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Summary

KINO-EYE

The Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, chief proponent of Kino-Eye, a technique of Soviet FORMALIST documentary, together with his filmmaker comrades, or kinocs, pioneered a CINEMA of accelerated MONTAGE, variable SPEED and innovative camera placement which eliminated script, actors and staging of any kind. In his writing and filmmaking of the mid-1920s, Vertov advocated the importance of capturing unaltered EVERYDAY life, as against the stagey illusions and bourgeois fairy tales of the narrative film. This documentary aesthetic is combined with the spirit of formal EXPERIMENT sweeping through the wider Soviet AVANT-GARDE and the desire to renew perception by cross-breeding the human with the mechanical.

The Kino-Eye enlarges microscopic phenomena ordinarily invisible to the human eye. It slows time, subjecting movement to close analysis, while associative montage editing carefully arranges visual material according to theme and idea. This poetic documentary filmmaking would also serve a political end, teaching the audience to see from new, unexpected perspectives the often invisible world of the everyday, and to decode social relations, labour, the body and TECHNOLOGY. The influence of Vertov's poetic, montage-based political documentary is most powerfully felt in post-war France, in the Cinéma Vérité of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, in Jean-Luc Godard's post-Nouvelle Vague Dziga Vertov Group, and in the film essays of Chris Marker. The Kino-Eye method laid the groundwork for Vertov's masterpiece, Man With a Movie Camera (1929), voted in the 2014 Sight and Sound poll of international filmmakers and critics as the greatest documentary ever made.

READING

Hicks, Jeremy (2007) Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. London: I. B. Tauris.

Vertov, Dziga (1985) Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press.

KITSCH

The word kitsch emerged in nineteenth-century Germany, pejoratively describing sentimental, cheap and lowbrow cultural products, especially commercial, mass-produced ones. The term was taken up by American art critic Clement Greenberg in his influential 1939 essay ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, which attempted to relate the tendency towards ABSTRACTION in modern art to the conditions of industrial MASS CULTURE in MODERNITY, of which kitsch was seen as symptomatic. For Greenberg, key characteristics of kitsch products are that they require little effort on the part of the viewer to understand them, that they offer only pre-digested clichéd meanings, and that they are formulaic, toothless copies of genuine culture.