Recensioni de* critic*

I don't think any of these films [in Flicker Alley's Vertov box set] is as important as The Man with the Movie Camera. For me, Kino-Eye is the most charming, with candid depictions of peasant festivals and the like. It was Vertov's first opportunity to stretch his ambitions after years of work in newsreels and documentaries. It has a spontaneity that perhaps disappeared in the later features.

This borderline impressionistic aesthetic complicates otherwise direct political cinema, a contrast seen more clearly in Kino-Eye, particularly the segment where Vertov runs the film backward in a short reverie on the awesome capacity of cinema to set reality against itself in pursuit of a higher truth. These reversals can be moving, but they also epitomize a wry comedy that pervades the youth-centric film and casts Vertov as the Chaplin to Eisenstein's Griffith.