Associational Film Editing and the Documentary

The associational system of film editing goes all the back to the great Russian masters of montage such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Such was the power of these and other directors working at the time of the origin of cinema in Soviet Russia that the dramatic narrative films of these directors tend to have the immediacy of a documentary even more so than most of the documentaries that are made today Associational film editing shun using uncomplicated and undemanding images in favor of a process of juxtapositioning images or sound that often only obliquely comments on the thematic concerns. This line of attack infiltrates the political consciousness of the viewer so to engage in subconscious coercion of an intellectual engagement with the subject matter that applies subjective reasoning to even the most objective of imagery.

Dziga Vertov's silent Soviet masterpiece A Man With a Movie Camera is one of the most exceptional associational film editing. A Man with a Movie Camera is nothing less than textbook lesson for all future film craftsmen in the ways that the camera and editing can be utilized to manipulate a moviegoer's perception of reality through the use of both editing and special effects.