Myles' Blog

https://voicethread.com/myvoice/thread/28418388 Reflection - Learning about Eisenstein was very interesting and useful. I learnt about the 5 types of montage, being metric, rhymic, tonal, overtonal and intellectual. I was most facinated about overtonal, which consisted of metric, rhymic and tonal, involving fast paced images etc. I intend to follow this idea in my production, especially if I choose to do a documentary about mountain safety, as it will make the film more dramatic and exciting for the audience.

Dziga Vertov - Dziga Vertov, also known as Denis Kaufman, was a soviet pioneer documentary film maker and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His theories and practices influenced the cinema verité style of documentary film making and the Dziga Vertov group, a radical film making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. His most famous film was Man with a movie camera, produced in 1929, which depicts a day in Russian city. However, the film was actually shot in multiple cities over the course of four years. His film making aesthetic was driven by his political beliefs as a communist and he was heavily influenced by Eisenstein’s use of montage. Vertov’s aim was to capture ‘film truth’, being fragments of actuality which, when arranged together, reveal a deeper truth that cannot be seen by the naked eye. In the kino-pravada series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences in places such as schools, bars etc., however he would sometimes film this using a hidden camera,...

  Reflection – researching Robert Flaherty has allowed me to understand more about staged documentaries, which are common in the world of documentary. After researching ‘Nanook of the North’, it taught me that you can make your production look very authentic, despite being staged. I may choose to follow a style similar to this, if the topic I choose to base my production on is too difficult to film authentically. For example, if I chose to do a production about mountain rescue or safety, I may need to film a staged ‘rescue mission’, as they are unlikely to let me film an authentic rescue.