- Kinoks
The Kinoks ("kino-oki," meaning cinema-eyes) were a collective of Soviet filmmakers in 1920s Russia, based most notably around film editor
Dziga Vertov . In 1919 Vertov and his future wife, the talented film editor Elisaveta Svilova, plus several other young filmmakers created a group called Kinoks ("kino-oki," meaning cinema-eyes). In 1922 they were joined byMikhail Kaufman , who had just returned from the civil war. From 1922 to 1923 Vertov, Kaufman, and Svilova published a number of manifestos in avant-garde journals which clarified the Kinoks' positions vis-à-vis other leftist groups. The Kinoks rejected "staged" cinema with its stars, plots, props and studio shooting. They insisted that the cinema of the future be the cinema of fact: newsreels recording the real world, "life caught unawares." Vertov proclaimed the primacy of camera ("Kino-Eye") over the human eye. The camera lens was a machine that could be perfected infinitely to grasp the world in its entirety and organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective picture. At the same time Vertov emphasized that his Kino-Eye principle was a method of "communist" deciphering of the world. For Vertov there was no contradiction here; as a true believer he consideredMarxism the only objective and scientific tool of analysis and even called a series of the 23 newreels he directed between 1922 and 1925Kino-Pravda , "pravda" being not only the Russian word for the truth but also the title of the official party newspaper. [http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:254Iuo-m0HwJ:cours.cegep-st-jerome.qc.ca/511-411-p.l/vertov.htm+kinoks&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us&client=firefox-a |Dziga Vertov (1896-1954)]The most acclaimed work is undoubtedly the seminal city symphony, "
Man with a Movie Camera " (1927).References
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