IV

		figure out the meaning of independent cells stuck next to each other. "While the conventional film," the Russian director wrote, "directs the emotions . . . [this kind of editing] direct[s] the whole thought process, as well." 25 Pushing beyond Griffith, Eisenstein had in fact discovered that it was not necessary to ground the pro-filmic material in any physical space at all. The picture of something could be used to connote meaning rather than denote a fact. He could send out signifying bubbles or balloons, knowing that the audience would jump at the occasion to exercise their minds.26 Intellectual montage had at the long last liberated editing from its pedestrian earmarks. If it could ask the question: "What is a God?," there was no limit to one's excursions into the world and pronouncements about it. No wonder that at the time, Eisenstein imagined himself capable of bringing Marx's Capital to the screen, speaking through images as if they were but words on a page.

		VI

		Dziga Vertov's theoretical and filmic work is notoriously complex. Most problematically, his films have been pigeonholed within the general category of documentary or (the kiss of death) experimental filmmaking. True enough, he uses a lot of newsreel-type footage in his films and, in his writing, he often talks about the importance of showing life as it is and of reaching indisputable truths through the use of the camera. At the same time, many of his techniques also remind us of the avant-garde. One would be mistaken though to leave it at that for we would miss out what makes his work truly exceptional. To start with, Vertov is not interested in the regular kind of story films. These, in his eyes, sink the cinema to the level of the old Bolshoi theater an institution he loathed. There, he writes, you find but a "scabby adjacent surrogate" for life, "an idiotic conglomerate from balletic contortions, musical squeaks, clever lighting effects" and the like.27 Quite logically, he rejected the work of his colleagues, Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and even Eisenstein, for all of them had remained stuck in the old way of doing things. For Vertov instead, a revolutionary cinema must "tunnel under literature" and "unserfage the camera" from the limited capabilities of the human eye.28 The problem with the human eye, he goes on to say, is that it only sees what is immediately there whereas the Kino-eye his name for his own type of cinema is able to find its way ''into the chaos of visual phenomena filling the uni-