The creative treatment of actuality can be seen very well in the film Man With a Movie Camera. 

 

Dziga Vertov’s film, when dissected into individual shots, could seem to be nothing more than an actuality, but when looking at it as sequences or as a whole, it becomes clear that the film is using its footage not to show objective truth with the shots. Instead, it uses it creatively to explore the ideals of contemporary (to Vertov) Russia. 

 

Vertov overlays an image of an eye over the image of a camera lens. This shows the audience that what the cameraman captures with the camera is representative of how he views the world. It is a creative reminder that we are watching Russia through his lens, that it is not a pure factual representation, but is only a perception.

 

Vertov also uses several shots that contrast each other. Like showing marriage and divorce, or life and death. These contrasting shots are placed with each other to take the audience out of the objective histories that could be within these individual shots and get them to think on an introspective level. It turns the footage not into watching history, but into watching representational ideals of Russia and the realities of human life on a more aesthetic level.

 

Further, one cannot discuss the creative treatment of actuality without mentioning Nanook of the North.

 

Robert Flaherty staged several things in the film and represented them as objective. Flaherty claimed to do this to preserve the history of a dying culture before it was completely lost due to Westernization. This made the film more of a reenactment of the culture than a documentation of the current culture.

 

One instance of staging was shots of the family in the interior of the igloo. Flaherty wanted to show how Nanook’s family slept in and used igloos, but they were much too small and dark to be able to capture properly on the big camera equipment. So they built a false wall outside and had the family act as if they were just waking up, so Flaherty could accurately portray Inuit life and the tasks needed to be done, such as biting the shoes, before they could venture out of the igloo. This, of course, wasn’t even a fully true portrayal as igloos were falling out of style and the Inuit had more modern clothing than was depicted.