Kino-Eye

Origins and Central Claim

Kino-Eye is a film theory and production method developed by Dziga Vertov amid the conditions of Soviet cinema in the 1920s, and also the name of the movement that adopted it. Vertov defined the camera as a mechanical eye capable of revealing a world inaccessible to ordinary human vision, writing in a 1923 credo, "I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye; I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it." He sought thereby to free himself from human immobility, drawing near to and away from objects, crawling under and climbing onto them, and recording movement itself so as to create a fresh perception of the world.

Method: Life Caught Unawares and Montage

Kino-Eye rejected the acted cinema built on actors, scripts, and sets. The kinoks held that actors could produce only pseudorealism, and instead asserted the capture of "life caught unawares." The related principle of kinochestvo excluded such extraneous elements as music and literature and pursued a non-theatrical film that recorded life itself, without script or composite characters. Vertov's conception was that the recorded fragments, assembled through montage, would form a deeper truth that could not be seen with the naked eye.

Origins and Collective

Kino-Eye grew fundamentally out of newsreel technique. Vertov learned to write with a camera while editing the Kino-Nedelya serial during the Civil War, and from June 1922 he launched the Kino-Pravda series, filming everyday spaces such as marketplaces, bars, and schools, sometimes with a hidden camera. Vertov called himself and his followers kinoks, or cinema-eye men, rather than cinematographers; he, his wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman formed the so-called Council of Three that led the movement. The kinoks wanted to make cinema a medium available to a working-class audience.

Works and the Movement's Course

In 1924 the silent nonfiction film Kino-Glaz, directed by Vertov and shot by Mikhail Kaufman, was produced; it won a prize at the international exhibition in Paris. In January 1927 Vertov was fired from Sovkino, and in May of that year he moved to Ukraine, whereupon the Kino-Eye movement broke up. There he made Man with a Movie Camera (1929), an experiment that sought to narrate solely through the visual language of film, without intertitles, script, actors, or theatre, and which Vertov described as a step toward an "absolute kinography" fully separated from the language of theatre and literature.

Assessment and Distinctions

Kino-Eye gave rise to debate over whether it was an epistemological form, an emancipatory form, or even a scientific form. Figures such as Osip Brik championed it as a model for all Soviet film production, while Eisenstein criticized the kinoks for wanting to remove cinema from the ranks of the arts at all costs. The "film truth" implied by Kino-Pravda shares a translation with the cinéma vérité movement that emerged in France in the 1960s, but they are distinct currents and should not be confused.