances of the film, Vertov positions the camera on tops of the buildings looking down onto the city streets from an aerial or a bird’s eye view. The camera operates as this omnipresent and omniscient eye surveillancing the movement of the
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