By Benjamin Hayden
Calgary; March 2010

Kyle Whitehead’s Kino-eye peeks through a lens at the fractured, solarized 8mm negatives. Blades and buckets repurposed and strewn about, he is the machinist of experimented vision. Later he sits at the 17th annual $100 Film Festival, wondering how his 16mm print of Maverick will look on the silver screen. Whitehead re-attesting to his visionary influences such as Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac and Dziga Vertov testify for his experimental short film, Maverick, that Whitehead is a man with a movie camera.

In the beginning there are flickers of black. It is immediately noticeable that this film is rustic and worked. Experimental processing techniques commence the film, accompanied by dusty crackles of noise. The sun rises, the beginning, the genesis of the photographic image, the omni-present agent of photography. Dulac iterates Whitehead’s acknowledgement of the sun, stating “[the filmmaker’s product] finds its true essence in the understanding of movement and visual values…in the light of a new dawn”(Dulac, P. 46). Whitehead’s dawn suggests the birth of the photographic image, receiving the reality of the horizon through its chemical singe into the strip of a living medium. The sun being the most natural light source for photography, Whitehead infers this relationship through a unity of the essential components of the process.

The connection of the sun and photography is fortified when experimental scratches are present between the viewer and the distant sun. Whitehead introduces Maverick with the fundamentals of photography, which are the camera-eye witnessing the light, the scratches on film resembling the film receiving the visual reality, and the sun to imprint the reality. This visual articulation about the arrangement of the fundamental photographic components relates to Deren’s statement, “the film images’ intangible reality consists of lights and shadows beamed through the air and caught across the surface of the silver screen”(Deren, p. 192). Whitehead exposing these fundamentals at the outset of Maverick illustrates that this is a film about visionary sight, and the duty of the Maverick.
The second shot is of Maverick, the unnamed character played by Tye Evans. Maverick is walking through a dusty field; the corners of the framed shot are not squared, but curved, creating a circular image. Again, this draws attention to the technologies of the recorder because the lens of a camera is not squared, but is circular. The circular lens meets the circular sun in the fourth shot. A centered shot of the sun with perfectly rounded lens flares encompassing the entire frame. Whitehead suggests the marriage of the photographic fundamentals, the sun as father, his rays providing to mother, the camera, who is receiver of these reflected rays.

Whitehead, the delivery doctor of the image whose credentials are held within the retina of his “Kino-eye”, assists the birth of the visual. Whitehead’s “Kino-eye” is seen later in Maverick, where he recreates the shot from The Man With the Movie Camera of the human eye superimposed against the eye of the lens (Image 1). Whitehead’s rendition is different because the eye and the lens are present together in one shot without superimposition (Image 2). The absence of superimposition speaks about Whitehead’s involvement in the creative process. Rather than the juxtaposition of the eye against the lens, Whitehead has a female character holding the lens, adding the presence of a person to metaphorically indicate that the camera lens is a filter of visual reality to the retina.

The next sequence is a diagonally framed time-lapse shot of vehicles driving in downtown Calgary. Maverick stands in the middle of a street while hundreds of people rush by him in time-lapse. Hastening the speed of time serves to offer a technical commentary about the extraordinary circumstance of photographic perspective because only the camera-eye is capable of capturing time in this abstracted format. Deren comments on the usefulness of time manipulation, she says, “[regarding the time-lapse sequence of vine growth] when projected at regular speed, the film reveals the actual integrity, almost the intelligence, of the movement of the vine as it grows and turns with the sun”(Deren, p. 190). Deren’s comments, applied to Maverick, offers confirmation that the time-lapsed public appear as insects, scurrying fretfully. Although this would disorient time for the spectator, the presence of the idle Maverick as subject in the center is indicative of Deren’s explanation of witnessing the intelligence behind motion. The Maverick bearing witness to this intelligence alters the time-lapse mode insomuch that he is the visionary amongst the crowd capable of subverting the logic of normal time. The Maverick is shown to be able to witness the abnormal scaling of time, possible only through the photographic eye.

