Dziga Vertov's 1929 experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera is known to contain one of the first usages of the Dutch angle, among other innovative techniques discovered by Vertov himself.

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 ).

Vertov believed the camera — with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability to slow motion, stop motion and fast-motion — could render reality more accurately than the human eye, and made a film philosophy out of it.

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.

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.

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.

'" 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 ...."

Vertov lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, possibly as a result of criticizing a film which effectively preaches the line of the Communist Party.

" 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.

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 .”

For his film, however, Vertov had been hired by Mezhrabpomfilm, a Soviet studio that produced mainly propaganda efforts.

Lullaby, perhaps the last film in which Vertov was able to maintain his artistic vision, was released in 1937.

It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer.

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.

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.

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.

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 ).

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

Upon the official release of Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov issued a statement at the beginning of the film, which read:

French left-wing political filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, under the collective Dziga Vertov Group, made a film depicting the trials in 1970 called Vladimir et Rosa.

The 1929 Russian film Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov featured nudity within the context of naturism.

In 1968, Gorin and Godard founded the collective Dziga Vertov Group and together produced a series of overtly political films including Vent d ' est ( 1970 ), Tout va bien ( 1972 ), and Letter to Jane ( 1972 ).

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 ".

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

Vertov worked on the Kino-Nedelya series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin's agit-train during the ongoing Russian Civil War between Communists and counterrevolutionaries.

In 1919, Vertov compiled newsreel footage for his documentary Anniversary of the Revolution ; in 1921 he compiled History of the Civil War.

By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years ; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in 1925.

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.

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.

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.

By 1968, he had switched to an overtly political phase of revolutionary Maoist-collectivist didactic films with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group, which lasted for the next six years until 1973.

Dziga Vertov was central to the Soviet Kino-Pravda ( literally, " cinematic truth ") newsreel series of the 1920s.

In 1922, the year that Nanook of the North was released, Vertov started the Kino-Pravda series.

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.

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.

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 Free Cinema movement in the United Kingdom during the 1950s, the Direct Cinema in North America in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the Candid Eye series in Canada in the 1950s, all essentially owed a debt to Vertov.

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.

Kino-Pravda (" Film Truth ") was a newsreel series by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman.

Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of kino-pravda, or film-truth, through his newsreel series.

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.

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 ".

* Kino-Pravda (" Film Truth "), a newsreel series by Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman