So this Russian guy came along

If you've looked at Nanook of the North, Robert J Flaherty's documentary feature, the first of its kind, its hard not to think of it being slightly romantic.

The natives are portrayed as noble savages.  The title cards suggest a Disney-esque landscape of white, white snow and more purer times past.

This slight heavy handedness, editorally, on behalf of Flaherty didn't take away from his film.  If anything, it made it more marketable to mass audiences.  People came in droves.

It did however stick in the gullet of another film maker, film theorist and all rounder, Russian Dziga Vertov.

Vertov, a communist in Russia in the 1920s, wanted something else from reality.  He didn't like the slightly romantic versions of reality, nor did he like the way documentary filmmakers like Flaherty constructed 'stories' from reality.

He didn't like stories at all.  He considered, which is fair enough, that stories themselves, the very notion of a story, was a way to control people; to make them think the way you want them to.

He hated this level of what he considering brainwashing and went looking for something purer.

In doing so, he laid foundations which many modern documentary filmmakers continue to refind and become inspired by all over again.

For instance.  He was fond of just rocking up at a place (he liked normal places, like cafes, and bars, and libraries, where normal people worked, not ice bergs where native people fished) and without telling anyone, he'd just start filming.

Or he'd hide behind plants, and film from there. 

He was desperate to catch reality, without reality catching him.

He was an experimenter.  Much like you, the student whose having a go for the first time.

All these thoughts were pushed into a body of work known as Kino-Pravda (meaning ''film truth").

Kino-Pravda was a series of news reels.

They didn't have stories and were simply descriptive happenings.  Like people building a railway.

Or, in this example, a group of women threshing corn. 

What do you think of this style?  What's good about it? 

Oh, he didn't put the music on.  Best to mute this.  He had music composed specially, apparently, but its not on this!