KINO-EYE (KINO-GLAZ) (Dziga Vertov, 1925)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, January 21, 5:15
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
“Kino-eye has managed to find its way in the struggle with bourgeois cinema,” Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov wrote in 1925, “and we seriously doubt that the latter (despite its present international dominance) can long withstand our revolutionary onslaught. There is another, greater danger — the distortion of our ideas.” One of the early masters of the new art form, Vertov, along with such contemporaries as Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, explored the potential power of the cinema in both fiction and nonfiction storytelling and as a propaganda tool. Vertov, whose most famous film is 1929’s Man with a Movie Camera, a revolutionary work about cinema itself, searched for truth in his films, what he referred to as “kino-pravda,” employing a unique cinema-verité style to capture real life. Not that he also didn’t have a very specific agenda. In the seminal Kino-Eye, what Vertov called a “tapestry of life,” Vertov and one of his brothers, cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, depict Soviet life of the 1920s, exploiting the technology of the medium while following a group of Young Pioneers marching through towns putting up political banners and waving flags. Along the way they stop by a village party filled with drunken revelers, wander through a street market, camp out in the fields, watch a Chinese magician perform, and come upon such health issues as tuberculosis and mental illness. Several scenes are projected in reverse, including the butchering of meat, the baking of bread, and even the sport of diving, as Vertov and Kaufman play with the story while also revealing the methods of production. By focusing on the children, Vertov is forming a blueprint for the future of the nation, just as in the film itself he is laying the groundwork for the future of cinema. Kino-Eye is screening on January 21 at 5:15 as part of Anthology Film Archives’ continuing “Essential Cinema” series, which followed by Vertov’s Forward, Soviet! at 7:00 and A Sixth of the World at 8:45.