Man with a Movie Camera

Written by	Dziga Vertov
Cinematography	Mikhail Kaufman
Release date(s)	January 8, 1929
Running time	80 min/68 min
Country	Soviet Union
Language	Silent film No intertitles

Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov.

Vertov's feature film, produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in Odessa and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters," they are the cameraman of the title and the modern Soviet Union he discovers and presents in the film.

This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

Overview

The film has an unabashedly art film style, and emphasizes that film can go anywhere. For instance, the film uses such scenes as superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass, filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed, even filming a woman giving birth, and the baby being taken away to be bathed.

Vertov's message about the prevalence and unobtrusiveness of filming was not yet true—cameras might have been able to go anywhere, but not without being noticed; they were too large to be hidden easily, and too noisy to remain hidden anyway. To get footage using a hidden camera, Vertov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman had to distract the subject with something else even louder than the camera filming them.

The film also features a few obvious stagings such as the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed (cameras at the time were fairly bulky and loud, and not surreptitious) and the shot of the chess pieces being swept to the center of the board (a shot which was spliced in backwards, causing the pieces to expand outward and stand into position). The film was criticized for both the stagings and its stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director's frequent assailing of fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses."

Vertov's intentions

Dziga Vertov, or Denis Arkadevich Kaufman, was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s. He belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks, or kinokis. Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making. This radical approach to movie making led to a slight dismantling of film industry: the very field in which they were working. This being said, most of Vertov's films were highly controversial, and the kinoc movement was despised by many filmmakers of the time. Vertov's crowning achievement, Man with a Movie Camera was his response to the critics who rejected his previous film, One-Sixth Part of the World. Critics declared that Vertov's overuse of "intertitles" was inconsistent with the code of film-making that the 'kinos' subscribed to.

Working within that context, Vertov dealt with much fear in anticipation of the film's release. He requested a warning to be printed in Soviet central Communist newspaper, Pravda, which spoke directly of the film's experimental, controversial nature. Vertov was worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public eye. Upon the official release of Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov issued a statement at the beginning of the film, which read:

"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

Stylistic aspects

Many visual ideas, such as the quick editing, the close-ups of machinery, the store window displays, even the shots of a typewriter keyboard appear to have been borrowed from Walter Ruttman's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which predates Man with a Movie Camera by two years.

Because of the doubts before screening, and the great anticipation which came from Vertov's pre-screening statements, the film had gained a colossal interest before it was even shown. Once the film was finally screened, the public either embraced or dismissed Vertov's stylistic choices. Working within a Marxist ideology, Vertov strove to create a futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This artificial city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. The kino’s aesthetic shined through in his portrayal of electrification, industrialization, and the achievements of workers through hard labour. This could also be viewed as early modernism in film.

On a more technical note, Man with a Movie Camera's usage of double exposure and seemingly 'hidden' cameras made the movie come across as a very surreal montage rather than a linear motion picture. Many of the scenes in the film contain characters, which change size or appear underneath other objects (double exposure). Because of these aspects, the movie’s overall speed is fast moving and enthralling. The sequences and close-ups capture emotional qualities, which could not be fully portrayed through the use of words. The film's lack of 'actors' and 'sets' makes for a unique view of the everyday world; one "directed toward the creation of a genuine, international, purely cinematic language, entirely distinct from the language of theatre and literature."

Vertov's use of stylistic symbolism was especially effective in creating a universal theme throughout the film. For example, one scene intercuts hidden camera shots of a couple getting marriage certificates and another couple at a divorce registry office. Soon after, two old women are shown attending a funeral procession and a woman is shown giving birth to a child. These shots are juxtaposed to possibly make a statement on the then current state of the Soviet world vs. a future one 'being born.' Regardless, these sharply cut shots create a jarring effect for the viewer.

