Vertov, from "From Radio Eye to Kino Eye:"
Kino-eye = kino-seeing (I see through the camera) + kino-writing (I write on film with the camera + kino-organization (I edit).The kino-eye method is the scientifically experimental method of exploring the visible world --
a. based on the systematic recording on film of facts from life;
b. based on the systematic organization of the documentary material recorded on film....
Kino-eye is the documentary cinematic decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye.
Kino-eye means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people throughout the entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible fact, of film-documents as opposed to the exchange of cinematic or theatrical presentations.
Kino-eye means the conquest of time (the visual linkage of phenomena separated in time). Kino-eye is the possibility of seeing life processes in any temporal order or at any speed inaccessible to the human eye.
...
Kino-eye plunges into the seeming chaos of life to find in itself the response to an assigned theme. To find the resultant force amongst the million phenomena related to the given theme. To edit; to wrest, through the camera, whatever is most typical, most useful, from life; to organize the film pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order, a meaningful visual phrase, an essence of "I see."
What strikes me about Man With a Movie Camera, relative to this show, is Vertov's insistence on losing the spectator in the experience of seeing, and on moving through ordinary life in such a way as to extract its real essence, to which our ordinary human senses may be deadened. He was a very quixotic filmmaker in that way; he sees the movie camera as transformative, even, in a communist way, redemptive of normal human experience and behavior.
Posted by seth at July 8, 2004 02:27 PM