Country: URSS
Year: 1924
Duration: 78'


kino-eye - life caught unawares

Seven major themes that form the first part of the “offensive against the empire of bourgeois cinematography:” 1) the old and the new; 2) children and adults; 2) cooperatives and the market; 4) the city and the countryside; 5) bread; 6) meat; 7) bootleg vodka, cards, beer, shady dealings, Ermakovka, cocaine, tuberculosis, the piazza, death.

 

“The kino-eye can make the invisible visible, the obscure clear, the hidden obvious, the disguised manifest; it can replace the game with the non-game, falsehood with truth, with the cinema of truth. But it’s not enough to show fragments of isolated truth on the screen, images of separate truths. These images must be organized in themes so that the truth can appear in its totality. This is very difficult to do. Right from the start, the goal of the kino-eye is to achieve an alliance between science and filmed news in order to show the truth and the communist interpretation of reality.”

Biography

film director

Dziga Vertov

Dziga Vertov (Bialystok, Poland, 1896 - Moscow, USSR, 1954) became involved in film by collaborating as film editor on Kinonedelja, the first Soviet newsreels. He used this same material, which was kept at the editorial offices, to make various shorts before fine-tuning his Kino-eye theory, a new expressive means with which factory workers and peasants can express their own conscience. The apex of his production is represented by Man With the Movie Camera (1929); his prestige began to decline after making this film, in part because he was overshadowed by filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov.

FILMOGRAFIA

filmografia/filmography

Kinonedelja (La settimana cinematografica, cinegiornale/newsreels, 1918-1919), Godovš?ina revoljucii (L’anniversario della rivoluzione, doc., 1919), Istorija gra?danskoj vojny (Storia della guerra civile, doc., 1922), Kinoglaz - ?izn’ vrasploch (Cineocchio - La vita colta sul fatto, mm, doc., 1924), Šagaj, soviet! (Avanti, Soviet!, mm, doc., 1926), Odinnadcatyj (L’undicesimo, mm, doc., 1928), ?elovek s Kinoapparatom (L’uomo con la macchina da presa, doc., 1929), Tri pesni o Lenine (Tre canti su Lenin, mm, doc., 1934), Kolybelnaya (Ninnananna, mm, doc., 1937), Kljatva molodych (Il giuramento dei giovani, doc., 1944), Novosti dnja (Novità del giorno, cinegiornale

Cast

& Credits

regia, soggetto /director, story

Dziga Vertov

operatore/camera operator 

Michajl Kaufman

produzione/production 

Goskino

Menu