Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera

and Other Newly-Restored Works

"I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only the machine can see it." - Dziga Vertov, "Kino-Eye"

These words, written in 1923 (only a year after Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North was released) reflect the Soviet pioneer's developing approach to cinema as an art form that shuns traditional or Western narrative in favor of images from real life. They lay the foundation for what would become the crux of Vertov's revolutionary, anti-bourgeois aesthetic wherein the camera is an extension of the human eye, capturing "the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe." Over the next decade-and-a-half, Vertov would devote his life to the construction and organization of these raw images, his apotheosis being the landmark 1929 film The Man with the Movie Camera. In it, he comes closest to realizing his theory of 'Kino-Eye,' creating a new, more ambitious and more significant picture than what the eye initially perceives.

The Man with the Movie Camera and Kino-Eye feature musical accompaniments by Alloy Orchestra and Robert Israel respectively, while original soundtracks have been restored for Enthusiasm and Three Songs About Lenin.