Man With a Movie Camera (1929), directed by Dziga Vertov and edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova, is a silent documentary intended to have no actors and no plot. As discussed in The Edit section of our second lecture, the viewer cannot help but perceive a sense of story and character in this experimental classic. This is because, as Mcloud argues in his comic: Blood In The Gutter, it is in the nature of the human imagination to perceive fragmented parts and make them into a whole. In an innate act of what he describes as ‘closure’ we join the dots between one camera cut and other.
“Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.”
Mcloud poses an interesting question; is it possible for any sequence of images to be totally unrelated to each other? He argues that no matter how dissimilar two images are to each other, our imagination helps us find meaning, even in the most jarring of combinations.
Check out a small sample of Man With a Movie Camera: minutes 35:00 to 37:30.
I could not help but feel that director Ron Fricke had been inspired by Man With A Movie Camera, when he made the non-narrative documentary film Baraka (1992).
Check out the similarities between the two scenes.
Both “non-narrative” films allow the audience to collaborate in the making of story. The audience closes the gaps between juxtaposed transitioning shots with their imagination. This effect can be incredibly powerful and uniquely meaningful to the viewer.