It presented a lyrical view of an idealized Soviet city (a combination of Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev), utilizing virtually every special effect and cinematic technique available to show life in Soviet society while encouraging viewers to consider the nature of cinematic construction and the relation between film and reality. Vertov's masterpiece, Chelovek s kino-apparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929), was a visionary 'city symphony'' documentary that reflected on its own status as both document and illusion. From 1922 to 1925 Vertov directed a series of twenty-three newsreels entitled Kino-Pravda pravda, meaning truth, was also the name of the official Soviet party newspaper. They issued an artistic manifestos and published journal articles in which they rejected fiction filmmaking, with its stars, studio shooting, and predetermined scripts, in favor of what Vertov celebrated as 'life caught unawares.'' The camera lens (or kino eye), Vertov proclaimed, had the power to penetrate and record visible reality better than could the human eye, making documentary the preferred practice for a Marxist society based on rational and scientific principles of organization. In 1919 Vertov, along with his future wife, the film editor Elisaveta Svilova, and later his brother Mikhail and several other young filmmakers, established the Kinoks (from kinoki, or cinema-eyes), a group that argued for the value and superiority of documentary filmmaking. Changing his name to Dziga Vertov, which loosely translates as 'spinning top,'' he began editing newsreel footage after the revolution, exploring the possibilities of montage in the context of documentary film. In 1916 Vertov enrolled in the Petrograd Psychoneurological Institute, where he studied human perception, particularly sound, editing bits of recorded sound in novel ways in his 'Laboratory of Hearing.'' These experiments would influence Vertov's experiments with sound film over a decade later in Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa (Enthusiasm: The Donbass Symphony, 1931) and Tripesni o Lenine (Three Songs of Lenin, 1934). His brother Mikhail also became an important documentary filmmaker, while a third brother, Boris, became an important cinematographer for Jean Vigo and others.Īt the outbreak of World War I, the Kaufmans, an educated Jewish family, moved to Moscow. He not only chronicled the revolution as it happened, but approached the production of newsreels in terms of interaction with the proletariat. Dziga Vertov was instrumental in using the cinema for the purposes of social education after the Russian Revolution.

Kino-Eye by Kevin O'Brien