Man of Aran

1934, first sound picture from the great documentary artist Robert J. Flaherty
This film is clearly influenced by the advances in montage made in the Soviet Union. Frequent dynamic changes of shot around even the main object, cutting in and out. Significant cross-cutting, not only as a masterful way of simply putting the story across, but to heighten tension. This is most explicit in the Eisensteinian repetition of one action across consecutive shots. The montage is largely used for dramatic effect, and the heroic framings to stand the dark figures as against the harsh landscape.
Yet nothing can escape the land; they are a part. It may be cognitive dissonance, but this film really did remind us of 'Warth'. This is often due to the framings where the tiny human figures are very high or very low, dominated by the land. Even when the land is not dynamic. When it is, there are some deeply beautiful and sublimely spectacular intrusions of it into view. With the humans as decenered. In the long shots, they are high or low; closer, the camera quickly tracks around, rarely centering on them entirely.
The sound also deserves a mention; used for strong effects of literally striking, and also a wonderful dialectic is set up of silence (quiet) and the extreme sounds of the sea in those fateful cross-cuts of earth and sea.
Flaherty's work here runs on the essential contradiction between mans struggle for survivial and the sea's monstrous wish to not let it. There are sonderful post-human evocation of the camera being pulled towards the torrents, and the struggle is the key here. There is no possibility of anything less than a tragic relation. But it is necessary.
Flaherty's montage, for all its dynamcy, achieves some stunning moments. There are pictorial abstractions of central circles, the beauty with the terror of the sea. Two shots stand out; firstly, the deep-focus 'farm' set up. Secondly, the child seeing the whale. Their is a moment of wonder, absolute otherness, about this distant creature, so beautiful, so far away. And then the immediate play of wonder and domination, and power, as the fishing boat enters.