In early propaganda films, the use of montage was a popular didactic tool that promoted consciousness among the classes. Arguably, one of the most renowned montages in early documentary film takes place in Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936) in which W.H. Auden’s poetic commentary is rhythmically matched to shots of the train gliding through Scotland’s countryside. Night Mail’s omniscient narrator enjoins its viewers with a steady dose of ideological statements about industrial progress and the making possible of national communication thanks to the government-owned postal service. However, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), another propaganda film, portrays a more subjective viewpoint on the new Marxist order in the
