EC: KINO-EYE

Directed by Dziga Vertov

1925 / 78min

“What do Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, Allen Funt, and Santiago Alvarez have in common? All of them were anticipated, if not directly influenced, by the genius of Dziga Vertov, one of the half-dozen most important personalities in the history of cinema, and a key figure in 20th century culture as a whole.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE “KINOGLAZ is a didactic work, centered on episodes which articulate major preoccupations of the young Soviet regime: it deals with the manufacture and distribution of bread,…the processing and distribution of meat, celebrates the constructions of youth camps and discusses the problem of alcoholism. It introduces Vertov’s formal adoption of the articulation of filmmaking technique as his subject. It begins, as well, to suggest what we may understand by ‘the negative of time’ as a key ‘to the Communist decoding of reality.’ Looking for ‘the negative of time,’ we find it in the use of reverse motion as analytic strategy.” –Annette Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist”