Kino Eye / Metaphors on Vision

Let me get this out of the way: I'm a film major.

There are two schools of thought, that film should simply capture reality as is or it should manipulate reality. The former is espoused by realist film theorists such as Andre Bazin, who favored long takes and wide lenses to most accurately reflect actual human perception of time and space.

Then you have the Soviets.

A lot of Soviet filmmakers in the early 20th century were constructivists and saw film as a complex machine that can be manufactured to accomplish a singular goal or effect. Vertov illustrates these ideas by comparing the human eye with the kino eye (film camera). He argues that the camera has capabilities special to and beyond those of human vision, so filmmakers should harness those features and make total use of them; it is not enough to simply mirror the human eye.

For me, it depends on what serves the story. Sometimes it's good to have a passive camera that merely observes the on-screen action and other times frantic cutting and elaborate camera movement is called for - whatever induces the most faithful and effective emotional response.

//

So... semiotics... and postmodernism...

They say life imitates art. The world bombards us with information and we compartmentalize everything into a semantic network of shorthands, symbols, and stereotypes. It just makes everything so much easier. This translates to more conceptual ideals as well. What we consider "love" to be is an amalgam of not only our life experiences, but the media we consume. That's why we hold onto ideas like "love at first sight" or finding "the one" - it's all made up, but we believe it anyway.

It's the responsibility of the artist to convey some of these ideas, originally or not. They have caught a glimpse of reality and "figured out" at least enough of it to have something worth saying.