The gradual beginning of Maverick, taken against time-lapse shots of the Maverick, standing in street where hundreds of people rush past him, comments on the rapidity of cinemas early development. In the early days of cinematic photography, the process was solitary, experimental, and concerned with the fundamentals of articulating images as a means to express. Dulac furthers this explanation by offering that “early audiences were happy with the simplicity of a train arriving in a station…The capture of life-movement envisaged as simple photographic production became, before every other effort, an outlet for literature”(Dulac, p. 44). Dulac’s recount is met in Maverick with Whitehead’s voice-over exclaiming “The horror! The irreplaceable blunderers that you still make it your aim to polish literary shoes with cinematic wax”. Whitehead’s concern is made into a metaphor within the Maverick character, whose idle stance is independent from the unnaturally paced crowd rushing around him. The unnatural pace can be taken as a representation for the unnatural, forced, development of cinema as outlet for literary modes that led to cinema’s commoditization. The denaturalization of the original function of what cinema may have been is apparent in Maverick, which accounts the genesis of the medium, followed by its divergence into a mode of literary expression, rather than a medium of visual or mechanical exploration.

The Maverick speaks into a microphone and Whitehead’s voice-over indicates his belief about the experience of perceiving moving images, he states, “we hold ourselves together through autohypnosis, ours in a theory of intervals”. Here, Whitehead cites Vertov’s “Kino-Eye Lecture II” in the segment discussing “[that] which has been called a “theory of intervals”(Vertov, p. 13). Vertov is useful to examine Whitehead when Vertov states, “Kino-eye offers the possibility of seeing the living processes in a temporally arbitrary order and following a chosen rhythm, the speed of which the human eye would not otherwise be able to follow”(Vertov, p. 11). Whitehead displaying a “chosen rhythm” is seen when the Maverick stands idle in the rushing crowd. This provides commentary about witnessing life in a western culture operating at hyper-speed.

Whitehead announces the search for meaning in watching cinema, he states, “we are in search of the film gesture, light in time, slowed and accelerated, running from us, past us, toward us. In a circle, straight line or ellipse”. This statement offers evidence to the former arguments regarding the exploration of light from the sun, time-lapse, the commoditization of cinema to the masses by “running past”, and finally the symbolism of the circle with the lens against the sun. Whitehead’s declaration in Maverick serves to review and revitalize the processes of witnessing the cinematic gesture, which are the transmissions of light.

Whitehead’s Maverick reinvigorating the significance of the experience of cinema in a form that is dutiful to the medium relates to what Deren’s states that:
“If cinema is to take its place beside the others as a full-fledged art form, it must cease merely to record realities that owe nothing of their actual existence to the film instrument. Instead, it must create a total experience so much out of the very nature of the instrument as to be inseparable from its means”(Deren, p. 198).

Whitehead’s Maverick being experimentally processed, finished to film, and self-reflexive about the filmmaking process satisfies Deren’s desire for a cinematic experience in harmony with the nature of the filmic instrument. Maverick will go on to win the Best of Alberta award at the $100 Film Festival in 2010. The film’s striking processing techniques are coupled with the integration of critical discourse about the fundamentals behind photography, the altered rhythm of reality, and the history of cinema. Maverick successfully displays what Deren, Dulac, and Vertov express in their arguments.  Whitehead is aware that Maverick is like a shoe, and equally aware that it is made of coarse cinematic leather, and not of glossy wax to make it shine.


Works Cited
Whitehead, Kyle. Maverick. Copyright Kyle Whitehead. 2009.

Deren, Maya. Ed: Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen. “Cinematography: The Creative Use Of Reality”. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 6th Edition.
Oxford University Press. New York: 2004. P. 190-98.

Dulac, Germaine. Ed: P. Adams Sitney “The Avant Garde Cinema”. The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Anthology Film Archives.
New York: 1987. P. 44-46

Vertov, Dziga. Ed: P. Adams Sitney. “Selected Writings: Kino Eye Lecture II”. The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Anthology Film Archives.
New York: 1987. P. 11-13

Images Cited
Image 1:  Vertov, Dziga. Ed: P. Adams Sitney. “Selected Writings: Kino Eye Lecture II”. The Avant Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Anthology Film Archives. New York: 1987. P. 12

Image 2:   Whitehead, Kyle. Maverick. Copyright Kyle Whitehead. 2009.