As Annette Michelson has suggested in her introduction to Vertov’s Kino-Eye, this journey through matter is the cinematic equivalent of The German Ideology. Vertov uses the cinematic machine to assemble the movement of matter in such a way that this movement becomes precisely the consciousness of material relations. The organicity of machines, as well as the machinic organization of human beings, will be rendered in and as cinema. In a technological extension of the senses, the new capacities of film are, in the cinema, fused to the eye, hence the name “kino-eye” or “film-eye.” 1 Kino-eye marks a suturing of human and machine, of corporeality and industrialized perception. These techniques are regarded not as special effects but as necessary means for the representation of reality. This visual journey through the production and reproduction of social life is above all a way of seeing through matter.Įnabling the journey through the city’s self-production are a variety of cinematic techniques: acceleration, deceleration, double exposure, rapid montage, optical printing of single frames, shots of celluloid undergoing the editing process that are then intercut with that celluloid, and the use of still and mobile cameras. The audience experiences a journey through a day in the life of the city (an assemblage of Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev), but a journey like no other-one made possible by the advent of cinema. This significance is, in part, Vertov’s provisions for the groundwork of a political economy of the visual.īefore turning to the possibility of a political economy of the visual suggested by Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, let us first examine the film closely. For those of us on the other side (historically speaking) of the Soviet experiment, Vertov’s film must take on a different significance.

For Vertov, film is the technology that will provide the utopian inspiration and practical means for the arrival of socialism. The postulating of such a significant role for cinema during the 1920s correctly suggests that the twenties was a period of radical transformation in both the nature and the function of the image.

As we shall soon witness, the movie theater would be, for Vertov, the public sphere, a place for collective and democratic consciousness and hence democratic representation, and film would be the medium for such a possibility. Magically, empty chairs fold open their seats, inviting us to sit.

The opening sequence in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film manifesto Man with a Movie Camera invites the audience into the theater. Cinema-the Fusion of the Objective and Subjective Dimensions of Production.

Kino-Eye by Kevin O'Brien