Constructivism

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in
1919 and was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a
practice for social purposes. Constructivist Cinema served as an objective depiction of the world,
a put-together purposeful mediated reality, and not just a creative personal artistic endeavor.
Constructivist Cinema began in the Soviet Union in the 1920‘s. One of the important figures in
Constructivist Cinema was Dziga Vertov whose goal was to eliminate non-documentary
filmmaking methods. He believed that filmmakers had the obligation to chronicle the truth and
to produce material that served a specific function. One of his most famous creations is the silent
documentary film Man with a Movie Camera.It was a cinematic experiment that made use of fast
and slow motion, freeze frames, split screens, jump cuts, extreme close ups, tracking shots, stop
motion animation, footage played backwards, self-reflexive, and double exposure techniques. It
had no real story and no real actors. The scenes were shot individually without following a
specific plot.
It used bizarre scenes that involved superimposing the image of a cameraman setting up his
equipment on top of a second mountain-sized camera or placing the cameraman inside a beer
glass. There were even scenes with footage that were played backwards, instead of the usual
chronological sequence. The use of double exposure and seemingly hidden cameras and nonplotted
scenes made the film seem more like a surreal montage rather than a traditional, linear
motion picture narrative.
The film is strongly constructivist in the sense that it served as an objective depiction of the
world, a put-together purposeful mediated reality, and not just a creative personal artistic
endeavor.Man with a Movie Camera was a silent film when it was first released in 1929