Soundtracks

The film, originally released in 1929, was silent, and accompanied in theaters with live music. It has since been released a number of times with different soundtracks:

• 1996 – Norwegian composer Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere) was commissioned by the Tromsø International Film Festival to write a new soundtrack for the movie, using the director's written instructions for the original accompanying piano player. Jenssen wrote half of the soundtrack, turning the other half to Per Martinsen (aka Mental Overdrive). It was used for the Norwegian version Mannen med filmkameraet at the 1996 TIFF . Scored movie not available after the festival. Soundtrack released in 2001 on CD.
• 1996 – New composition performed by the Alloy Orchestra, based on notes left by Vertov. It incorporates sound effects such as sirens, babies crying, crowd noise, etc. Readily available on several different DVD versions.
• 1999 – In the Nursery version , made for the Bradford International Film Festival. Currently available on a few DVD versions, often paired with the Alloy Orchestra score as an alternate soundtrack.
• 2002 – A version was released with a soundtrack composed by Jason Swinscoe and performed by the British jazz and electronic outfit The Cinematic Orchestra (see Man with a Movie Camera (album)). Originally made for the Porto 2000 Film Festival. It was also released on DVD in limited numbers by Ninja Tune. This DVD edition is currently very much in demand and goes for prices higher than the other DVD versions.
• 2002 – A DVD of the film by the British Film Institute was released with a score by Michael Nyman. This score is readily available on several different DVD editions. It has not been issued on CD, but some of the score is reworked from material Nyman wrote for the Sega Saturn video game Enemy Zero, which had a limited CD release, and Nyman performs a brief excerpt, "Odessa Beach" on his album, The Piano Sings.
• 2008 – Norwegian electronic jazz trio Halt the Flux performed their interpretation of the soundtrack for Man with a Movie Camera in Bergen International Film Festival. The trio consists of Anders Wasserfall, Jørgen Vaage & Bjørnar Thyholdt.
• 2008 October – London based Cinematic Orchestra undertook a show featuring a screening of Vertov's film, which preceded the re-issue of the Man With A Movie Camera DVD, in November.
• 2008 November – San Francisco Bay Area based Tricks of the Light Orchestra accompanied a screening of the film on Sunday, November 30 at Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco.

Further reading

Feldman, Seth R. Dziga Vertov. A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.

• Devaux, Frederique. L'Homme et la camera: de Dziga Vertov. CrisnÈe, Belgique: Editions Yellow Now, 1990.
• Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. The Oxford history of World Cinema. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Tsivian, Yuri. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. edited and with an introduction by Yuri Tsivian; Russian texts translated by Julian Graffy; filmographic and biographical research, Aleksandr Deriabin; co-researchers, Oksana Sarkisova, Sarah Keller, Theresa Scandiffio. Gemona, Udine : Le Giornate del cinema muto, 2004.

Formalism in Auteur Theory

If the ideological approach is concerned with broad movements and the effects of the world around the filmmaker, then the auteur theory is diametrically opposed to it, celebrating the individual, usually in the person of the filmmaker, and how his personal decisions, thoughts, and style manifest themselves in the material.

This branch of criticism, begun by François Truffaut and the other young film critics writing for Cahiers du cinema, was created for two reasons.

First, it was created to redeem the art of film itself. By arguing that films had auteurs, or authors, Truffaut sought to make films (and their directors) at least as important as the more widely-accepted art forms, such as literature, music, and painting. Each of these art forms, and the criticism thereof, is primarily concerned with a sole creative force: the author of a novel (not, for example, his editor or type-setter), the composer of a piece of music (though sometimes the performers are given credence, akin to actors in film today), or the painter of a fresco (not his assistants who mix the colours or often do some of the painting themselves). By elevating the director, and not the screenwriter, to the same importance as novelists, composers, or painters, it sought to free the cinema from its popular conception as a bastard art, somewhere between theater and literature.

Secondly, it sought to redeem many filmmakers who were looked down upon by mainstream film critics. It argued that genre filmmakers and low-budget B-movies were just as important, if not more, than the prestige pictures commonly given more press and legitimacy in France and the United States. According to Truffaut's theory, auteurs took material that was beneath their talents—a thriller, a pulpy action film, a romance—and, through their style, put their own personal stamp on it.

