Flaherty and Vertov Robert Flaherty Term Paper

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In the words of DeBartolo:

Vertov was the founder of Soviet documentary, and he was an enthusiastic opponent of the theatre, staged events and fiction in film. Vertov loved machines and the tricks that the camera was able to do fascinated him. "Man with a Movie Camera" is a result of his fascination. He filmed "Man with a Movie Camera" using a candid camera, filming undercover or from a distance, using split screens, dissolves, superimposition, slow motion, crude animation and freeze frames. He seemed devoted to tram cars, shuttle looms, traffic signals, and motor cars, and he traveled throughout the country side and into factories.

Shortly thereafter, Vertov would make his first sound film, Enthusiasm. By this time, Vertov was allegedly disgusted with the sort of mainstream, narrative-based cinema that was so popular with the working-class public - and which today continues to triumph in the form of Hollywood entertainment blockbusters. In this film, Vertov's aesthetic became even more radical than it was in the Man with the Movie Camera. In Enthusiasm, the camera has no fixed reference point. This means that there is no clear, coherent point-of-view for the audience to follow. The film depicts a mad symphony, in sight and sound, of a crumbling bourgeois order at the feet of organized religion and revolution organized by the working classes. The real focus of the film, however, is on the lives of a group of coal miners in the Donbas mountains struggling to meet their quotas under the Soviet five-year plan.

Ultimately, it was Vertov who was able to forge a more truthful, uncompromised account of daily life through his filmmaking activity.

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Flaherty clearly lacked a clear ideological purpose in his filmmaking platform - his ultimate goal was to capture images that conformed to his vision of the subject, and thus had no qualms about manipulating his subjects and staging scenes for the benefit of the camera. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with Vertov's political sympathies, he was able to forge a unique, individualistic version of documentary cinema marked by stylistic ingenuity and a devotion to the "real life" of his subjects.

What both of these early documentarians show us, however, is that all filmed images are, to a certain extent, staged, in that they are delivered to us through the filmmaker's unique eye. Here, Vertov is the more interesting example, as his hyper-stylized presentation of sound and image is unrivaled in modern cinema - with the possible exception of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who would continue Vertov's efforts at forging a cross between documentary and experimental narrative in his movies of the 1970s. Flaherty's aim, on the other hand, was to make a film that would appeal to the masses in his home country. In doing so, he manipulated his subject to present an incredibly skewed version of reality - something that Vertov would have surely objected to.

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