page_title: Kino-Eye
section_title: Technique
hierarchical_section_title: Kino-Eye / Technique
context_page_description: Kino-Eye is a film technique developed in Soviet Russia by Dziga Vertov. It was also the name of the movement and group that was defined by this technique. Kino-Eye was Vertov's means of capturing what he believed to be "inaccessible to the human eye"; that is, Kino-Eye films would not attempt to imitate how the human eye saw things. Rather, by assembling film fragments and editing them together in a form of montage, Kino-Eye hoped to activate a new type of perception by creating "a new filmic, i.e., media shaped, reality and a message or an illusion of a message - a semantic field." Distinct from narrative entertainment cinema forms or otherwise "acted" films, Kino-Eye sought to capture "life unawares" and edit it together in such a way that it would form a new, previously unseen truth.
context_section_description: Like many of its contemporaneous art forms, Kino-Eye was an attempt to model objectivity amid the contradictions of Soviet modernity. The Kino-Eye was Vertov's solution to what he saw as the diluted nature of "propagandistic-artistic" Soviet film. He thought of film as "dynamic geometry," and therefore Kino-Eye would exploit dynamism in geometric space in a way that the eye could not. By manipulating the camera to exploit movement along with new editing techniques that focused on film speed and transitions, Kino-Eye would construct a new, objective depiction of reality. In 1923, Vertov wrote: 
  "I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them... Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations... My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you."
  Kino-Eye was also a reaction to overly "acted" films that Vertov despised. It was positioned diametrically opposite what the kinoks thought of as "staged" film. They wanted to capture "real life," which they believed could only be achieved through the objectivity of Kino-Eye. The kinoks held that actors could only ever produce "pseudorealism" through a scripted film. In a 1929 note on the "History of the Kinoks," Vertov wrote:
  "I don't know who's opposed to whom. It's difficult to stand up against the cinema that is acted. It represents 98 percent of our world production. We simply feel that the cinema's chief function is the recording of documents, of facts, the recording of life, of historical processes. Acted cinema is a replacement for theater, it is theater restored. A compromise tendency still exists, directed toward the fusion or blending of the two. We take a stand against all that."
  The goal of a non-staged,  was the expansion of the cinematic field of vision, and thereby of the potential truth of that vision. It became largely recognized, as members of the film community could not help but recognize the success of works like Man with a Movie Camera. Author Osip Brik espoused Kino-Eye as a model for all Soviet film production. Vertov also hoped that Kino-Eye would make cinema more intelligible to the common people, so that it could truly become a mass media form.
  There has been much debate over whether Kino-Eye was intended as an epistemological form, an emancipatory form, or even a scientific form. Hicks writes about Kino-Eye as an early expression of documentary, as Vertov's films were not staged and captured "real life" in order to create "tremendous rhetorical force." The delineation between "fiction" and "nonfiction" in film had not yet been clearly marked in the cinema as a new form of meaning-making. Crucially for Vertov, Kino-Eye allowed the meaning to be in the hands of the viewer, not the script.
caption: Vertov
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