It is this auteur style that concerns formalism.

A perfect example of formalist criticism of auteur style would be the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock primarily made thrillers, which, according to this the Cahiers du cinema crowd, were popular with the public but dismissed by the critics and the award ceremonies (though it should be noted that Hitchcock's Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1940 Academy Awards, and though he never won the Oscar for directing, he was nominated five times in the category). Truffaut and his colleagues argued that Hitchcock had a style as distinct as that of Flaubert or Van Gogh: the virtuoso editing, the lyrical camera movements, the droll humour. He also had "Hitchcockian" themes: the wrong man falsely accused, violence erupting at the times it was least expected, the cool blonde. Now, Hitchcock is more or less universally lauded, his films dissected shot-by-shot, his work celebrated as being that of a master. And the study of this style, his variations, and obsessions all fall quite neatly under the umbrella of formalist film theory.

Auteur theory

In film criticism, the 1950s-era Auteur theory holds that a director's films reflect that director's personal creative vision, as if he were the primary "Auteur" (the French word for "author"). In some cases, film producers are considered to have a similar "Auteur" role for films that they have produced.

In law the Auteur is the creator of a film as a work of art, and is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law the film director shall always be considered the author or one of the authors of a film.

Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated by film director and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. "Auteurism" is the method of analyzing films based on this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director's work that makes him an Auteur. Both the Auteur theory and the Auteurism method of film analysis are frequently associated with the French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical Cahiers du cinéma.

Origin

Auteur theory draws on the work of the "The Young Turks", a group of cinema enthusiasts who wrote for the Cahiers du cinéma and argued that films should reflect a director's personal vision. They championed filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir as absolute 'auteurs' of their films. Although André Bazin, co-founder of the Cahiers, provided a forum for Auteurism to flourish, he himself remained wary of its excesses, as he explained in his article "On the Auteur Theory" (Cahier # 70, 1957).

Another key element of Auteur theory comes from Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen" and the idea that directors should wield their cameras like writers use their pens and that they need not be hindered by traditional storytelling.

Truffaut and the members of the Cahiers recognized that moviemaking was an industrial process. However, they proposed an ideal to strive for: the director should use the commercial apparatus the way a writer uses a pen and, through the mise en scène, imprint their vision on the work (conversely, the role of the screenwriter was minimized in their eyes). While recognizing that not all directors reached this ideal, they valued the work of those who neared it.

Truffaut's development

In his 1954 essay "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" ("a certain tendency in French cinema"), François Truffaut coined the phrase "la politique des Auteurs", and asserted that the worst of Jean Renoir's movies would always be more interesting than the best of Jean Delannoy's. "Politique" might very well be translated as "policy" or "program"; it involves a conscious decision to look at films and to value them in a certain way. Truffaut provocatively said that "(t)here are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors."

Truffaut's article dealt primarily by his own admission with scenarists or screenwriters. Precisely the screenwriting duo Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost whom Truffaut believed simplified and compromised many of the great works of French literature in order to support the political topic of its day. In his article, he quotes the director Claude Autant-Lara describing his adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh as an "anti-war" book when the book pre-dated the Second World War. The term auteur described by Truffaut is applied to directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Jacques Becker, Jacques Tati, and Robert Bresson, who aside from having a distinct style also wrote the screenplays or worked on the screenplays of the film as well. The auteur theory in its embryonic form dealt with the nature of literary adaptations and Truffaut's discomfort with the screenwriters Aurenche's and Bost's maxim that any film adaptation of a novel should capture its spirit and deal only with the "filmable" aspects of the books. Truffaut believed that film directors like Robert Bresson using the film narrative at its disposal could approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes, for which he used the film version of Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest as an example.

