A Keen Eye – A Brief Participatory Documentary Case Study of Dziga Vertov’s ‘Kino-Eye’

Kino-Eye (or Kinoglaz or Kinopravda) was one of the very first examples of what one might consider a ‘participatory documentary’.
Dziga Vertov, best known for his 1929 piece A Man with a Movie Camera, cried out to his fellow soviet people for a capturing of true reality.

Vertov was heavily invested in the idea that no one man can truly see reality, for each person is riddled with unshakeable biases that inform and interpret everything anyone sees, hears or even thinks. He saw the invention of the movie camera as soething that could truly capture reality, as the camera was mechanical and gave exactly what was given.  This ideology drove him to encourage those he could to capture footage of the world, as much as they could, so that they might truly document fact, history and life without the blurring inherent in subjective constructions.

The Kino-Eye project, as explained by Vertov himself in ‘Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov’

“means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people throughout the entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible fact”.

Vertov sought truth outside all human bias, even time itself. Many Vertov scenes involve slowed footage, sped-up footage and even footage played in reverse. He explains:

“Kino-Eye is the possibility of seeing life processes in any temporal order or at any speed”

 

Some may associate Vertov’s works with confusion and an almost rambling sense of non-direction, but his aim was not only to break free of classical film construction techniques but rather to ignore them altogether. With the ‘Kino-Eye’ project he focused not on story, character development, plot or drama, but rather on the inherent truth of the footage and the truly participatory nature of the project.

Check out this excerpt!

Whilst there are still many shots constructed by Vertov, ‘Kino-Eye’ is the best filmic example of Vertov’s doctrine. Greater depth and detail can be ascertained by assessing his writings, however ‘Kino-Eye’ still provides a great breadth of knowledge upon the subject of not only soviet history, but of the workings of Vertov’s mind.

Within the film many of Vertov’s principles can be directly witnessed, such as

“montage, comparing and linking all points of the universe in any temporal order, breaking, when necessary, all the laws and conventions of film construction”

Vertov’s work is undoubtedly dense, however it acts as a clearly evident seed of the emergent form of participatory documentary. His attempts to construct film out of provided footage would have been supported to a much greater degree in this digital age, with great portions of footage able to travel across continents in relatively no time at all.

One can only hypothesise the success of Vertov’s work had Facebook or Twitter been available to him in the 1920’s, and it is likely that the genre of participatory documentary may very well not have been as readily accepted without the footwork done by Vertov and those that believed in his cause.

Those interested in learning more about the topic should investigate Vertov’s writings, but should that prove too dense perhaps exploring these ideas one hundred and forty characters at a time is easier. David Tames, a documentary filmmaker with a proclivity to explore new media, runs a twitter page: @cinemakinoeye , which explores the ideas Vertov began to instigate way back in the early twentieth century.

If you cant get enough Vertov (though due to density, this is rare) check out the entire Kino-Eye project below.