Surveillance and Subjectivity: From Vertov to Verité

Presented in conjunction with the University of King's College Contemporary Studies Program Cyclops: Vision and Visuality into the 21st Century, this series consists of films that challenge the viewer's remoteness from the subject viewed. The films assume a position of focused subjectivity provoked by the idea that the mechanical camera is more truthful than the human eye. Often, engagement defeats detachment, and the Brechtian 'alienation' or 'distancing' effect is neutralized. 

Screenings are every Wednesday  at 12:30 pm & 8:00 pm in the Gallery.

27 September- The Man With the Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov, Soviet Union, 1929, 79 minutes, silent with music track. 

Vertov's masterwork matches playful formalism with cinematic irony. The film, the filming, and the watching of the film, are in fact the subject of the film. For Vertov, the mechanical camera was free of the built-up visual and ideological biases of the human eye. 

4 and 11 October: No films, due to installation of new exhibition

5 October, 7:30 pm, Haliburton Room, University of King's College Lecture: Ron Foley MacDonald

Seeing Through the Subjective Camera in Cinema

18 October - Dark Passage

Delmer Davis, USA, 1947, 106 minutes

From the classic Série Noire novel by David Goodis, Dark Passage is a unique unsettling film noir in which an escaped convict undergoes plastic surgery. We experience the first half of the film completely from that character's point of view, immersed in his subjective vision.

25 October - Rear Window

Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1954, 112 minutes

Hitchcock's classic confronts the viewer wih the queasy morality involved in the act of viewing. Jimmy Stewart plays a photographer laid up with a broken leg. Obsessively watching his neighbours, he believes he has witnessed a murder. Shot from the fixed point-of-view of Stewart's apartment, Rear Window is a taut thriller that mixes coy sophistication with outright voyeurism.

1 November - Blow Up

Michelangelo Antonioni, Britan/Italy 1966, 111 minutes

Antonioni's masterpiece, set in mid-sixties Swinging London, is the story of a caddish photographer (David Hemmings) who suspects he's accidentally photographed a murder. The mystery, however, dissolves in the uncertainties of a vulgar 1960's cocktail of sex, drugs and materialism.

8 November - The Conversation

Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974, 113 minutes

As the new values of the 1960s collapsed into the indulgences and disappointments of the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola's extraordinary film helped set the tone for Watergate-era paranoia. Gene Hackman plays a wiretap specialist on a downward spiral when he gets personally involved with one of his clients. The Conversation is a brilliant essay on the moral costs of invading private space.

15 November - Solaris (Part One)

Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 1972, 90 minutes

Andrei Tarkovsky's great science-fiction film is based on Stanislaw Lem's classic novel of the same name. It is the story of a sentient, possibly omniscient, planet that invades the subconscious of its human visitors. A plan to drop Hyrdogen bombs into the surface provokes a crisis and brings the story to strange lyrical conclusion.

22 November - Solaris (Part Two)

Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 1972, 90 minutes

29 November: No film due to installation week.

6 December - Cinema Verité: Defining the Moment

Peter Wintonick, Canada, 1999, 100 minutes

Wintonick wraps up the 30-year old Cinema Verité movement neatly in this non-fiction feature. Looking at developments in France, Canada, Britain and the US, Wintonick covers the major figures (Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, Wolf Koenig, Jean Rouch) concluding in the 1990s with hand-held, low budget video. Fast-paced, fun and informative, this is an ideal introduction to Cinema Verité.

13 December - Don't Look Back

D. A. Pennebaker, USA, 1967, 100 minutes

Over three decades old, Pennebaker's on-the-fly portrait of Bob Dylan during a 1965 British tour is still a major Cinema Verité touchstone. Returning us to Vertov's notion that the mechanical camera is more capable of truth than the human eye, Pennebaker's subjectivity seems entirely passive as he witnesses Dylan confront and deconstruct the machinery of fame and stardom.