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Dziga Vertov, the Soviet Union's revolutionary documentarian and film theorist, put his years of experimentation in weekly newsreels to work in the 1924 feature film
Kino-Eye, a continuation of his work on the
Kino Pravda series. The mixture of slice-of-life observations (often captured with a hidden camera) with documentary studies and playful cinematic tricks was his first attempt to create a new kind of filmmaking about life in the Soviet Union under Communism. The episodic film is structured something like a variety show, with the recurring thread of "Young Pioneers" (a youth brigade of Soviet boys and girls dedicated to helping the poor and needy) running through the film as a kind of narrative glue. Nestled between these uplifting sequences are glimpses into taverns and bars, a state home for the mentally ill, and the black market, fanciful documentary investigations into the origins of bread and meat (from the slaughterhouse to the farm), and a scene of kids at play in the water that turns into a gorgeous diving montage that presages
Olympia by over 10 years. Though never more than an accomplished curiosity,
Kino-Eye is a pleasant diversion and an essential piece of Soviet film history. Vertov's finest work was to come with his dazzling 1929 masterpiece
The Man with a Movie Camera, in which all of his ideas and experiments come together in a spellbinding piece of nonnarrative cinematic poetry.
--Sean Axmaker
