In 2024, most of us are no strangers to the video editing maestros of Tiktok and Instagram. In the early ages of film, however, thinkers like Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) had high hopes that the power of the camera could resist the homogenization and commercialization of culture. His film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) illustrates his technique of Kino-Eye (“movie eye,” also the title of his manifesto published 1923) that uses then-radical editing techniques like manipulating speed, zooming in, cross-fading, and juxtaposing frames to draw attention to aspects of daily activities that might otherwise go unnoticed. A giant camera walks through the city on its tripod legs, scattered chess pieces are reassembled into hands, and close-ups of pedestrians quickly swell into widepan shots of the urban crowd. Vertov hoped that, rather than providing escape from the world, the camera would become an extension of our senses and enhance viewers' attention to the strange immediacy of everyday life.

Read more about Vertov here, here and here.