Silent Films & The Development Of Film Styles

   

     Whereas Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers lacked the touch to produce movies that exhibited similar styles through stylistic choice, the late 1910s and 1920s saw a new sort of renaissance in cinema, both in Hollywood and abroad. This renaissance or "re-birth" of cinema can attributed to a growing number of auteurs who vividly left their signatures imprinted in their film stocks. No longer were they confined to film a certain way just because the technology at hand dictated that they follow rules and conventions laid out by the masters of cinema before them. People experimented with mise-en-scene, editing, and camera angles among many others to graduate from "cinema school", hereby forging their own styles. Interestingly enough, many of those filmmakers shared similar styles based on regionalism, thereby forging the film movements known as: Soviet, German Expressionism, French Impressionism, and Danish style.

     To this day, the aftermath of those movements is still palpable. French Impressionist Abel Gance's multi-layered editing, focusing on several different shots at once in Napolean, does seem to breathe new life in the form of Darren Aronofsky's Requiem For A Dream. 

     Quentin Tarantino's mastery of action shots and his artful mise-en-scene is perhaps an homage to Sergei Eisenstein's spectacular battle sequences in Alexander Nevsky.

  Man with a Movie Camera is a film that showcased the use of montage shots to ellicit a specific emotion or thought from the audience, or to showcase the symbiotic relationship between two or more things. For example, the shots of the man in bed apparently dreaming are intercut with scenes of perhaps the same man about to be run over by a train. This is perhaps used to signify that the man was dreaming. Despite keeping the audience on the edge of its seat, showing the scenes of the dreaming man assure the audience that perhaps the man is not under any real threat which helps to assuage our fears.

Another interesting shot in the film is that of the man exercising, or perhaps two different men exercising.

Or the one with the girl blinking in unison with the shutters.

Or the waltzing tripod.

Or the upside down gif.

Thus, Man with a Movie Camera helped demonstrate the tropes that these auteurs had come to employ as stylistic choices in their films. Instead of being an accusation of the manipulative tactics that cinema had grown to adopt in just a few years, Man with a Movie Camera seems to celebrate what cinema was now capable of doing compared to just less than two decades ago when the short realist films of Edison and Lumiere were the norm. George Melies was one of the first who attempted to bring a fantastical element to cinema, hand tinting his films and creating actual narratives. It is interesting that the tropes used in Man with a Movie Camera are still used to this day.