Kino-Eye (USSR, 1924) Dziga Vertov
*Catching life unawares*
The title of the film, Kino Eye, refers to Vertov's opinion that the camera is an improvement of the human eye. It can see things that we cannot, and it sees the world in a better, more precise way. This film aims to prove that futurist idea. In this film Vertov experiments with several techniques to exploit the qualities of the film camera. He tilts the camera 90 degrees to show a street from a different angle. He speeds up the image, or slows it down, for instance to show how to dive from a high platform. He also reverses the image, to show how a bull is slaughtered or how bread is made and where the flour comes from. These techniques indeed make you see things in a new way. They make the familiar strange, a known design research technique. And they teach you something that was important to the soviet revolution at that time: the things we eat or consume are produced in a certain way that we might not know about. Today this has become important again, with anxieties about food health and safety, and interest in fair trade.
The second title of the film translates as "Life caught unawares" or "Life unrehearsed", pointing at the importance of observing people without them noticing it. When making this film, Vertov still thought that he could only show everyday life as it is, if people did not notice him. (Later, in 1929's The Man with a Movie Camera, he considered spontaneous reactions to the camera to be 'unawares' too.) He developed several techniques to achieve this. One was trying to hide or disguise the camera. For instance, in the sequence with the magician, the cameraman was dressed as a telephone repairman and the camera was inside a fake telephone booth. This allowed him to get images of the faces of the children without distracting them from the spectacle of the magician. In itself, filming a spectacle, something that keeps people's attention, is a good way of catching life unawares. This is also demonstrated by the sequence with the elephant in Moscow, attracting everybody's attention. Another way of going unnoticed is filming from a distance, but in the 1920s there were no strong long lenses yet. We do see wide shots from a distance though, observing movements of people on the streets.
The act of looking is a few times stressed in the film by the insert of a close up of an eye, for instance in the sequences on the mental illness institute and the young homeless waking up on the street. These sequences, and others, are edited in a fast pace, directing the gaze of the spectator quite strongly. This might not be the editing style you expect in a film that foremost observes. But it fits in Vertov's programme to let you see the world in a new way. His observations are guiding the spectator; they hardly let you discover things yourself. They point at the things he wants you to discover and learn about such as how people take a dive or how bread is made. This might seem boring because it is overly didactic, but because it is filmed in a way that lets you see these events see in a new way, the didacticism is acceptable.
On DVD in my archive and available on DVD from Amazon in France.
Kino-Eye (USSR, 1924) Dziga Vertov
*Catching life unawares*
The title of the film, Kino Eye, refers to Vertov's opinion that the camera is an improvement of the human eye. It can see things that we cannot, and it sees the world in a better, more precise way. This film aims to prove that futurist idea. In this film Vertov experiments with several techniques to exploit the qualities of the film camera. He tilts the camera 90 degrees to show a street from a different angle. He speeds up the image, or slows it down, for instance to show how to dive from a high platform. He also reverses the image, to show how a bull is slaughtered or how bread is made and where the flour comes from. These techniques indeed make you see things in a new way. They make the familiar strange, a known design research technique. And they teach you something that was important to the soviet revolution at that time: the things we eat or consume are produced in a certain way that we might not know about. Today this has become important again, with anxieties about food health and safety, and interest in fair trade.
The second title of the film translates as "Life caught unawares" or "Life unrehearsed", pointing at the importance of observing people without them noticing it. When making this film, Vertov still thought that he could only show everyday life as it is, if people did not notice him. (Later, in 1929's The Man with a Movie Camera, he considered spontaneous reactions to the camera to be 'unawares' too.) He developed several techniques to achieve this. One was trying to hide or disguise the camera. For instance, in the sequence with the magician, the cameraman was dressed as a telephone repairman and the camera was inside a fake telephone booth. This allowed him to get images of the faces of the children without distracting them from the spectacle of the magician. In itself, filming a spectacle, something that keeps people's attention, is a good way of catching life unawares. This is also demonstrated by the sequence with the elephant in Moscow, attracting everybody's attention. Another way of going unnoticed is filming from a distance, but in the 1920s there were no strong long lenses yet. We do see wide shots from a distance though, observing movements of people on the streets.
The act of looking is a few times stressed in the film by the insert of a close up of an eye, for instance in the sequences on the mental illness institute and the young homeless waking up on the street. These sequences, and others, are edited in a fast pace, directing the gaze of the spectator quite strongly. This might not be the editing style you expect in a film that foremost observes. But it fits in Vertov's programme to let you see the world in a new way. His observations are guiding the spectator; they hardly let you discover things yourself. They point at the things he wants you to discover and learn about such as how people take a dive or how bread is made. This might seem boring because it is overly didactic, but because it is filmed in a way that lets you see these events see in a new way, the didacticism is acceptable.
On DVD in my archive and available on DVD from Amazon in France.