Stekliannyi glaz / [The Glass Eye]

I missed this screening due to an overlap with the Griffith Project: Old Heidelberg, but I include Thomas Tode's excellent program note to keep a full record of the Vertov Project in this blog.

DZIGA VERTOV XVI
Grand piano: studente SMI
Cinema Ruffo, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 15 Oct 2004

Prog. 16

STEKLIANNYI GLAZ / [L’OCCHIO DI VETRO / THE GLASS EYE] (Mezhrabpom-Film, Moscow, USSR 1928)
Dir/sc: Lily Brik & Vitaly Zhemchuzny; ph: K. Vents; ed: Lily Brik; prod. des: Sergej Kozlovski; superv: I. Freund; cast: Anatoli Golovnya, Veronika Polonskaya, A. Sdrok, N. Prozorovski, E. Gvosdikov, I. Tsitinnik; premiere: 15.1.1929, Moscow; lunghezza originale / orig. length: 5 rls., 1703 m. (per Kulturfilmkatalog 1929-1930 des Kino-Kontor der Handelsvertretung der UdSSR in Deutschland, p.48); 35 mm, 1455 m, 52’ (24 fps), Gosfilmofond.
Didascalie in russo / Russian intertitles.

Thomas Tode (GCM): "Stekliannyi Glaz [The Glass Eye] was filmed by Vitaly Zhemchuzny and Lily Brik, the muse and former lover of the famous Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (his new lover, Veronika Polonskaya, appears in the film in the parody role of the kissed-and-kissing movie star). It is — as Lily Brik herself wrote — "a parody on the commercially-oriented feature films which then swamped the screens, and at the same time agit-prop for the documentary newsreel film. Mayakovsky liked its topic a lot; it coincided with his own ideas." In the first part it ridicules the shooting of a "heartbreaker", including a director whose monocle brings to mind Fritz Lang. All this in the train of thought of Dziga Vertov: "We invite you — to flee — the sweet embraces of the romance, the poison of the psychological novel."(Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, p.7) The second part compiles images from newsreels and documentaries (among them Mikhail Kaufman’s Moskva [Moscow] — shown in an earlier program in this series) to articulate a plea to observe topics in documentary style. For example, an operation first filmed in Germany, in which a file was removed from a prisoner’s intestines, was extensively shown."

"Sovetskii ekran (30.10.1928) wrote enthusiastically: "It [The Glass Eye] strips and unmasks pseudo-realistic means with the help of authentic film footage, and does more telling than a book, a lecture, or a play could have done... How foolish it is to waste the grandiose means of cinematographic expression on such scenic nonsense." Curiously enough, Lily Brik uses footage she herself shot to deconstruct the feature film, whereas the sequences that her heart clung to came from archives."

"At first, films that supported radical social change in revolutionary Russia, e.g., those of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Vertov, were in the minority on the playbills of metropolitan cinemas in the 1920s. In 1924 the playbill of a Leningrad movie theatre featured titles such as The Indian Tomb, The Adventures of a Lady, The Love of a Gypsy, The Temple of Delight, First Love, India: Land of Wonders, Bianca the Adventuress, The Female Fantomas, The Girl in the Mask, etc. (cf. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory, p. 102). From 1922 onwards Vertov mobilized his films and manifestos against this so-called "opium for the masses". This tradition was taken up by Lily Brik with her film Stekliannyi Glaz. Using a metonymy for the camera, already in the film’s title, the widespread fascination with technology breaks through. The film-eye surpasses the human eye; it sees everything, all over the world. Stekliannyi Glaz opened on 15 January 1929, almost parallel with Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. In both films the camera gets top billing." – THOMAS TODE (GCM)