Flaherty and Vertov Robert Flaherty

Flaherty and Vertov Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov: A Comparative Study Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov were two of the earliest proponents of documentary film. In the 1920s, when the motion picture was still a fragile, emerging art form, they managed to produce documentary films that have in many ways come to define both the limitations and possibilities of the genre. In the course of this essay, we will examine the way that both filmmakers attempted to grapple with the complexities of reality through the cinematic process.

We will explore the ways that both Flaherty and Vertov utilized the newly emergent technology of the motion picture as a means of recording the external world. This will ultimately lead us to ask whether the filmmakers were successful in eliciting a truthful representation of reality.

In his essay on Nanook of the North, Robert Sherwood argues that Flaherty was able to attain a true-to-life representation of Eskimo life by refuting traditional narrative aims in favor of a more honest and open depiction: The back bone of every motion picture is the continuity - and by this I do not mean the plot. Nanook of the North had no plot whatsoever, and struggled along very well without it, but it did have continuity. The arrangement of scenes was sound and logical and consistent (Sherwood 1974, p. 15).

Such a vantage point may seem quaint from a contemporary point-of-view, wherein the plot takes precedence over the more technical consideration of continuity for the vast majority of viewers. Yet despite the formal accomplishment, as articulated so eloquently by Sherwood, that the film undoubtedly represents, its claims to authenticity have been called into question by a number of writers, most notably Duncan: Nevertheless, the film is full of faking and fudging in one form or another.

Observers (starting with John Grierson) would come to accuse Flaherty of ignoring reality in favor of a romance that was, for all its documentary value, irrelevant. The family at the film's center was not at all. These were photogenic Inuit, cast and paid to play these roles. The characters' authentic clothes were actually a nostalgic hybrid; the Inuit had started to integrate Western wear some time previously.

This integration was in fact quite general: igloos were giving way to southern building materials, many harpoons had been replaced by rifles, many kayak paddles by motors. The seal that appears to be engaging Nanook in a delightful tug of war is actually dead; Nanook is in fact being pulled around by friends at the other end of the rope, standing just off camera. During the famous walrus hunt the hunters desperately asked the filmmaker to stop shooting the camera and start shooting the rifle.

For his part, Flaherty pretended not to hear, and kept filming until the prey was taken in the old way. A failed bear hunt (not appearing in the film, but related in Flaherty's northern memoir, My Eskimo Friends) left its participants, Flaherty included, stranded and nearly starving for weeks. Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera was a more experimental affair, aiming to portray the lives of the inhabitants of Moscow in the 1920s. Formally, the film employs the innovative montage technique as its central narrative tool.

The ultimate protagonist of Man with a Movie Camera is the movie camera itself. Vertov set out to focus his energies on the possibilities, rather than the limitations, of the filmmaking apparatus. 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.

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.