Part 4 is the one I like the most of those I’ve had a chance to watch. The opening with the camera looks so ominous and cool…may have to lift that for a comic panel at some point. :P

In terms of Kino-Eye how intense must it have felt to be in the early decades of the motion picture camera? It was the first time we could record moving life as we knew it. At the time it was the present but for us it’s the past and we’ll never see it the way those that shot it did…even if in a way we’re all seeing the same images. Makes my brain knot up thinking about it…it’s wonderful to have. These images simply become more valuable as time goes on even in an age where you can see an entire persons life via their flickr stream. The Kino Eye ideal no doubt had roots in standard photography (closer to what we think of as photo journalism now maybe?) but it’s impact is so different. Look at any sequence in those film then just pause it as a still image…it’s not the same is it? I was gonna say this reminds me a lot of Cinéma vérité…and it looks like the term originates within his work. How cool is that?

“And how did his brother Boris Kaufman fare in the paranoid environment of McCarthyism? Who felt that he got the better end of the deal, I wonder?”

Ah, a discussion all unto itself given the time period. I love Kazan’s work and can understand why he did what he did. It was a unique time period mixed with part inquisition and part real world threat. Hollywood is notorious for eating its own as is so I think Kazan gets way too much flack for “selling out his fellow artists” given the nature of Hollywood and how it works. Many have done far worse without the threat of the government hounds.

I would think both brothers probably saw the other as in worse shape or at the very least in a harder place. In looking back now what was the real difference? Both nations had harsh censorship and propaganda at the time. The U.S. may have had the edge on being more open freedom wise but the amount of hoops mainstream filmmakers still had to jump through was nuts. That’s without even taking into account the rampant corruption, racism, classicism, and segregation of the era. People got screwed with McCarthyism but those with the power to stop it did nothing and those who suffered the worst of it didn’t have to look hard to see others equally as screwed over. Plus it’s not like Hollywood learned a thing from it…unless you talk to George Clooney who is under the misguided delusion his industry was the tip of the spear in social and political reformations.