Bazin

The very end of this article provides the clearest idea of Bazin's point and I immediately understood everything better. Bazin says that "in the silent days, montage evoked what the director wanted to say; in the editing of the 1938, it described it" (167). To take Man With A Movie Camera as an example, 70 minutes of Vertov's experimental documentary montage implicitly ask the questions "do you get it?" and "what do you think about what I've shown you?" Honestly, it's not easy to watch. I have been raised on descriptive Hollywood storytelling. Watching Man With a Movie Camera was more like trying to dissect a cubist painting than analyzing a film. It can be confusing but thought provoking as well. The camera functions as the tool for pointing to what the filmmaker wants you to think about.

A well made Hollywood film, in contrast, shows you exactly what it wants to tell you. You know what the story is because there is a very clear one taking place in front of you in any scene. Every single thing in the frame is intentionally constructed and included. Every thing has its function and describes something. Bazin makes perfect sense when he says that "the film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist" (167).

One recent film that came to mind for me when reading this film was Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Thinking back on it now it seems sort of like a combination of montage and description.