Reviews

Kino-Eye by Annette Michelson, Dziga Vertov

hoggboss's review against another edition

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

From what I understand, Vertov has 3 major points of interest when it comes to film:

• The filmmaker is not primarily an artist, but in the marxist sense part of a class of workers using the camera as a machine to produce an object with a utilitarian purpose. The filmmaker makes a film using a camera in the same way a steelworker makes a sheet of steel with a smelting furnace.

• the scripted story narrative film is a bourgeois fantasy, and instead of creating a film object with a purpose, directors of this variety of film are deceiving and placating the workers with a comforting fantasy, rather than using the camera machine for a Purpose, such as exposing the truths of the world as cannot be seen by the naked eye, by the editing of unscripted guerrilla footage. (Vertov later walks back the extremity of this point as he gets older) 

• The camera is more "perfect" than the human eye. Where the human eye is limited by time and space, and can only see what's in front of it at that very moment, camera footage pulls video from a variety of different places and times and links them together. This is the essence of his "kino eye". 

 Movie fans and film bros of the marvel and Scorsese variety might not find Vertov's ideas very kind to them. However, I found his writing very thoughtful, and raised questions of my own. If you just want to escape into a story, why not just read a book? Shouldn't you justify why you choose to present art in one medium as opposed to another?

If we take Vertov's materialist constructivist approach for what is is, then viewing a film creates no tangible, material product. The studio, director, production company, and actors have all separated us from our money without having to provide a physical gain in return.  That would make the whole hollywood industry of the present day an economic speculation operation with massive returns. And enemies to the working class.

Vertov's own approach attempts to provide a physical gain for the viewer, either a feeling of solidarity among workers from different places and therefore a growth of communist sentiment, or a greater understanding of the truth of the world around us and an increase in productivity. Give this a read before watching Man With a Movie Camera or Three Songs of Lenin