Dziga Vertov believed his concept of Kino-Glaz, or " Cine Eye " in English, would help contemporary man evolve from a flawed creature into a higher, more precise form.

Whereas Sergei Eisenstein viewed his montage of attractions as a propaganda tool through which the film-viewing masses could be subjected to “ emotional and psychological influence ” and therefore able to perceive “ the ideological aspect ” of the films they were being shown, Vertov believed the Kino-Eye would influence the actual evolution of man, “ from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man .”

Vertov believed film was too “ romantic ” and “ theatricalised ” due to the influence of literature, theater, and music, and that these psychological film-dramas “ prevent man from being as precise as a stop watch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine .”

Vertov is known for many early writings, mainly while still in school, that focus on the individual versus the perceptive nature of the camera lens, which he was known to call his " second eye ".

In the " Kino-Pravda " series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first.

However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, " life as it is " means to record life as it would be without the camera present.

This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov " life caught unawares " meant " life caught unaware of the camera.

Dziga Vertov claimed in his 1924 manifesto, “ The Birth of Kino-Eye ” that “ the cinema-eye is cinema-truth .” To paraphrase Hilmar Hoffman, this means that in film, only what the camera ‘ sees ’ exists, and the viewer, lacking alternative perspectives, conventionally takes the image for reality.

To get footage using a hidden camera, Vertov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman ( the film's co-author ) had to distract the subject with something else even louder than the camera filming them.

L ' Homme et la camera: de Dziga Vertov.

In the " Kino-Pravda " series, Vertov focused on everyday experiences, eschewing bourgeois concerns and filming marketplaces, bars, and schools instead, sometimes with a hidden camera, without asking permission first.

David Abelevich Kaufman () ( 2 January 1896 – 12 February 1954 ) — better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov, or Vertof (, " spinning top ") — was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist.

Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series — in the final segment he includes contact information — but by the 14th episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as " insane ".

Vertov freely admitted one criticism leveled at his efforts on the " Kino-Pravda " series — that the series, while influential, had a limited release.

Man with a Movie Camera (, Chelovek s kinopparatom ) — sometimes called The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia — is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova.

Vertov — born David Abelevich Kaufman — was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s.

Vertov clearly intended an active relationship with his audience in the series — in the final segment he includes contact information — but by the fourteenth episode the series had become so experimental that some critics dismissed Vertov's efforts as " insane ".

In 1916-1917 Vertov was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and experimenting with " sound collages " in his free time.

She began collaborating with Vertov, beginning as his editor but becoming assistant and co-director in subsequent films, such as Man with a Movie Camera ( 1929 ), and Three Songs About Lenin ( 1934 ).

Vertov responds to their criticisms with the assertion that the critics were hacks nipping " revolutionary effort " in the bud, and concludes the essay with his promise to " explode art's tower of Babel.

By this point in his career, Vertov was clearly and emphatically dissatisfied with narrative tradition, and expresses his hostility towards dramatic fiction of any kind both openly and repeatedly ; he regarded drama as another " opiate of the masses ".

'" Towards the end of the same essay, Vertov mentions an upcoming project which seems likely to be Man with the Movie Camera, calling it an " experimental film " made without a scenario ; just three paragraphs above, Vertov mentions a scene from " Kino Pravda " which should be quite familiar to viewers of Man with the Movie Camera: the peasant works, and so does the urban woman, and so too, the woman film editor selecting the negative ...."

With Lenin's admission of limited private enterprise through his New Economic Policy ( NEP ) of 1921, Russia began receiving fiction films from afar, an occurrence that Vertov regarded with undeniable suspicion, calling drama a " corrupting influence " on the proletarian sensibility (" On ' Kinopravda ,'" 1924 ).

The Ukraine State Studio hired Vertov to create Man with a Movie Camera.

Vertov says in his essay " The Man with a Movie Camera " that he was fighting " for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature.

" By the later segments of Kino-Pravda, Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés ( and receiving criticism for it ); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of Man with a Movie Camera, which was filmed in Ukraine.

For example, in Man with a Movie Camera, two trains are shown almost melting into each other, although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains.

" Lines of resistance: Dziga Vertov and the twenties / edited and with an introduction by Yuri Tsivian.

Dziga Vertov's newsreel series Kino-Pravda, the best known of these, lasted from 1922 to 1925 and had a propagandistic bent ; Vertov used the series to promote socialist realism but also to experiment with cinema.

Eisenstein's first film, Glumov's Diary ( for the theatre production Wiseman ), was also made in that same year with Dziga Vertov hired initially as an " instructor.

Vertov is also known for quotes on perception, and its ineffability, in relation to the nature of qualia ( sensory experiences ).

" The Kino-Pravda group began its work in a basement in the centre of Moscow " Vertov explained.

This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style ( at one point it features a split screen tracking shot ; the sides have opposite Dutch angles ).

* Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov ’ s Man With A Movie Camera

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya (, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia ), which first came out in June 1918.

Vertov explains himself in " On ' Kinopravda '": in editing " chance film clippings " together for the Kino-Nedelia series, he " began to doubt the necessity of a literary connection between individual visual elements spliced together ....

Some have mistakenly stated that many visual ideas, such as the quick editing, the close-ups of machinery, the store window displays, even the shots of a typewriter keyboard are borrowed from Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City ( 1927 ), which predates Man with a Movie Camera by two years, but as Vertov wrote to the German press in 1929, these techniques and images had been developed and employed by him in his Kino-Pravda newsreels and documentaries for the last ten years, all of which predate Berlin.

By the end of the " Kino-Pravda " series, Vertov made liberal use of stop motion, freeze frames, and other cinematic " artificialities ," giving rise to criticisms not just of his trenchant dogmatism, but also of his cinematic technique.

The development of Russian cinema in the 1920s by such filmmakers as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein saw considerable progress in the use of the motion picture as a propaganda tool, yet it also served to develop the art of moviemaking.

With the rise and official sanction of socialist realism in 1934, Vertov was forced to cut his personal artistic output significantly, eventually becoming little more than an editor for Soviet newsreels.

Vertov was worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public eye.