*This essay was originally written for a Graduate writing class on December 14, 2010.

At first glance, it would appear that a comparison of Ron Fricke’s Baraka and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera is an unfair juxtaposition since the political and ideological messages of the two films vastly differ in both message and cultural sympathies. Man is a city symphony focused on a localized Soviet city of 1929. It celebrates socialism, modernity, industry and labor, while encouraging humanity’s coexistence with machine. Baraka on the other hand is a global symphony that celebrates humanism and spirituality. With its “one world”message, the film romanticizes nature while chastising modernity and society’s obsession with a destructive global-industrial consumerist culture. However, despite these thematic differences, there are many instances of overlap and parallel filmic moments the two films share in common, more specifically, their use of technological cinematic elements, poetic structure and experiment in pure montage that push filmmaking to limits beyond the classical Hollywood narrative composition that has long dominated world cinema. Read the rest of this entry →