Visualizing Vertov

[Vertov sob Visualização / Visualizando Vertov]

Abstract

This essay, written by Lev Manovich, discusses digital visualizations of two Dziga Vertov’s films. Manovich argues that Vertov’s desire for a ‘graphic language’ anticipates the recent work of a number of data
visualization designers and artists who use computational analysis and computer graphics to visualize patterns in artistic works, including literary texts and films. Yet Manovich’s work also explores how new visualization techniques can help us comprehend cinema differently, revealing patterns and dimensions that are hard or impossible to study through established film analysis methods. Like a digital counterpart to what
Vertov theorized as the Kino-Eye, the digital photography and software applications Manovich manipulates collectively extend and transform the capacities of the human eye and its relation to film. Manovich thus
reveals a whole new science and aesthetics of cinema in the data sets, maps, patterns, and graphics that lie latent in the celluloid image.>