Birth of the Brute Light Beast

[Terrance]

Central to this theories is a kind of idolization of the camera. Vertov
believed that the camera (which, in combination with the editing
process, he called "kino-eye") was in many respects superior to the
human eye, able as it was to see at long distances, to film in fast or
slow motion, etc. Moreover, in the editing process, scenes from
different times and places could be cut together, the same scene viewed
from several different angles, impressions of speed and energy given by
fast cutting ... The Kino-eye was liberated from the confines of time,
space and normal causation. A Kino-eye was able, Vertov believed, to
reveal a deeper level of truth in the world than was normally perceived
by the "imperfect human eye." The Russians considered film the most
"modern" and "objective" art form and the least encumbered with
bourgeoisie associations. "Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the
most important, " Lenin asserted in 1919. As if in response, Sergei
Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Alexander Dovzhenko (amongst many others)
turned from the traditional arts of theatre, poetry and painting
respectively, to work with celluloid. Lenin's statement was not
primarily an aesthetic judgement--would he even have recognized such a
thing?--but a measure of the significance he attached to cinema as a
tool for communication and propaganda. The Soviet Union was a vast,
heterogeneous country, peopled by predominantly illiterate peasants who
spoke dozens of different dialects and languages. Educating them in the
basic tenets of communism, and setting in motion the enormous
socio-political change of the Revolution was a massive job--for which
cinema was ideally suited. The flourishing, state sponsored Soviet
cinema of the 1920s and 1930s should be viewed in this light: as
essentially a cinema of propaganda. 

_Imagining Reality: The Faber Book Of Documentary_ 
Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins
Chapter 3, "Kino Eye and Agit Trains