Much of Truffaut's writing of this period, and of his colleagues at the film criticism magazine Cahiers du cinéma, was designed to lambaste post-war French cinema, and especially the big production films of the cinéma de qualité ("quality films"). Truffaut's circle referred to these films with disdain as sterile, old-fashioned cinéma de papa (or "Dad's cinema"). During the Nazi occupation, the Vichy government did not allow the exhibition of U.S. films such as The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane. When French film critics were finally able to see these 1940s U.S. movies in 1946, they were enamoured with these films.

Truffaut's theory maintains that all good directors (and many bad ones) have such a distinctive style or consistent theme that their influence is unmistakable in the body of their work. Truffaut himself was appreciative of both directors with a marked visual style (such as Alfred Hitchcock), and those whose visual style was less pronounced but who had nevertheless a consistent theme throughout their movies (such as Jean Renoir's humanism).

Impact

The Auteur theory was used by the directors of the nouvelle vague (New Wave) movement of French cinema in the 1960s (many of whom were also critics at the Cahiers du cinéma) as justification for their intensely personal and idiosyncratic films. One of the ironies of the Auteur theory is that, at the very moment Truffaut was writing, the break-up of the Hollywood studio system during the 1950s was ushering in a period of uncertainty and conservatism in American cinema, with the result that fewer of the sort of films Truffaut admired were actually being made.

The "Auteur" approach was adopted in English-language film criticism in the 1960s. In the UK, Movie adopted Auteurism, while in the U.S., Andrew Sarris introduced it in the essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962". This essay is where the half-French, half-English term, "Auteur theory", originated. To be classified as an "Auteur", according to Sarris, a director must accomplish technical competence in their technique, personal style in terms of how the movie looks and feels, and interior meaning (although many of Sarris's auterist criteria were left vague). Later in the decade, Sarris published The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, which quickly became the unofficial bible of Auteurism.

The Auteurist critics—Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer—wrote mostly about directors (as they were directors themselves), although they also produced some shrewd appreciations of actors. Later writers of the same general school have emphasised the contributions of star personalities like Mae West. However, the stress was on directors; and screenwriters, producers and others have reacted with a good deal of hostility. Writer William Goldman has said that, on first hearing the Auteur theory, his reaction was, "What's the punchline?"

Criticism

Starting in the 1960s, some film critics began criticising Auteur theory's focus on the authorial role of the director. Pauline Kael and Sarris feuded in the pages of The New Yorker and various film magazines. One reason for the backlash is the collaborative aspect of shooting a film (one person cannot do everything) and in the theory's privileging of the role of the director (whose name, at times, has become more important than the movie itself). In Kael's review of Citizen Kane, a classic film for the Auteur model, she points out how the film made extensive use of the distinctive talents of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland

Notable screenwriters such as Ernest Lehman, Nicholas Kazan, Robert Riskin, and William Goldman have publicly balked at the idea that directors are more authorial than screenwriters, while film historian Aljean Harmetz, referring to the creative input of producers and studio execs in classical Hollywood, argues that the Auteur Theory "collapses against the reality of the studio system."

The Auteur theory was also challenged by the influence of New Criticism, a school of literary criticism. The New Critics argued that critics made an "intentional fallacy" when they tried to interpret works of art by speculating about what the author meant, based on the author's personality or life experiences. New Critics argued that that information or speculation about an author's intention was secondary to the words on the page as the basis of the experience of reading literature.

Formalist film theory

Formalist film theory is a theory of film study that is focused on the formal, or technical, elements of a film: i.e., the lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of color, shot composition, and editing. It is a major theory of film study today.

Basic Theory

Formalism, at its most general, considers the synthesis (or lack of synthesis) of the multiple elements of film production, and the effects, emotional and intellectual, of that synthesis and of the individual elements. For example, let's take the single element of editing. A formalist might study how standard Hollywood "continuity editing" creates a more comforting effect and non-continuity or jump-cut editing might become more disconcerting or volatile.

