Documentaries From Humble Beginnings

What is a documentary? That is a question that no one can seem to answer. While it is true that there is no legitimate definition of a documentary, people can still somehow know if they are watching one. “They offer us alternative ways of seeing the world, from the caustic but double-edged voice-over commentary about a seemingly doomed culture in Land without Bread to the unobtrusive, sync sound portrait of a great musician (Bob Dylan) in Don’t Look Back” (Nichols). Like Nichols mentioned, documentaries serve us as a mirror of how the world looks according to the documentarian.

In Man With a Movie Camera, we notice a man with a movie camera randomly shooting clips of the day to day lives of the citizens of USSR. Occasionally we see the cameraman in the city pointing his device in different places and angles. The images of simple life events such as women going to beauty salons, people walking to and from work, and traffic being directed documents their lives and shows that people in a communist country still live like ordinary people in their private lives.

In one of our class discussions, I remember one of my classmates mentioning that the scenes of the documentary occasionally showed the eye of the cameraman looking through the lens and looking around as the images juxtapose together, creating that sense of a god-like state of mind. It was suggested that the camera holds a great power of revealing what the human eye cannot perceive.

Vertov, “suggested that the emerging documentary form could draw profitably from avant-garde practices and the oratorical tradition of addressing an audience to move or persuade it” (Nichols). One of those avant-garde moments in his film included a version of himself and his camera inside a glass of alcohol. While there are many interpretations of what that image means, it is entirely up to the viewer to decide. We may never know exactly what a true documentary is since it keeps evolving with the times. However, we can learn from them that the camera is a very powerful tool to keep providing education that we will never have a chance to experience on our own.