Man with the Movie Camera

What I first want to state about this film is that I really enjoyed the music!! Different from what I was originally exposed to. :]

To me, the film was a look into a city and its citizens. It lacked a plot and characters, but was interesting in that you could view this particular time period and discover peoples' jobs and activities. The film was composed of various negative and positive aspects of life. For instance, a scene in a beauty shop, someone in need of medical attention, as well as birth..

One scene that sticks out in my mind is when a couple goes to register for their marriage license and this happy tune is playing- then it flips to a more serious note with a depressing tune for a couple who are choosing divorce. I love the facial expression of that woman. The divorcing couple seems to bicker a little bit, she makes a disgruntled face, and they sign papers. I found this change from marriage/divorce to the images of death/birth to be interesting in a display of opposites.

What I also noticed from the Man with the Movie Camera is that the director would take varying objects and give them a life of their own. For example, the moving crawfish (Atleast I thought it looked like one) or the dancing camera. This was an aspect that I had not seen previously in the other silent movies and found them to be amusing and random.

Comparing Vertov's montage technique with Eisenstein's- I find Eisenstein's style to be more planned and executed (mathematically, psychologically calculated), whereas I get a sense of randomness in Vertov's..
In Eisenstein's work (that I have previously seen) he includes intertitles- Vertov did not in this film. Without intertitles, I spent most of the movie trying to figure out what was going on, realizing it wasn't a story, then trying to figure out what the director's message/theme was, and finally coming to the conclusion that it could be some sort of documentary on these people in this city???