Or one might consider the synthesis of several elements, such as editing, shot composition, and music. The shoot-out that ends Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western "Dollars" trilogy is a valid example of how these elements work together to produce an effect: The shot selection goes from very wide to very close and tense; the length of shots decreases as the sequence progresses towards its end; the music builds. All of these elements, in combination rather than individually, create tension.

Formalism is unique in that it embraces both ideological and auteurist branches of criticism. In both these cases, the common denominator for Formalist criticism is style.

Ideological Formalism

Ideologues focus on how socio-economic pressures create a particular style, and auteurists on how auteurs put their own stamp on the material. Since formalism is primarily concerned with style and how it communicates the ideas, emotions, and themes (rather than, as critics of formalism point out, concentrating on the themes of a work itself).

Two examples of ideological interpretations that are related to formalism:

The classical Hollywood cinema has a very distinct style, sometimes called the Institutional Mode of Representation: continuity editing, massive coverage, three-point lighting, "mood" music, dissolves, all designed to make the experience as pleasant as possible. The socio-economic ideological explanation for this is, quite crassly, that Hollywood wants to make as much money and appeal to as many ticket-buyers as possible.

Film noir, which was given its name by Nino Frank, is marked by lower production values, darker images, underlighting, location shooting, and general nihilism: this is because, we are told, during the war and post-war years filmmakers were generally more pessimistic (as well as filmgoers). Also, the German Expressionists (including Fritz Lang, who was not technically an expressionist as popularly believed) emigrated to America and brought their stylized lighting effects (and disillusionment due to the war) to American soil.

It can be argued that, by this approach, the style or 'language' of these films is directly affected not by the individuals responsible, but by social, economic, and political pressures, of which the filmmakers themselves may be aware or not. It is this branch of criticism that gives us such categories as the classical Hollywood cinema, the American independent movement, the New American independent movement, the new queer cinema, and the French, German, and Czech new waves.

Marxist film theory

Marxist film theory is one of the oldest forms of film theory.

Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage.

While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative structure of Hollywood filmmaking.

Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over.

Eisenstein himself, however, was accused by the Soviet authorities under Stalin of "formalist error," of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the worker nobly.

French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, would employ radical editing and choice of subject matter, as well as subversive parody, to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas.

Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, began his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni [Wandering around in the night we are consumed by fire] with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about his dispossessed daily life.

Situationist film makers produced a number of important films, where the only contribution by the situationist film cooperative was the sound-track. In Can dialectics break bricks? (1973) a Chinese Kung Fu film was transformed by redubbing into an epistle on state capitalism and Proletarian revolution. The intellectual technique of using capitalism's own structures against itself is known as detournement.

A Trip to the Moon

A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French black and white silent science fiction film. It is loosely based on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.

he film was written and directed by Georges Méliès, assisted by his brother Gaston. The film runs 14 minutes if projected at 16 frames per second, which was the standard frame rate at the time the film was produced. It was extremely popular at the time of its release and is the best-known of the hundreds of fantasy films made by Méliès. A Trip to the Moon is the first science fiction film, and utilizes innovative animation and special effects, including the iconic shot of the rocketship landing in the moon's eye.

It was named one of the 100 greatest films of the 20th century by The Village Voice, ranking in at #84.

Synopsis

At a meeting of astronomers, their president proposes a trip to the Moon. After addressing some dissent, six brave astronomers agree to the plan. They build a space capsule in the shape of a bullet, and a huge cannon to shoot it into space. The astronomers embark and their capsule is fired from the cannon with the help of a bevy of beautiful women in sailors' outfits. The Man in the Moon watches the capsule as it approaches, and it hits him in the eye.

Landing safely on the Moon, the astronomers get out of the capsule and watch the Earth rise in the distance. Exhausted by their journey, the astronomers unroll their blankets and sleep. As they sleep, a comet passes, the Big Dipper appears with human faces peering out of each star, old Saturn leans out of a window in his ringed planet, and Phoebe, goddess of the Moon, appears seated in a crescent-moon swing. Phoebe calls down a snowfall that wakens the astronomers. They seek shelter in a cavern and discover giant mushrooms. One astronomer opens his umbrella; it promptly takes root and turns into a giant mushroom itself.

