Bazin - The Evolution of Language

I can easily apply Bazin's article to Battle of Potemkin and Man with a Movie Camera. To desribe film language, Bazin writes, "Through the contents of the image and the resources of montage, the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to impose its interpretation of an event on the spectator" (158). Both of these silent films exhibit montage to illicit a certain meaning and emotion within the viewer. To describe this language he also writes, "But these examples suffice to reveal, at the very heart of the silent film, a cinematographic art the very opposite of that which has been identified as 'cinema par excellence,'a language the semantic and syntactical unit of which is in no sense the Shot; in which the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it" (159). This description stood out to me because the camera shots used in both Bottle of Potemkin and Man with a Movie Camera depict people's emotions more than a film with sound. The images without any soundtrack leave more of an impression on the viewer and makes it seem as though the camera is capturing a real moment rather than having a fake soundtrack recorded over the shot. In other words, the most important point that I took away from Bazin is that silent films along with montage editing creates its own language allowing the viewer to interpret a metaphor and symbol in exchange for the illusion of objective presentation.