Vertov’s first sound film, celebrates the role played by the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and its mineral and agricultural riches in the Five Year Plan of the late 1920s, a centralized economic program launched by Stalin in 1928 to achieve rapid industrialization, agricultural collectivization, and the expansion of heavy industry. The film, a unique experimental symphony brimming with irony, offers a piercing, clanging, screeching sound-collage, mixing crowds, shouts, boots and industrial machinery as well as ordinary music and speech.
Dziga Vértov
He was born in the former Russian Empire (present-day Poland) in 1896 and died in 1954. A Soviet pioneer of documentary film, he rejected theatrical and fiction films, arguing that the camera should capture the ‘truth of life’ without actors or artificial sets. Together with his wife, Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, he formed the Kinoki collective. In 1922, he launched the series of experimental newsreels Kino-Pravda (‘Cinema-Truth’), and in 1924, he dazzled audiences with his feature film ‘Kino Eye,’ which was followed by works such as ‘The Sixth Part of the World’ (1926) and his manifesto ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ (1929). In the sound era, he made ‘Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas’ (1931) and ‘Three Songs About Lenin’ (1934). With Stalinism he returned to Moscow and lost prominence, but his theoretical and aesthetic approaches decisively influenced Cinéma Vérité and later generations of documentary filmmakers.