At this point, a Selenite (an insectoid alien inhabitant of the Moon, named after Selene) appears, but it is easily killed by an astronomer, as the creatures explode if they are hit with a hard force. More Selenites appear and it becomes increasingly difficult for the astronomers to destroy them as they are surrounded. The Selenites arrest the astronomers and bring them to their leader. An astronomer picks the Chief Selenite up off its throne and dashes him to the ground, exploding him.

The astronomers run back to their capsule (continuing to hit the pursuing Selenites on the way). Five get inside. The sixth uses a rope to tip the capsule over a ledge on the Moon and into space. A Selenite tries to seize the capsule at the last minute. Astronomer, capsule, and Selenite fall through space and land in an ocean on Earth. The Selenite falls off and the capsule floats back to the surface, where they are rescued by a ship and towed ashore.

Complete version

When originally screened, the film featured a final scene depicting a celebratory parade in honor of the travelers' return. Until recently, this scene was considered lost, and did not appear on any commercially available editions. However, a complete cut of the film was discovered in a French barn in 2002. Not only is it the most complete cut of the movie, but it is also entirely hand-colored. It was restored and premiered in 2003 at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. The complete film is now available on the extensive new box set.

Analysis

Some historians suggest that although A Trip to the Moon was among the most technically innovative films up until that time, it still displays a primitive understanding of narrative film technique. American film scholar Ken Dancyger writes that the film is "no more than a series of amusing shots, each a scene unto itself. The shots tell a story, but not in the manner to which we are accustomed. It was not until the work of American Edwin S. Porter that editing became more purposeful." However, it has been said that Porter was inspired partially "by the length and quality of Méliès's work."

Although most of the editing in A Trip to the Moon is purely functional, there is one unusual choice: when the astronomers land onto the lunar surface, the "same event is shown twice, and very differently" the first time it is shown crashing into the eye of the man in the moon; the second time it is shown landing on the moon's flat terrain. The concept of showing an action twice in different ways was experimented with again by Porter in his film Life of an American Fireman, released roughly a year after A Trip to the Moon.

Some have claimed that the film was one of the earliest examples of pataphysical film, while stating that the film aims to "show the illogicality of logical thinking." Others still have remarked that the director, Georges Méliès, aimed in the film to "invert the hierarchal values of modern French society and hold them up to ridicule in a riot of the carnivalesque." This is seen as an inherent part of the film's plot; the story itself pokes fun at the scientists and at science in general: upon traveling to the moon, these astronomers find that the face of the moon is, in fact, the face of a man, and that it is populated by little green men.

Directed by	Georges Méliès
Produced by	Georges Méliès
Written by	Georges Méliès Gaston Méliès
Starring	Georges Méliès Victor André Bleuette Bernon Jeanne d'Alcy Henri Delannoy
Cinematography	Michaut Lucien Tainguy
Distributed by	Gaston Méliès
Release date(s)	France: September 1, 1902 United States: October 4, 1902
Running time	14 min (at 16 frame/s) 8 min (at 25 frame/s)
Language	originally narrated in French
Budget	10,000FF
Preceded by	Bluebeard (1902)
Followed by	The Man with the Rubber Head (1902

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiDWmXHR3RQ

WHAT IS FILM THEORY

Film theory seeks to develop concise and systematic concepts that apply to the study of film as art. It was started by Ricciotto Canudo's The Birth of the Sixth Art. Formalist film theory, led by Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer, emphasized how film differed from reality, and thus could be considered a valid fine art. André Bazin reacted against this theory by arguing that film's artistic essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality not in its differences from reality, and this gave rise to realist theory. More recent analysis spurred by Lacan's psychoanalysis and Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics among other things has given rise to psychoanalytical film theory, structuralist film theory, feminist film theory and others.

Sources:Wiki

Film Theoris.

Is Indian films really have theories ....