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cinemas were established in requisitioned churches and village halls. Trotsky said the cinema would compete with the tavern and the church: it would appeal to a young society, whose character was formed, like a child's, through play.⁴⁴ The fact that in the early 1920s nearly half the audience in Soviet cinemas was aged between ten and fifteen years (the age when political ideas start to form in a person's mind) was one of the medium's greatest virtues as far as its patrons in the Kremlin were concerned.⁴⁵ Here was the art form of the new socialist society -it was technologically more advanced, more democratic, and more 'true to life' than any of the arts of the old world.

'The theatre is a game. The cinema is life', wrote one Soviet critic in 1927.⁴⁶ It was the realism of the photographic image that made film the 'art of the future' in the Soviet Union.⁴⁷ Other art forms represented life; but only cinema could capture life and reorganize it as a new reality. This was the premise of the Kinok group, formed in 1922 by the brilliant director Dziga Vertov, his wife, the cine newsreel editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, a daring cameraman who had been with the Red Army in the civil war. All three were involved in making propaganda films for Soviet agitprop. Travelling by special 'agit-trains' around the front-line regions in the civil war, they had noticed how the villagers to whom they showed their films were free from expectations of a narrative. Most of them had never seen a film or play before. 'I was the manager of the cinema carriage on one of the agit-trains', Vertov later wrote. 'The audience was made up of illiterate or semi-literate peasants. They could not even read the subtitles. These unspoiled viewers could not understand the theatrical conventions.'⁴⁸ From this discovery, the Kinok group became convinced that the future of the cinema in Soviet Russia was to be found in non-fiction films. The basic idea of the group was signalled by its name. The word Kinok was an amalgam of kino (cinema) and oko (eye) - and the kinoki, or 'cine-eyes', were engaged in a battle over sight. The group declared war on the fiction films of the studios, the 'factory of dreams' which had enslaved the masses to the bourgeoisie, and took their camera out on to the streets to make films whose purpose was to 'catch life as it is' - or rather, insofar as their aim was 'to see and show the world in the name of the proletarian revolution', to catch life as it ought to be.⁴⁹

This manipulative element was the fundamental difference between the kinoki and what would become known as cinema verite in the Western cinematic tradition: cinema verite aspired to a relatively objective naturalism, whereas (their claims to the contrary notwithstanding) the kinoki arranged their real-life images in a symbolic way. Perhaps it was because their visual approach was rooted in the iconic tradition of Russia. The Kinok group's most famous film, The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), is a sort of symphony of images from one day in the ideal Soviet metropolis, starting with early morning scenes of different types of work and moving through to evening sports and recreations. It ends with a visit to the cinema where The Man with a Movie Camera is on the screen. The film is full of such visual jokes and tricks, designed to debunk the fantasies of fiction film. Yet what emerges from this playful irony, even if it takes several viewings to decode, is a brilliant intellectual discourse about seeing and reality. What do we see when we look at a film? Life 'as it is' or as it is acted for the cameras? Is the camera a window on to life or does it make its own reality?