Choice 1: Compare Man with a Movie Camera to films from the painterly mode (Rain, Berlin: Symphony of a City, Balet Mecanique, etc.) that Barnouw discusses and/or that we watched in class.  What influenced these types of films?  How did these films influence the documentary genre?  What is innovative about these films?

The Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov was a piece that came out of Russia in the late 1920’s. It sought to show the city in a futuristic manner, focusing on the machines that helped run the city and the processes that were required for it to function. Vertov filmed the working class through the “cinema eye” and used his camera to show truth and life in ways that an audience wouldn’t otherwise experience it (Barnouw 58).

 As a documentary, it could get abstract at times with the technical manipulation of the film to achieve perspective variety. However, it focused on the daily life of citizens and not actors, using their everyday routines as guidance for scenes. This focus on the unscripted and seemingly ordinary developed its own painterly genre within the film industry, producing many documentaries that broke away from fiction film styles. The audience watching Man with a Movie Camera was shown scenes of life coming into the world and leaving it, trolleys, and even the editing process itself. It was a film that was widely appreciated in theaters- the result of the audience’s fascination at the time concerning their own routines through another’s perspective. Their lives were being documented and at the same time given a voice by being included in the film, an aspect that would later develop into narrative story telling documentaries (Nichols 132). 

Documentary films that were created around this era were often focused on perspective, developing into the painterly mode genre in which the visual manipulations of light and imagery guided movie scenes. They tended not to be based on stories, like Man with a Movie Camera, and usually did not follow a rising and falling plot. This was the result of the influence that painters, musicians, and other artists brought to cinema during the 1920’s (Barnouw 71). Images were the focus of these films, just as it would be in a painting. The result was abstract films that let the audience gain a different perspective on mundane objects or daily life. An example of this is the film Balet Mecanique, the creative work of Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphey. This 1929 film focused on the everyday items and events that someone could come across in ordinary circumstances (Barnouw 72). It used interesting image reversal techniques, a kaleidoscope effect, and repetition to make ordinary mechanics take on their own life and characterizations.

Not every film in the painterly genre was prone to being so abstract. Another 1929 classic is the documentary Rain, a film of tranquil and calming images that allowed the audience to look at a rainstorm for its beauty without having to worry about getting caught in it (Barnouw 78).  Filmed by Joris Ivens, it took on a painterly documentary approach and was similar to Man with a Movie Camera because it did not follow any characters or have a story plot , but instead followed the adventures of raindrops as they traveled through town. The film differed from Man with a Movie Camera concerning the filming techniques used, which zoomed in and focused on the patterns that rain made in the city landscape, creating beautiful imagery of the city reflected in puddles. The puddles created an impressionist effect of the city and turned passing citizens into living works of art.

The painterly documentaries were created in the 1920’s and were popular up until the introduction of films with audio and dialogue. Though quickly disregarded once sound swept through films, the painter-as-documentarist genre contributed wonderful films to history, even a sub-genre of city symphonies, in which the city became the focus of the film and the people in it merely part of a larger landscape (Barnouw 81). Films like Man with a Movie Camera set up the foundation for documentaries that encouraged the interaction of the camera with its surroundings, something that audiences now subconsciously expect (Nichols 187).