Flashback: Kino Eye (1924) – Dziga Vertov’s cinematic precursor to Man with a Movie Camera

Russian director Dziga Vertov is best known for 1929’s Man with a Movie Camera, a masterwork that documents a day in Moscow and Odessa without the use of narration, intertitles or any form of cinematic artifice.

Kino Eye (Kinoglaz), which Vertov made in 1924, is an earlier demonstration of the theories of cinema that came to fruition in Man with a Movie Camera. The documentary is about the day-to-day lives of Russian workers, and records activities such as baking bread. Vertov introduced then-unusual techniques such as backwards sequences, and experimented with camera angles that still look fascinating today.

Kino Eye was also the name of the cinema movement that Vertov, who filmed revolution­ary newsreels, formed in the early 1920s.

The main idea behind Kino Eye was that the “eye” of the camera – which Vertov refers to as a machine – saw life more accurately than the subjective eye of a human. So films should be shot objectively. Editing could then bring about new relation­ships between the shots to achieve kino-pravda, or cinematic truth.