Perception And Understanding: Five Distinct Documentary Filmmakers

Perception and Understanding: Five Distinct Documentary Filmmakers Documentary filmmaking would not be what it is today if it weren’t for the pioneers of this film style. Many people have contributed to rise of this approach to making motion pictures, but the five people that I will discuss each had their own style, influences, and designs. Utilizing each of their own resources and tireless work to their craft we are giving many different approaches to documentary film. The first of the five filmmaker is Robert J. Flaherty, this man made the first successful full-length documentary call Nanook of the North (1922). In class we discussed that Flaherty did not go to any film school and had little experience with film before this, although was

He heavily influenced the ideals of observational cinema. “Vertov saw human perception as having limitations compared with the more perfectible ‘machine eye’ of the motion picture camera. Flaherty, too, thought of the motion picture camera as a seeing machine, like the telescope or microscope, offering ‘a sort of extra sight’, albeit with a very different purpose from Vertov’s “(McLane 74). In Nanook of the North our subject and focus is surrounded by an Eskimo family. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has no definitive subject, but many subject’s. His approach to this film is to have no clear narrative and no main subject for the film to focus on. It is difficult to describe what kind of film this really is. This is a film about humanity interacting with machines and is portrayed in a very artistic manor. We see many editing techniques not really utilized in documentaries before this. Many icon moments are seen, such as the director superimposed inside a glass of beer holding his camera. In class we discussed the Kinoks and how Vertov saw life through his Kino-Eye. We are presented with a truth or Pravda as discussed in class. With no real defined conflict in this movie we are given the opportunity to see the world as is. Using the camera to create art is what drives this movie and what gave birth to what is called a city symphony. In class we went over how these many montages could be Vertov giving us a critique of the human condition and overall relationship we have with