Kino-glaz / Kino-Eye

Lisää Dziga Vertov: Kino-Glaz (1924). Poster design: Alexander Rodchenko. From: Wikipedia.

DZIGA VERTOV VII
Moderator, live translator, narrator and explicador: Yuri Tsivian
Grand piano: John Sweeney
Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 12 Oct 2004

Prog. 7

KINO-GLAZ (ZHIZN VRASPLOKH) / [CINE-OCCHIO (LA VITA COLTA ALLA SPROVVISTA) / KINO-EYE (LIFE OFF-GUARD)] (Goskino, USSR 1924)
Author-Dir: Dziga Vertov; ph: Mikhail Kaufman; ed: Elizaveta Svilova; film organizer: Abram Kagarlitsky; rel: 31.10.1924; lunghezza originale / orig. length: 1627 m.; 35  mm, 1593 m., 70’ (20 fps), Österreichisches Filmmuseum.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

Yuri Tsivian (GCM): "Cine-occhio is Vertov’s first feature-length documentary made not of found-footage but of purpose-filmed shots. Life Off-Guard is not its alternative title — it’s a subtitle. It points to two things at once: the title of a 6-part documentary series which Cine-occhio was originally supposed to set off (which is why Vertov’s writings often call it "Cine-occhio, Part One"), and to the off-guard method of filmmaking — defiantly so, as we learn from Vertov’s introductory speech at the screening that took place on 13 October 1924: "You will be disappointed if you have come here to see an enthralling love story. You will be disappointed if you are expecting an absorbing detective story, disappointed too if you think you are going to see some extraordinary tricks and stunts. But it you take note that what we are going to show you now is just a reconnaissance by a single movie camera feeling its way, if you bear in mind that it’s only the first part, one-sixth of the first journey of the Kino-Eye, then even these simple little pieces of life, filmed as they are and not acted out, will give you a certain satisfaction.""

"The underlying strategy of catching life off-guard was to do as little pre-planning as possible — which entailed that Vertov and his crew were themselves exposed to being caught off-guard by the very life they were after. This was part of the game, part of Vertov’s experiment. Here is how the rules of this game were announced by the newspaper Trud (Labor) on 27 September 1924, shortly before the film’s release: "The kinocs Vertov and his cameraman Kaufman have spent two weeks in a randomly chosen Pioneer camp, following the entire active working day of a Young Pioneer with a movie camera. Their eye — a movie camera, which has the wonderful capacity to see, to capture what it sees, and to reproduce it as it saw it — got up at the same time as the people it was observing, rushed off to have a wash, cooked its breakfast, did its morning exercises, went to work, attended the other games, and so on. No scriptwriter can invent something greater than what happens in real life. … And the Kino-Eye — the movie camera and two or three people — has gone off on a journey from the Pioneer camp, through the peasant courtyards, through the fields, through the markets and slums of the town, with an ambulance car to a dying man, from there to workers’ sports grounds, and so on and so forth, peering into all the little corners of social life. It has looked at and captured life, which has not been changed by its presence, has not smoothed down its hair or taken up a pose, because it has not noticed it.""

"Is this film as unscripted as the above announcement makes it sound? On one hand it is, and this explains why its narrative is so rambling. Take the murdered night watchman, or the Chinese conjurer, or the elephant sequence. An elephant walking in the streets of Moscow — a delightful attraction! — was not something pre-planned; it just happened to arrive on the same train as the Pioneer unit."

"On the other hand, you will hardly find a movie with a conceptual structure more rigid than Kino-Eye. Much like your regular melodrama, its story is structured around the opposition of "bad guys / good guys" — but these, of course, are not the natural-born villains and heroes of the good old days. Amazingly, Vertov actually believed that bad or unhappy people have been turned so by bad and unjust societies, and, conversely, that if a society is just, all its members will be good and honest. This simple thought (today some will call it naïve, but in 1924 such simplistic thoughts were "in") gave structure to Kino-Eye."

"There are two poles to the life which Vertov’s Kino-Eye catches off-guard. At one pole are people of the "New" Russia: Soviet kids organized into Pioneer units (a non-gendered, politicized equivalent of the West’s Boy and Girl Scouts). At the other pole are people exemplifying the "Old" life — drunken peasant women dancing; a bunch of lunatics in a mental asylum (in keeping with then-widespread views, Vertov — formerly a student at the Petrograd Institute of Psycho-Neurology — thought that mental illnesses had social causes); shady black market dealers; an addict sniffing cocaine, and the like. In the film, the heart of all evil is the market where small private traders (allowed under the New Economic Policy) sell their produce. This is how critic Aleksandr Belenson, writing in 1925, described the sequence shot at the marketplace: "In the town the Young Leninists, the children of workers, in their struggle for the co-operative, take on the inspection of a little corner of the Old World, the inspection of the market. ‘Little Smoked Sprat’ and ‘The Gypsy Kid’ (these are their nicknames) hang up posters everywhere, calling for support for the cause of the co-operatives. ‘Little Smoked Sprat’ has hung up one of the posters in the Tishinsky Market, where her mother has come to buy meat. The mother of ‘Little Smoked Sprat’ has gone round a number of private traders looking for meat, but hasn’t bought any: it’s either too expensive, or the meat isn’t fresh. She approaches the poster that her daughter has hung up: ‘Don’t give profits to the merchants; buy in the co-operative.’ The effect of the poster on the woman turns out to be so powerful that she rushes backwards to the co-operative. Kino-Eye shows us that the co-operative gets its meat straight from the abattoir, and putting time into reverse, it turns the meat into a bull and sends it off to graze in the country.""

"In addition to time tricks like the one described above, there is a remarkable spatial trick in Kino-Eye which is rather difficult to figure out, until you have seen the film a couple of times. An extreme long shot of a street, seen from above — taken in the late afternoon, judging by the long shadows cast by the people walking along it — is followed by the intertitle "The same street, as seen from a different camera set-up." The next shot shows the street lying on its side. Motivation? Look at the shadows: they are now walking vertically, as people do, while the people casting them now appear to be gliding behind their shadows. A little perceptual experiment — we can recall the same trick in Rodchenko’s still photographs from around the same time." – YURI TSIVIAN (GCM)

AA: Presented by ladies from Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Brigitte Paulowitz. Elizaveta Svilova re-edit. II: Chinese conjurer, poor definition. Ugly visual quality. Actual duration: 75 min 46 sec.