Why the name Kino-Eye?
I’m often asked about the name kino-eye. It is a term with many meanings and interpretations. Dziga Vertov, a filmmaker best known for the classic A Man With A Movie Camera, used the term in a 1923 manifesto,
“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.”
In 1929 Dziga Vertov explained the meaning in “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” (an essay that appears in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov)
“Kino-eye = kino-seeing (I see through the camera) + kino-writing (I write on film with the camera) + kino-organization (I edit).” … “Kino-Eye means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people throughout the entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible fact” … “Kino-Eye is the possibility of seeing life processes in any temporal order or at any speed” … “Kino-Eye uses every possible means in montage, comparing and linking all points of the universe in any temporal order, breaking, when necessary, all the laws and conventions of film construction.”
Joseph Schaub wrote in “ Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“,
“…Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.”
The confluence of new and old media technologies are expanding our knowledge of the world and helping us see from perspectives that we could not have seen otherwise. Vertov’s films and writings were prescient and inspire an interest in media technology of the past, present, and future.