Without a Camera

Synopsis

Decades later, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera retains to be a reference point to many who works with moving image and gives a critical ground to discuss the rapidly evolving digital realities of our lives.
Without a Camera recreates the experimental classic using 325 videos collected from an online video-sharing platform shot by people, machines and things. The video follows the original editing of Elizaveta Svilova, one of the main protagonists of the original movie while the other protagonists, the camera and the cameraman, is replaced by new recording technologies such as mobile phone cameras, selfie sticks, GoPro’s, POVs, dash board cameras, earth cams, built-in computer cameras, drones and more.
Scene by scene recreation of the movie also gives us a chance to reflect on 1929’s utopia becoming today’s dystopia; hasty urban life, mechanization of labor, people becoming appendages of the device and camera as a machine being unhanded and independent from human manipulation and human gaze.

Director Biography

Zeyno Pekünlü (b. 1980, Izmir) She obtained her M.A. from University of Barcelona, her Ph.D. from Mimar Sinan University. She is based in Istanbul and currently running the Work and Research Program of the Istanbul Biennial (AP) for young artists and researchers. She is part of the editorial board of e-journal Red Thread and member of IRI (Institute of Radical Imagination). Scanning a range of issues, from the construction of maleness and femaleness as gender roles to questioning knowledge and it’s distribution, her works aims to decipher “power” that encompasses the intimate and the social simultaneously. http://zeynopekunlu.blogspot.com