Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov claims that kino-glaz presents life in its most realistic form via exploring “the chaos of visual phenomena that fills the world”. It has the capacity to make all what is invisible visible and all that is unclear clear.
In the previous post, I mentioned that the visual stimulus has become the most dominant aspect within the modern city. Hal Foster's book Vision & Visuality is a mixture of historical records that questioned and redefined the era of postmodern gaze. The notion of the gaze stemmed from a static, fixated eye rather than the dynamic one that eventually jumped from one focal point to another, making it different from the concept of the glance. In his book Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, Norman Bryson describes the image produced as an “eidolon”, a one-perspective abstract form that later developed to Vertov’s ‘kino-glaz’ (film-eye) theory.
A camera moving within the city is a symbolic reflection of ourselves sauntering around observing everything encircling our vicinity – since cinema is projected all over the city, it cannot be restricted within the standard dimensions of a screen. The camera here is considered the third person.
The Flâneur
In almost every book addressing the relationship between cinema and the city, two movies usually pop up within the authors’ minds, ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis’ (1927) by Walter Ruttmann, and ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Both films elevated our senses and excitement of modernity and the city, alongside the feeling of being within a fast-paced abstract chaotic spatial thrill-ride independent of any plot or characters. These two films have engaged narrative space with cinematic images to create a new form of spatial avant-garde, where reality is manifested into a modernistic type of spectacle laying basic grounds for urban cinema to evolve.
In his book The Cinematic City, David Clarke calls this phenomenon as flâneurie. The flâneur in Clarke’s perspective is modernity’s new-born that combined the potentials of both the camera – which documented the labyrinth nature of urban experiences, and the editor – who structured these experiences into a harmonious narrative manner.
“The flâneur embraced the uneasy, fleeting life-world of the modern city,enthralled by the pleasures and potentialities of a world removed from the presence, stricture and restraint of tradition, but also from the functional efficacy of modern rationality” - DAVID CLARKE
As a modernist observer, experiencing the city offers a moveable experience, a contemporary collection of life images that define everyday scenes. Cinema encompasses the role of the observer, a medium that exposes a variety of realities to a wide range of the public immersing them into a fragmented space and time – “a re-engineering of space and time in visual culture that paralleled the embodied experience of the reconfiguration of space and time achieved by the development of the railways and the motor car”. Whole images, fragmented images, and even still images are mentally reconstructed to unfold the city’s hidden aspects; ones that cannot be fully understood or comprehended due to their distant indirect affiliation with our mental perceptions.
This will take us to what I refer to as the 'Cine-Spatial Representation', which you will find explained in details here.