The Glass Eye (1929)

• 74%
• 1929
• Comedy
• Drama
• Lilya Brik
• Vitaliy Zhemchuzhniy
• Anatoli Golovnya
• Veronika Polonskaya
• Nikolai Prozorovsky

The film begins with the Cameraman assembling "the glass eye", or the movie camera, which is followed by snippets from archive footage taken all over the world. They include footage of an African tribe, a medical operation during which a nail file is removed, in close-up, from the stomach of a prisoner who swallowed it, busy streets of Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin, Paris, and Moscow, and May 1 demonstrations in Paris and Prague. The intertitles then sardonically inform the audience that "showing such things to the masses is dangerous", and the film switches to a parody of "spectacle the bourgeoisie cooks up for them" - an exaggerated love-triangle melodrama that concludes with Hero and Heroine surviving a shipwreck and making their way to an uninhabited island, where they find a convertible waiting for them and are shown as being perfectly made-up. The intertitles proclaim "Enough!", and the film ends with shots of Soviet factories and the declaration that only in a country of growing socialism does the glass eye show "the true life" of the proletariat.